VER: Vision Expert Transformer for Robot Learning via Foundation Distillation and Dynamic Routing
This addresses the problem of inflexible and costly feature selection in robotic learning for researchers and practitioners, offering a scalable and adaptive solution.
The paper tackles the limitation of individual vision foundation models (VFMs) excelling only in specific domains for robotic learning by proposing VER, a Vision Expert Transformer that distills multiple VFMs into a library and uses a lightweight routing network for dynamic expert selection, achieving state-of-the-art performance across 17 diverse robotic tasks.
Pretrained vision foundation models (VFMs) advance robotic learning via rich visual representations, yet individual VFMs typically excel only in specific domains, limiting generality across tasks. Distilling multiple VFMs into a unified representation for policy can mitigate this limitation but often yields inflexible task-specific feature selection and requires costly full re-training to incorporate robot-domain knowledge. We propose VER, a Vision Expert transformer for Robot learning. During pretraining, VER distills multiple VFMs into a vision expert library. It then fine-tunes only a lightweight routing network (fewer than 0.4% of parameters) to dynamically select task-relevant experts from the pretrained library for downstream robot tasks. We further introduce Patchwise Expert Routing with Curriculum Top-K Annealing to improve both flexibility and precision of dynamic expert selection. Moreover, VER supports parameter-efficient finetuning for scalable expert utilization and adaptive robot-domain knowledge integration. Across 17 diverse robotic tasks and multiple policy heads, VER achieves state-of-the-art performance. We find that VER reduces large-norm outliers in task-irrelevant regions (e.g., background) and concentrates on task-critical regions. Visualizations and codes can be found in https://yixiaowang7.github.io/ver_page/.