MSACT: Multistage Spatial Alignment for Stable Low-Latency Fine Manipulation

TL;DR

This paper presents MSACT, a multistage spatial attention approach that enhances stability and low-latency in bimanual fine manipulation tasks by aligning attention sequences with visual features to reduce drift.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multistage spatial attention module with a temporal alignment loss, improving visual localization stability without requiring keypoint annotations.

Findings

Improved localization stability in simulated and real-world tasks.

Enhanced task success rates with low-latency inference.

Reduced attention drift under visual disturbances.

Abstract

Real-world fine manipulation, particularly in bimanual manipulation, typically requires low-latency control and stable visual localization, while collecting large-scale data is costly and limited demonstrations may lead to localization drift. Existing approaches make different trade-offs: action-chunking policies such as ACT enable low-latency execution and data efficiency but rely on dense visual features without explicit spatial consistency, generative methods such as Diffusion Policy improve expressiveness but can incur iterative sampling latency, vision-language-action and voxel-based methods enhance generalization and geometric grounding but require higher computational cost and system complexity. We introduce a multistage spatial attention module that extracts stable 2D attention points and jointly predicts future attention sequences with a temporal alignment loss. Built upon ACT with a pretrained ResNet visual prior, a multistage attention module extracts task-relevant 2D attention points as a local spatial modality for action prediction. To maintain consistent object tracking, we introduce a self-supervised objective that aligns predicted attention sequences with visual features from future frames, suppressing drift without keypoint annotations and improving stability of the vision-to-action mapping under limited data. Experiments on simulated and real-world fine manipulation tasks, conducted on the ALOHA bimanual platform, evaluate task success, attention drift, inference latency, and robustness to visual disturbances. Results indicate improvements in localization stability and task performance while maintaining low-latency inference under the tested conditions.