# ViTaPEs: Visuotactile Position Encodings for Cross-Modal Alignment in Multimodal Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20032 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20032/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02155/) (2018)
- [Rotary Position Embedding for Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13298/) (2024)
- [DIGIT: A Novel Design for a Low-Cost Compact High-Resolution Tactile Sensor with Application to In-Hand Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14679/) (2020)
- [More Than a Feeling: Learning to Grasp and Regrasp using Vision and Touch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11085/) (2018)
- [Binding Touch to Everything: Learning Unified Multimodal Tactile Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.18084/) (2024)
- [Touch and Go: Learning from Human-Collected Vision and Touch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12498/) (2022)
- [A Touch, Vision, and Language Dataset for Multimodal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13232/) (2024)
- [The Feeling of Success: Does Touch Sensing Help Predict Grasp Outcomes?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05512/) (2017)
- [Connecting Touch and Vision via Cross-Modal Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06322/) (2019)
- [Visuo-Tactile Transformers for Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00121/) (2022)
- [The ObjectFolder Benchmark: Multisensory Learning with Neural and Real Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00956/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Visuo-Tactile Pretraining to Locate and Follow Garment Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13042/) (2022)
- [MidasTouch: Monte-Carlo inference over distributions across sliding touch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14210/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Visual-Tactile Representation Learning through Self-Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12024/) (2024)
- [ViTac: Feature Sharing between Vision and Tactile Sensing for Cloth Texture Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07490/) (2018)
- [Generating Visual Scenes from Touch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15117/) (2023)
- [Globally Injective ReLU Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08464/) (2020)
- [Connecting Look and Feel: Associating the visual and tactile properties of physical materials](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03822/) (2017)
- [M2CURL: Sample-Efficient Multimodal Reinforcement Learning via Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17032/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [NeuroGame Transformer: Gibbs-Inspired Attention Driven by Game Theory and Statistical Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18761/) (2026)
- [Monocular Reconstruction of Neural Tactile Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12508/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tactile sensing provides local essential information that is complementary to visual perception, such as texture, compliance, and force. Despite recent advances in visuotactile representation learning, challenges remain in fusing these modalities and generalizing across tasks and environments without heavy reliance on pre-trained vision-language models. Moreover, existing methods do not study positional encodings, thereby overlooking the multi-stage spatial reasoning needed to capture fine-grained visuotactile correlations. We introduce ViTaPEs, a transformer-based architecture for learning task-agnostic visuotactile representations from paired vision and tactile inputs. Our key idea is a two-stage positional injection: local (modality-specific) positional encodings are added within each stream, and a global positional encoding is added on the joint token sequence immediately before attention, providing a shared positional vocabulary at the stage where cross-modal interaction occurs. We make the positional injection points explicit and conduct controlled ablations that isolate their effect before a token-wise nonlinearity versus immediately before self-attention. Experiments on multiple large-scale real-world datasets show that ViTaPEs not only surpasses state-of-the-art baselines across various recognition tasks but also demonstrates zero-shot generalization to unseen, out-of-domain scenarios. We further demonstrate the transfer-learning strength of ViTaPEs in a robotic grasping task, where it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in predicting grasp success. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/vitapes