Recasting Generic Pretrained Vision Transformers As Object-Centric Scene Encoders for Manipulation Policies

Generic re-usable pre-trained image representation encoders have become a standard component of methods for many computer vision tasks. As visual representations for robots however, their utility has been limited, leading to a recent wave of efforts to pre-train robotics-specific image encoders that are better suited to robotic tasks than their generic counterparts. We propose Scene Objects From Transformers, abbreviated as SOFT(·), a wrapper around pre-trained vision transformer (PVT) models that bridges this gap without any further training. Rather than construct representations out of only the final layer activations, SOFT(·) individuates and locates object-like entities from PVT attentions, and describes them with PVT activations, producing an object-centric embedding. Across standard choices of generic pre-trained vision transformers PVT, we demonstrate in each case that policies trained on SOFT(PVT) far outstrip standard PVT representations for manipulation tasks in simulated and real settings, approaching the state- of-the-art robotics-aware representations. Code, appendix and videos: https://sites.google.com/view/robot-soft/