# SpatialActor: Exploring Disentangled Spatial Representations for Robust Robotic Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09555 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09555/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05973/) (2023)
- [R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12601/) (2022)
- [RDT-1B: a Diffusion Foundation Model for Bimanual Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07864/) (2024)
- [RLBench: The Robot Learning Benchmark & Learning Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12271/) (2019)
- [ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12288/) (2023)
- [Perceiver-Actor: A Multi-Task Transformer for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05451/) (2022)
- [PointNeXt: Revisiting PointNet++ with Improved Training and Scaling Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04670/) (2022)
- [Transporter Networks: Rearranging the Visual World for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14406/) (2020)
- [Real-World Robot Learning with Masked Visual Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03109/) (2022)
- [RVT: Robotic View Transformer for 3D Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14896/) (2023)
- [How Far is Video Generation from World Model: A Physical Law Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02385/) (2024)
- [AnyGrasp: Robust and Efficient Grasp Perception in Spatial and Temporal Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08333/) (2022)
- [MemoryVLA: Perceptual-Cognitive Memory in Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19236/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-3D: A Simple yet Effective Pathway to Empowering LMMs with 3D-awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18125/) (2024)
- [Act3D: 3D Feature Field Transformers for Multi-Task Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17817/) (2023)
- [RVT-2: Learning Precise Manipulation from Few Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08545/) (2024)
- [THE COLOSSEUM: A Benchmark for Evaluating Generalization for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08191/) (2024)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Q-attention: Efficient Learning for Visual Robotic Manipulation via Discretisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12534/) (2021)
- [DeeR-VLA: Dynamic Inference of Multimodal Large Language Models for Efficient Robot Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02359/) (2024)
- [Self-supervised 6D Object Pose Estimation for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10159/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models: An Action Tokenization Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01925/) (2025)
- [Instruction-driven history-aware policies for robotic manipulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04899/) (2022)
- [Multi-View Masked World Models for Visual Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02408/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Any3D-VLA: Enhancing VLA Robustness via Diverse Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00807/) (2026)
- [MemoryVLA++: Temporal Modeling via Memory and Imagination in Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09827/) (2026)
- [PriorVLA: Prior-Preserving Adaptation for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10925/) (2026)
- [Learning Action Manifold with Multi-view Latent Priors for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11832/) (2026)
- [X-Imitator: Spatial-Aware Imitation Learning via Bidirectional Action-Pose Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12162/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robotic manipulation requires precise spatial understanding to interact with objects in the real world. Point-based methods suffer from sparse sampling, leading to the loss of fine-grained semantics. Image-based methods typically feed RGB and depth into 2D backbones pre-trained on 3D auxiliary tasks, but their entangled semantics and geometry are sensitive to inherent depth noise in real-world that disrupts semantic understanding. Moreover, these methods focus on high-level geometry while overlooking low-level spatial cues essential for precise interaction. We propose SpatialActor, a disentangled framework for robust robotic manipulation that explicitly decouples semantics and geometry. The Semantic-guided Geometric Module adaptively fuses two complementary geometry from noisy depth and semantic-guided expert priors. Also, a Spatial Transformer leverages low-level spatial cues for accurate 2D-3D mapping and enables interaction among spatial features. We evaluate SpatialActor on multiple simulation and real-world scenarios across 50+ tasks. It achieves state-of-the-art performance with 87.4% on RLBench and improves by 13.9% to 19.4% under varying noisy conditions, showing strong robustness. Moreover, it significantly enhances few-shot generalization to new tasks and maintains robustness under various spatial perturbations. Project Page: https://shihao1895.github.io/SpatialActor