Control-policy visual features cluster by relative-pose orthant (Neural Collapse)

Qi, Yin & Yang study behavior-cloned image-based control (no explicit label set) and define implicit classes from the sign pattern (orthant) of a relative-pose vector [qi-etal-2024-control-oriented-clustering] Across four architectures, visual representations prevalently cluster by these relative-pose-orthant classes, a control-oriented analogue of Neural Collapse discovered rather than designed [qi-etal-2024-control-oriented-clustering] Pretraining the vision encoder with a Neural-Collapse-style regularizer that encourages orthant clustering, then finetuning end-to-end, causally improves low-data control performance by 10-35%, confirmed in real-world planar pushing [qi-etal-2024-control-oriented-clustering]