Learning to See and Act: Task-Aware Virtual View Exploration for Robotic Manipulation

Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models for multi-task robotic manipulation commonly rely on static viewpoints and shared visual encoders, which limit 3D perception and cause task interference, hindering robustness and generalization. In this work, we propose Task-aware Virtual View Exploration (TVVE), a framework designed to overcome these challenges by integrating virtual view exploration with task-specific representation learning. TVVE employs an efficient exploration policy, accelerated by a novel pseudo-environment, to acquire informative views. Furthermore, we introduce a Task-aware Mixture-of-Experts (TaskMoE) visual encoder to disentangle features across different tasks, boosting both representation fidelity and task generalization. By learning to see the world in a task-aware way, TVVE generates more complete and discriminative visual representations, demonstrating significantly enhanced action prediction across a wide array of manipulation challenges. To further validate the robustness and generalization capability of TVVE under out-of-distribution (OOD) settings, we construct a challenging benchmark, RLBench-OG, covering various visual perturbations and camera pose variations. Extensive experiments on RLBench and RLBench-OG show that our TVVE achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art approaches. In real-robot experiments, TVVE demonstrates exceptional performance and generalizes robustly in multiple OOD settings, including visual disturbances and unseen instructions. Visual results and code are provided at: https://hcplab-sysu.github.io/TAVP.