Rethinking Implicit Spatial Representation in Visuomotor Policy Learning

Abstract: Generative model-based imitation learning has become a widely adopted paradigm for robotic manipulation, where policy performance depends critically on the conditioned visual representations. Although spatial softmax-based representations have been adopted in prior visuomotor policies, their effectiveness and underlying mechanisms remain insufficiently understood. This work rethinks the use of spatial softmax pooling: do such implicit spatial representations provide effective and stable visual features for robotic manipulation? Through systematic studies of different pooling methods in visual encoders, we find that this pooling operation produces compact and stable spatial representations, which outperform feature-value representations, despite using substantially fewer dimensions. Complementary saliency analysis further suggests that these spatial representations guide the encoder to focus more consistently on task-relevant regions. However, this advantage is limited by a representation bottleneck in current visual encoders: repeated downsampling operations weaken fine-grained spatial information before the action-generation module can use it, especially under low-resolution observations. Motivated by these findings, we propose PRISM, a visual encoder that preserves multiscale implicit spatial information through top-down cross-attention fusion. Experiments across multiple tasks and policy backbones show consistent improvements. In particular, on the low-resolution, high-precision ToolHang task, PRISM shows clear gains, improving the average success rate from 5.0% to 13.4% while increasing parameters by only 15.4%. These results support the use of multiscale implicit spatial representations as an effective and efficient design principle for robotic manipulation.