ExStereo: Lifting 2D Vision-Language-Action Models to 3D with Explicit Stereo Representations

Engineering notes

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Three-dimensional perception is critical for robotic manipulation, particularly for high-precision tasks, as recovering metric depth and precise 3D object positions from monocular RGB observations is inherently ill-posed. However, many Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models rely solely on RGB observations for perception. Leveraging recent advances in foundation models for stereo matching, we introduce ExStereo, a stereo module that augments pre-trained 2D VLAs with 3D perception. ExStereo reconstructs scene geometry from stereo image pairs and renders multi-view observations as an explicit stereo representation for stereo feature extraction. The action tokens from the action expert selectively attend to the resulting stereo tokens through our proposed action-stereo cross-attention mechanism, enabling the policy to generate robot actions conditioned on 3D scene information. To learn robust 3D representations, we introduce a mid-training stage before task-specific post-training, using a self-supervised learning objective on large-scale stereo data. We validate our approach by fine-tuning two publicly available VLAs, $π_{0.5}$ and SmolVLA, and evaluate them in simulation and on a real-world bimanual PiPER platform. Across both settings, VLAs fine-tuned with ExStereo consistently outperform baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of stereo perception for robotic manipulation. Our project website is at: https://exstereo-vla.github.io/ExStereo/.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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