Poke &Wiggle
Papers
Paper

ActionMap (full data)

ActionMap: Robot Policy Learning via Voxel Action Heatmap

Claim tested: ActionMap's voxel action heatmap head improves real-robot task success over OpenVLA-OFT's standard action regression head.

Tested

Paper
arXiv⁠ (opens in a new tab)
Code
GitHub⁠ (opens in a new tab)
Venue
—
Authors
Pei Yang et al.
Farm tasks
3
Evaluation
360 episodes (180 for baseline, 180 for method)

Result

Improvement over baseline

Not replicated

Reported
+43 pts
Ours
+6 pts
−200+20+40+60
  • Gain vs baseline
  • 95% CI, −9 pts to +20 pts
  • Paper's reported gain
  • No difference

Success rate

Reported
67%
Ours
49%
0%20%40%60%80%100%
  • Measured on our stations
  • 95% CI, 39%–59%
  • Reported in the paper

Across iterations

  1. Iteration 1vs OpenVLA-OFT−4 pts
  2. Iteration 2vs OpenVLA-OFT+6 pts
−200+20+40+60

By task

TaskBaselineOpenVLA-OFTMethodActionMap (full data)Improvement
e01Clamp electrical component0%0/303%1/30+3 pts−8 to +17
e02Pour screws into the funnel73%22/3077%23/30+3 pts−18 to +25
e03Datum-corner alignment57%17/3067%20/30+10 pts−14 to +32
All tasks43%39/9049%44/90+6 pts−9 to +20
Reported in the paper23%67%+43 pts

Rollouts

One clip per environment from this entry's evaluation, beside where each evaluation episode placed the environment's objects, coloured by its rating. Use the button beside each environment to open its evaluation dataset in the dataset viewer.

  1. e02Pour screws into the funnel
  2. Held-out benchmark environment
    e01Clamp electrical component
  3. Held-out benchmark environment
    e03Datum-corner alignment

Implementation Details

What we changed

We replaced only OpenVLA-OFT’s L1 regression head with the paper’s voxel heatmap head, and trained both on each task’s full demonstration set with the paper’s real-robot recipe. Because OFT’s custom transformers fork does not run on our stack, we rebuilt OpenVLA-7B on a newer transformers release; both heads follow the official code. This round re-evaluates the same models on the station’s blend runtime instead of the synchronous one, on the same stations and placements. Differences from the paper:

  • Two arms and three cameras. Each step predicts 14 action values instead of 7, and ActionMap has one heatmap branch per arm on a shared trunk.
  • Delta actions on absolute targets. Both heads predict per-step deltas between consecutive commands, as in the paper, and integrate them from the measured pose. The first step is taken from the measured pose and normalized separately, because this robot’s commands lead its measured pose by up to 20 cm.
  • Training budget. Both heads train for 4,000 steps at a constant learning rate of 5e-4 and batch 64, without a validation split. On clamp, whose episodes are longest, this covers only 0.8 passes over the data.
  • Chunk timing. Chunks are 32 steps at 30 Hz, about 1.07 s.
  • Blend execution. The station requests each next chunk 800 ms before the current one ends and crossfades into it over 600 ms, instead of executing each chunk in full before replanning as OFT does.
  • Evaluation. Each task runs 30 placements with one trial each, instead of the paper’s 10 trials.
  • Hardware. All six models trained on four A100 40 GB GPUs, with two micro-batches of 8 per GPU.

See the code changes on GitHub⁠ (opens in a new tab)

Prompt summary

Re-evaluate the six existing models on the blend runtime (AIS blend 85mm) in a new project, with everything else unchanged. (A retraining step with a longer schedule, decaying LR and a validation split was started and then discarded.)

Response summary

On blend, L1 vs ActionMap: pour 22/30 vs 23/30, push 17/30 vs 20/30, clamp 0/30 vs 1/30; 39/90 vs 44/90 (+5.6 pp, 95% CI −5.6 to +16.7, p = 0.42).

Conclusion

ActionMap slightly ahead on blend (44 vs 39/90), within noise. Concluded: not reproduced.