Equivariant Visual-Tactile Diffusion Policy for Contact-Rich Manipulation
Lik Hang Kenny WongYiyao MaXiu-Shen WeiZelong TanZhuheng SongDongsheng XieKai ChenQi Dou
Oct 2026
Artificial IntelligenceRobotics
Abstract
Imitation learning for contact-rich manipulation requires high-quality expert data that is expensive to obtain. This makes learning a sample-efficient policy a key issue. To address this, we propose VISTA, a workspace-level equivariant visuotactile diffusion policy for data-efficient contact-rich imitation learning. VISTA projects visual and tactile observations into spherical tokens, injects tactile contact cues into visual spherical directions through permutation-equivariant spherical fusion, and rotates the fused harmonic representation using the end-effector orientation. The resulting representation conditions an equivariant diffusion policy to predict spatially consistent actions. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world robotic settings show that VISTA substantially improves data efficiency over strong visuotactile imitation learning baselines. Project website: https://vista-paper.github.io/
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