Brain-Aligned Latent Actions: Imposing Premotor Cortex Geometry on a Robot's Action Vocabulary

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

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Original abstract

Robot policies increasingly act through a small vocabulary of discrete latent actions learned from unlabeled video, yet training leaves open which motion receives which code. We find this choice highly unstable: two independently trained runs of Moto's latent motion tokenizer assign the same robot clips to nearly unrelated codes (adjusted Rand index 0.001), and evaluating one tokenizer in bf16 instead of fp32 reassigns 74% of its tokens. We use this freedom to impose the representational geometry of macaque ventral premotor cortex (PMv), recorded while a monkey drew shapes, on the tokenizer's code assignment, with a straight-through similarity loss trained alongside its reconstruction objective on robot video. In one training run per target, on five shape categories the loss never saw, the PMv-trained tokenizer reaches a representational similarity of 0.52 with PMv, against 0.20-0.26 for released and no-prior tokenizers and 0.42 for the 95th percentile of random kinematic encoders. Kinematic, language, and random targets do not transfer (-0.17 to -0.03). Two results limit the claim: a hand-picked kinematic descriptor, the stroke's initial direction, matches PMv better (0.65), and a label-shuffled PMv control scores 0.41. We specify the downstream manipulation test, on a CALVIN pipeline that reproduces Moto's published results, before running it.

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• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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