3D-MVP: 3D Multiview Pretraining for Manipulation

Recent works have shown that visual pretraining on egocentric datasets using masked autoencoders (MAE) can improve generalization for downstream robotics tasks [1, 2] . However, these approaches pretrain only on 2D images, while many robotics applications require 3D scene understanding. In this work, we propose 3D-MVP, a novel approach for 3D multi-view pretraining using masked autoencoders. We leverage Robotic View Transformer (RVT), which uses a multi-view transformer to understand the 3D scene and predict gripper pose actions. We split RVT's multi-view transformer into visual encoder and action decoder, and pretrain its visual encoder using masked autoencoding on large-scale 3D datasets such as Objaverse. We evaluate 3D-MVP on a suite of virtual robot manipulation tasks and demonstrate improved performance over baselines. We also show promising results on a real robot platform with minimal finetuning. Our results suggest that 3D-aware pretraining is a promising approach to improve sample efficiency and generalization of vision-based robotic manipulation policies. We will release code and pretrained models to facilitate future research.