HeRO: Hierarchical 3D Semantic Representation for Pose-aware Object Manipulation

2026-02-21

AI Summary

This work addresses the limitation of existing 3D geometry–based robotic imitation learning methods, which lack explicit part-level semantic understanding and thus struggle with pose-sensitive manipulation tasks—such as distinguishing a shoe’s toe from its heel. To overcome this, the authors propose HeRO, a hierarchical, semantics-aware policy grounded in diffusion models. HeRO constructs a global–local semantic field by fusing features from DINOv2 and Stable Diffusion and employs a permutation-invariant network for conditional generation, thereby eliminating sequential bias and enabling fine-grained, spatially consistent part perception. Evaluated on the Place Dual Shoes task, HeRO improves success rates by 12.3%, and achieves an average gain of 6.5% across six pose-sensitive manipulation tasks, establishing a new state of the art.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Manipulation
• Humans and AI: Human-Aware Planning and Behavior Prediction
• Computer Vision: Diffusion Models for Vision

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web learning to rank, online learning, and counterfactual learning for ranking
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

Imitation learning for robotic manipulation has progressed from 2D image policies to 3D representations that explicitly encode geometry. Yet purely geometric policies often lack explicit part-level semantics, which are critical for pose-aware manipulation (e.g., distinguishing a shoe's toe from heel). In this paper, we present HeRO, a diffusion-based policy that couples geometry and semantics via hierarchical semantic fields. HeRO employs dense semantics lifting to fuse discriminative, geometry-sensitive features from DINOv2 with the smooth, globally coherent correspondences from Stable Diffusion, yielding dense features that are both fine-grained and spatially consistent. These features are processed and partitioned to construct a global field and a set of local fields. A hierarchical conditioning module conditions the generative denoiser on global and local fields using permutation-invariant network architecture, thereby avoiding order-sensitive bias and producing a coherent control policy for pose-aware manipulation. In various tests, HeRO establishes a new state-of-the-art, improving success on Place Dual Shoes by 12.3% and averaging 6.5% gains across six challenging pose-aware tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Chongyang-99/HeRO.

Problem

• pose-aware manipulation
• semantic representation
• imitation learning
• 3D geometry
• part-level semantics

Innovation

• hierarchical semantic fields
• dense semantics lifting
• diffusion-based policy
• pose-aware manipulation
• permutation-invariant conditioning