Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

Flow matching policies learn continuous velocity fields that transport noise to actions, enabling fast deterministic inference for robot manipulation. However, standard training optimizes a pointwise velocity objective while inference requires numerical integration of that field -- a mismatch that causes compounding trajectory errors. We propose four complementary remedies: (1) auxiliary rectified flow velocity regression that provides uniform temporal supervision across the full time interval; (2) multi-step trajectory consistency training that supervises the integrated displacement of the velocity field over trajectory segments, directly closing the train-inference gap; (3) velocity field regularization that enforces temporal smoothness, preventing oscillations that destabilize integration; and (4) fourth-order Runge-Kutta (RK4) inference that reduces global discretization error by orders of magnitude over Euler methods. Critically, these components are not independently sufficient -- RK4 without a smooth velocity field fails, and smoothness without trajectory-level supervision still drifts, as our ablation study confirms. We further pair these with a dual-view 3D point cloud encoder using two independent PointNet encoders for complementary spatial perception. On four real-robot tasks across a Franka arm and a Boston Dynamics Spot, our method achieves 70% and 60% overall success on two long-horizon multi-phase tasks where both baselines score 0%, and reaches 100% on precision tool placement. Three MetaWorld simulation tasks confirm consistent improvements, validating that trajectory-level supervision is essential for reliable policy execution.

Autonomous robotic assembly of interlocking bricks demands seamless integration of long-horizon task reasoning, spatial grounding, and fine-grained manipulation. This paper presents BrickCraft, a compositional framework designed for long-horizon and generalizable interlocking brick assembly. BrickCraft models the assembly process using a relative formulation, where each step is anchored to a reference brick within the partial structure, thereby decomposing complex tasks into a finite set of reusable primitive skills. BrickCraft bridges the gap between high-level assembly plans and physical execution through situated manuals, which provide explicit spatial guidance for learned visuomotor skills by projecting the assembly intent onto real-time robot observations. Finally, BrickCraft employs a modular execution pipeline that chains these spatially grounded skills to accomplish long-horizon assembly tasks. Extensive experimental validations demonstrate that BrickCraft acquires proficient assembly skills from a limited set of demonstrations and effectively composes them for diverse long-horizon assembly tasks. The project website is available at https://intelligent-control-lab.github.io/BrickCraft.

Biological laboratory automation can reduce repetitive manual work and improve reproducibility, but reliable embodied execution in wet-lab environments remains challenging. Protocols are often unstructured, labware is frequently transparent or reflective, and multi-step procedures require state-aware execution beyond one-shot instruction following. Existing robotic systems often rely on costly hardware, fixed workflows, dedicated instruments, or robotics-oriented interfaces. Here, we introduce BioProVLA-Agent, an affordable, protocol-driven, vision-enhanced embodied multi-agent system enabled by Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for biological manipulation. The system uses protocols as the task interface and integrates protocol parsing, visual state verification, and embodied execution in a closed-loop workflow. A Tailored LLM Protocol Agent converts protocols into verifiable subtasks; a VLM-RAG Verification Agent assesses readiness and completion using observations, robot states, retrieved knowledge, and success/failure examples; and a VLA Embodied Agent executes verified subtasks through a lightweight policy. To improve robustness under wet-lab visual perturbations, we develop AugSmolVLA, an online augmentation strategy targeting transparent labware, reflections, illumination shifts, and overexposure. We evaluate the system on a hierarchical benchmark covering 15 atomic tasks, 6 composite workflows, and 3 bimanual tasks, including tube loading, sorting, waste disposal, cap twisting, and liquid pouring. Across normal and high-exposure settings, AugSmolVLA improves execution stability over ACT, X-VLA, and the original SmolVLA, especially for precise placement, transparent-object manipulation, composite workflows, and visually degraded scenes. These results suggest a practical route toward accessible, protocol-centered, and verification-capable embodied AI for biological manipulation.

World Action Models (WAMs) jointly predict future visual observations and actions, but typically execute a fixed number of actions before replanning, regardless of whether the imagined future remains consistent with reality. We formulate adaptive WAM execution as future--reality verification and propose Future Forward Dynamics Causal Attention (FFDC), a lightweight verifier that reasons over predicted actions, predicted visual dynamics, real observations, and instruction-conditioned semantics. FFDC allows continued execution when a plan remains reliable and triggers replanning when its validity deteriorates. We combine verification with Mixture-of-Horizon Training to improve long-horizon trajectory coverage. On RoboTwin, FFDC-WAM achieves the highest average success rate among the evaluated methods in both clean and randomized settings. Under randomization, it improves success by 2.54 percentage points over Base-Motus while reducing WAM planning calls by 69.10% and completion time by 33.88%. Notably, across six real-world tasks on a Unitree G1D robot, FFDC-WAM improves average success by 9.17% over Base-Motus-LC16 while reducing calls by 74.06% and completion time by 51.31%.

Recent advances in generative models have shown promise in generating behavior plans for long-horizon, sparse reward tasks. While these approaches have achieved promising results, they often lack a principled framework for hierarchical decomposition and struggle with the computational demands of real-time execution, due to their iterative denoising process. In this work, we introduce Hierarchical Diffusion-Flow (HDFlow), a novel hierarchical planning framework that optimally leverages the strengths of diffusion and rectified flow models to overcome the limitations of single-paradigm generative planners. HDFlow employs a high-level diffusion planner to generate sequences of strategic subgoals in a learned latent space, capitalizing on diffusion's powerful exploratory capabilities. These subgoals then guide a low-level rectified flow planner that generates smooth and dense trajectories, exploiting the speed and efficiency of ordinary differential equation (ODE)-based trajectory generation. We evaluate HDFlow on four challenging furniture assembly tasks in both simulation and real-world, where it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we also showcase our method's generalizability on two long-horizon benchmarks comprising diverse locomotion and manipulation tasks. Project website: https://hdflow-page.github.io/

