Pix2Act: Image-Space Manipulation Policies with Equivariant Augmentation

2026-07-13Robotics

RoboticsArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
AI summary

AI summary is being generated…

Authors
Haojie Huang, Linfeng Zhao, Haotian Liu, Zhang Ye, Si-Yuan Huang, Mingxi Jia, Boce Hu, Fangzhou Lin, Yu Qi, Dian Wang, Robin Walters, Robert Platt
Abstract
Representing manipulation actions as 2D trajectories in the camera plane provides a compact and interpretable basis for learning complex 3D manipulation policies. However, it also creates challenges from out-of-frame trajectories and limited precision. We propose Pix2Act, an imitation learning method that addresses these challenges by generating continuous image-space keypoint trajectories in each camera plane and losslessly recovering end-effector poses via triangulation. This reformulates high-dimensional 3D control as a simpler, more learnable 2D prediction problem. Crucially, it aligns observations and actions in the same coordinate space, enabling equivariant transformations to jointly rotate individual camera images together with their image-space actions. We analyze the symmetry properties of this augmentation and design a network architecture that can fuse multiple camera views while respecting their per-view rotations. As a result, Pix2Act implicitly enlarges the support of the data distribution and learns invariant action structures across transformations, yielding improved generalization and overall performance. Across diverse simulated and real-world manipulation tasks, Pix2Act outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and remains robust under camera perturbations.