Do You Know Where Your Camera Is? View-Invariant Policy Learning with Camera Conditioning
About
We study view-invariant imitation learning by explicitly conditioning policies on camera extrinsics. Using Plucker embeddings of per-pixel rays, we show that conditioning on extrinsics significantly improves generalization across viewpoints for standard behavior cloning policies, including ACT, Diffusion Policy, and SmolVLA. To evaluate policy robustness under realistic viewpoint shifts, we introduce six manipulation tasks in RoboSuite and ManiSkill that pair "fixed" and "randomized" scene variants, decoupling background cues from camera pose. Our analysis reveals that policies without extrinsics often infer camera pose using visual cues from static backgrounds in fixed scenes; this shortcut collapses when workspace geometry or camera placement shifts. Conditioning on extrinsics restores performance and yields robust RGB-only control without depth. We release the tasks, demonstrations, and code at https://ripl.github.io/know_your_camera/ .
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coffee | Robosuite Seen views | Success Rate10.7 | 9 | |
| Stack Three | Robosuite Seen views | Success Rate1.9 | 9 | |
| Coffee | Robosuite Unseen views | Success Rate0.00e+0 | 9 | |
| Mug Cleanup | Robosuite Seen views | Success Rate4 | 9 | |
| Mug Cleanup | Robosuite Unseen views | Success Rate0.00e+0 | 9 | |
| Square | Robosuite Seen views | Success Rate14 | 9 | |
| Stack Three | Robosuite Unseen views | Success Rate0.00e+0 | 9 | |
| Lift | Robosuite Unseen views | Success Rate46 | 9 | |
| Lift | Robosuite Seen views | Success Rate72 | 9 | |
| Square | Robosuite Unseen views | Success Rate0.00e+0 | 9 |