Foundation Models

Image Encoder

An image encoder is a neural network that maps raw images to compact feature embeddings consumed by downstream policy or planning heads, with ResNet and Vision Transformer (ViT) architectures being the most common backbones. Robot policies frequently reuse encoders pretrained at internet scale, such as CLIP, SigLIP, or DINOv2, either frozen or fine-tuned, rather than learning vision from robot data alone.

Why it matters for physical AI

Pretrained visual representations inject broad semantic knowledge that small robot datasets cannot provide, substantially improving generalization of manipulation policies to novel objects and scenes.