DynaSlots: Slot-Centric 3D Dynamics Pretraining for Robot Manipulation
Organizations: Department of Electronics and Information Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China. · Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China. · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, China. · Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK.
Abstract
Robot manipulation involves localized changes: picking up a cup moves the cup while leaving the surrounding scene largely unchanged. Yet existing 3D visual pretraining methods, including recent dynamics-aware variants, model state transitions at the scene level, compressing the motion of everything in a scene into a single global latent action. This conflates semantically distinct transitions in scenes with multiple moving parts, obscures dependencies between changing regions, and leaves the learned representation vulnerable to task-irrelevant scene content. We introduce DynaSlots, an action-free, label-free pretraining framework that decomposes each point cloud frame into a small set of temporally consistent slots and models dynamics at this per-slot level rather than the scene level. A temporal slot propagation module promotes consistent slot assignments across frames; an inverse dynamics model then extracts one latent action per slot from feature differences, and a diffusion-based forward dynamics model, paired with a self-supervised interaction head, predicts each slot's future state while learning pairwise proximity-and-motion relations. Experiments on Meta-World, Adroit, and a RealMan RM65-B robot demonstrate that DynaSlots outperforms prior scene-level baselines. It achieves superior success rates in simulation and exhibits strong robustness to scene clutter and unseen objects in real-world manipulation. Code is available at https://zhucezhanghao12345-source.github.io/DynaSlots-Anonymous/.
Figures & tables
| Category | Method | MetaWorld | Adroit | ||||||
| Easy(3) | Med.(6) | Hard(2) | V.Hard(3) | Mean S.R. | Door | Pen | Mean S.R. | ||
| Large-scale | CLIP [ 31 ] | 29.3 | 14.0 | 5.0 | 55.3 | 24.9 ( 55.9) | 61.0 | 84.0 | 72.5 ( 15.5) |
| DINOv2 [ 27 ] | 34.0 | 14.0 | 5.0 | 55.3 | 25.9 ( 54.9) | 76.0 | 84.0 | 80.0 ( 8.0) | |
| PointNet [ 30 ] | 71.3 | 49.7 | 23.0 | 55.3 | 51.7 ( 29.1) | 80.0 | 72.0 | 76.0 ( 12.0) | |
| Static 3D | PointMAE [ 28 ] | 77.3 | 61.3 | 42.0 | 70.0 | 63.9 ( 16.9) | 64.0 | 76.0 | 70.0 ( 18.0) |
| PointDif [ 46 ] | 83.3 | 58.0 | 41.0 | 58.7 | 61.1 ( 19.7) | 76.0 | 78.0 | 77.0 ( 11.0) | |
| Variant | MetaWorld | Adroit |
| w/o Temporal Slot Propagation | 68.5 ( 12.3) | 76.0 ( 12.0) |
| w/o Interaction Head ( ) | 78.2 ( 2.6) | 85.5 ( 2.5) |
| w/o Reverse Consistency ( ) | 79.0 ( 1.8) | 86.5 ( 1.5) |
| slots | 74.5 ( 6.3) | 82.5 ( 5.5) |
| slots | 77.5 ( 3.3) | 84.5 ( 3.5) |
| DynaSlots (ours, ) | 80.8 | 88.0 |
| Method | Target-task data | RH20T pretrain + target-task policy training | ||||||||
| Task (a) | Task (b) | Task (c) | Task (d) | Avg. | Task (a) | Task (b) | Task (c) | Task (d) | Avg. | |
| DP3 [ 42 ] | 62.0 13.0 | 66.0 18.2 | 54.0 11.4 | 48.0 13.0 | 57.5 7.9 | 54.0 15.2 | 58.0 17.9 | 48.0 13.0 | 44.0 11.4 | 51.0 6.8 |
| PointDif [ 46 ] | 58.0 16.4 | 64.0 11.4 | 52.0 13.0 | 46.0 18.2 | 55.0 7.9 | 52.0 13.0 | 56.0 13.4 | 46.0 8.9 | 40.0 15.8 | 48.5 7.2 |
| FVP [ 17 ] | 60.0 10.0 | 64.0 11.4 | 54.0 8.9 | 50.0 12.2 | 57.0 6.0 | 54.0 11.4 | 60.0 12.2 | 50.0 10.0 | 42.0 13.0 | 51.5 6.0 |
| DynaMo-3D [ 9 ] | 66.0 8.9 | 72.0 11.0 | 60.0 10.0 | 56.0 8.9 | 63.5 5.2 | 60.0 10.0 | 64.0 8.9 | 54.0 11.4 | 50.0 10.0 | 57.0 5.4 |
| AFRO [ 23 ] | 72.0 11.0 | 78.0 8.4 | 68.0 8.4 | 64.0 8.9 | 70.5 4.8 | 66.0 8.9 | 72.0 11.0 | 60.0 10.0 | 54.0 8.9 | 63.0 5.4 |
| Method | Success rate (%) | Drop (pp) | |
| No clutter | Cluttered | ||
| DP3 [ 42 ] | |||
| PointDif [ 46 ] | |||
| FVP [ 17 ] | |||
| DynaMo-3D [ 9 ] | |||
| AFRO [ 23 ] | |||
| Method | Success rate (%) | Drop (pp) | |
| Original | Unseen | ||
| DP3 [ 42 ] | |||
| PointDif [ 46 ] | |||
| FVP [ 17 ] | |||
| DynaMo-3D [ 9 ] | |||
| AFRO [ 23 ] | |||
Robot Learning
Robot learning develops methods for robots to acquire skills and adapt from demonstrations, interaction, data, and physical models.
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