Cross-Domain Demo-to-Code via Neurosymbolic Counterfactual Reasoning

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have recently achieved remarkable progress by leveraging large-scale robot datasets and foundation models for general-purpose robot manipulation. However, their ability to rapidly adapt to novel manipulation tasks beyond the training distribution remains limited. Existing approaches often require task-specific robot demonstrations and additional training, which are labor- and compute-intensive, limiting the scalability of VLA adaptation to open-world scenarios. To reduce this dependence on target-task robot data, we propose CapPro, a framework that enables a VLA policy to adapt to previously unseen manipulation tasks using only a single human demonstration video. CapPro consists of two components. First, a phase-aware human video representation module constructs a compact video representation through learned visual token selection and learns task-relevant query representations under phase-caption supervision. Second, a video-conditioned adaptation module jointly incorporates the compact video and query-derived representations into the action-conditioning context of the pretrained VLA policy. % This design introduces task-specific guidance while largely preserving the original VLA action-generation backbone. In this way, the human demonstration provides task-specific execution guidance rather than an embodiment-aligned trajectory to imitate, without requiring target-task robot demonstrations or target-task fine-tuning. Experiments across source and unseen target tasks show that CapPro improves average performance across unseen target groups while maintaining comparable performance on the source tasks. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of human-video guidance for cross-task VLA adaptation.

Enabling robots to learn long-horizon manipulation tasks from a handful of demonstrations remains a central challenge in robotics. Existing neuro-symbolic approaches often rely on hand-crafted symbolic abstractions, semantically labeled trajectories or large demonstration datasets, limiting their scalability and real-world applicability. We present a scalable neuro-symbolic framework that autonomously constructs symbolic planning domains and data-efficient control policies from as few as one to thirty unannotated skill demonstrations, without requiring manual domain engineering. Our method segments demonstrations into skills and employs a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to classify skills and identify equivalent high-level states, enabling automatic construction of a state-transition graph. This graph is processed by an Answer Set Programming solver to synthesize a PDDL planning domain, which an oracle function exploits to isolate the minimal, task-relevant and target relative observation and action spaces for each skill policy. Policies are learned at the control reference level rather than at the raw actuator signal level, yielding a smoother and less noisy learning target. Known controllers can be leveraged for real-world data augmentation by projecting a single demonstration onto other objects in the scene, simultaneously enriching the graph construction process and the dataset for imitation learning. We validate our framework primarily on a real industrial forklift across statistically rigorous manipulation trials, and demonstrate cross-platform generality on a Kinova Gen3 robotic arm across two standard benchmarks. Our results show that grounding control learning, VLM-driven abstraction, and automated planning synthesis into a unified pipeline constitutes a practical path toward scalable, data-efficient, expert-free and interpretable neuro-symbolic robotics.

Vision-language-action models (VLAs) are promising general-purpose robot policies, but adapting them to new tasks typically requires costly task-specific teleoperation data. As an alternative, we study one-shot demo-conditioned VLAs, where a robot policy is conditioned on a single demonstration video of an unseen task. We find that existing end-to-end approaches often struggle when successful execution requires precisely localizing small target regions. To address this limitation, we propose SeeTraceAct, a demo-conditioned VLA framework that encourages precise spatial grounding through visibility-aware prediction of future end-effector traces. To enable reproducible evaluation with cross-embodiment demonstrations, we introduce and release RoboCasa-DC, a demo-conditioned extension of RoboCasa that pairs its robot trajectories with newly collected humanoid demonstrations. Experiments on RoboCasa-DC and a real-world benchmark, where a Franka Panda arm is conditioned on human demonstrations, show that SeeTraceAct outperforms baselines, achieving the best success rate across all four RoboCasa-DC settings and improving real-world average success by 9.5 percentage points.