English

Multi-Modal Manipulation via Multi-Modal Policy Consensus

Robotics 2026-04-17 v3 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Effectively integrating diverse sensory modalities is crucial for robotic manipulation. However, the typical approach of feature concatenation is often suboptimal: dominant modalities such as vision can overwhelm sparse but critical signals like touch in contact-rich tasks, and monolithic architectures cannot flexibly incorporate new or missing modalities without retraining. Our method factorizes the policy into a set of diffusion models, each specialized for a single representation (e.g., vision or touch), and employs a router network that learns consensus weights to adaptively combine their contributions, enabling incremental of new representations. We evaluate our approach on simulated manipulation tasks in {RLBench}, as well as real-world tasks such as occluded object picking, in-hand spoon reorientation, and puzzle insertion, where it significantly outperforms feature-concatenation baselines on scenarios requiring multimodal reasoning. Our policy further demonstrates robustness to physical perturbations and sensor corruption. We further conduct perturbation-based importance analysis, which reveals adaptive shifts between modalities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.23468,
  title  = {Multi-Modal Manipulation via Multi-Modal Policy Consensus},
  author = {Haonan Chen and Jiaming Xu and Hongyu Chen and Kaiwen Hong and Binghao Huang and Chaoqi Liu and Jiayuan Mao and Yunzhu Li and Yilun Du and Katherine Driggs-Campbell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.23468},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

8 pages, 7 figures. Project website: https://policyconsensus.github.io

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:01:24.783Z