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for embodied intelligence, enabling robots to perform tasks based on natural language instructions and current visual input. However, existing VLA models struggle with long-horizon tasks due to compounding errors. Prior methods decompose tasks into subtasks of fixed granularity, which cannot adapt to the varying complexity of execution states, limiting their robustness in long-horizon tasks. To overcome this, we introduce Anticipation Model, which adaptively and recursively generates future subgoals. This model continuously adapts as the task unfolds, adjusting future subgoals in response to evolving dynamics, facilitating more reliable planning paths. Building on this concept, we propose Anticipation-VLA, a hierarchical VLA model that leverages the anticipation model to generate actionable subgoals that guide VLA policy execution. We implement Anticipation-VLA with finetuning a Unified Multimodal Model (UMM) for high-level subgoal generation and a goal-conditioned VLA policy for low-level action execution. Experiments in both simulated and real-world robotic tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of Anticipation-VLA, highlighting the importance of adaptive and recursive subgoal generation for robust policy execution.

Long-horizon robotic manipulation requires plans that are both logically coherent and geometrically grounded. Existing Vision-Language-Action policies usually hide planning in latent states or expose only one modality: text-only chain-of-thought encodes causal order but misses spatial constraints, while visual prediction provides geometric cues but often remains local and semantically underconstrained. We introduce Interleaved Vision--Language Reasoning (IVLR), a policy framework built around \trace{}, an explicit intermediate representation that alternates textual subgoals with visual keyframes over the full task horizon. At test time, a single native multimodal transformer self-generates this global semantic-geometric trace from the initial observation and instruction, caches it, and conditions a closed-loop action decoder on the trace, original instruction, and current observation. Because standard robot datasets lack such traces, we construct pseudo-supervision by temporally segmenting demonstrations and captioning each stage with a vision-language model. Across simulated benchmarks for long-horizon manipulation and visual distribution shift, \method{} reaches 95.5% average success on LIBERO, including 92.4% on LIBERO-Long, and 59.4% overall success on SimplerEnv-WidowX. Ablations show that both modalities are necessary: without traces, LIBERO-Long success drops to 37.7%; text-only and vision-only traces reach 62.0% and 68.4%, while the full interleaved trace reaches 92.4%. Stress tests with execution perturbations and masked trace content show moderate degradation, suggesting that the trace can tolerate local corruption and moderate execution drift, but remains limited under stale or incorrect global plans.

In reinforcement learning (RL) for robotic manipulation, the Decision Transformer (DT) has emerged as an effective framework for addressing long-horizon tasks. However, DT's performance depends heavily on the coverage of collected experiences. Without an active exploration mechanism, standard DT relies on uniform replay, which leads to poor sample efficiency, limited exploration, and reduced overall effectiveness. At the same time, while excessive exploration can help avoid local optima, it often delays policy convergence and leads to degraded efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose E$^2$DT, a DT-guided k-Determinantal Point Process sampling framework that enables the model to actively shape its own experience selection. Our framework is experience-aware, allowing E$^2$DT to be both efficient, by prioritizing sampling quality, such as high-return, high-uncertainty, and underrepresented trajectories, and effective, by ensuring diversity across trajectory windows to preserve policy optimality. Specifically, DT's internal latent embeddings measure diversity across trajectory windows, while quality is quantified through a composite metric that integrates return-to-go (RTG) quantiles, predictive uncertainty, and stage coverage based on inverse frequency. These two dimensions are integrated into a novel quality-diversity joint kernel that prioritizes the most informative experiences, thereby enabling learning that is both efficient and effective. We evaluate E$^2$DT on challenging robotic manipulation benchmarks in both simulation and real-robot settings. Results show that it consistently outperforms prior methods. These findings demonstrate that coupling policy learning with experience-aware sampling provides a principled path toward robust long-horizon robotic learning.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models advance robotic control via strong visual-linguistic priors. However, existing VLAs predominantly frame pretraining as supervised behavior cloning, overlooking the fundamental nature of robot learning as a goal-reaching process that requires understanding temporal task progress. We present PRTS (Primitive Reasoning and Tasking System), a VLA foundation model that reformulates pretraining through Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning. By treating language instructions as goals and employing contrastive reinforcement learning, PRTS learns a unified embedding space where the inner product of state-action and goal embeddings approximates the log-discounted goal occupancy, the probability of reaching the language-specified goal from the current state-action, quantitatively assessing physical feasibility beyond static semantic matching. PRTS draws this dense goal-reachability supervision directly from offline trajectories without reward annotations, and folds it into the VLM backbone via a role-aware causal mask, incurring negligible overhead over vanilla behavior cloning. This paradigm endows the high-level reasoning system with intrinsic goal reachability awareness, bridging semantic reasoning and temporal task progress, and further benefits goal-conditioned action prediction. Pretrained on 167B tokens of diverse manipulation and embodied-reasoning data, PRTS reaches state-of-the-art performance on LIBERO, LIBERO-Pro, LIBERO-Plus, SimplerEnv, and a real-world suite of 14 complex tasks, with particularly substantial gains on long-horizon, contact-rich, and zero-shot novel-instruction settings, confirming that injecting goal-reachability awareness significantly improves both execution success and long-horizon planning of general-purpose robotic foundation policies.

Contact-rich manipulation is challenging due to its high dimensionality, the requirement for long time horizons, and the presence of hybrid contact dynamics. Sampling-based methods have become a popular approach for this class of problems, but without explicit mechanisms for global exploration, they are susceptible to converging to poor local minima. In this paper, we introduce Global-MPPI, a unified trajectory optimization framework that integrates global exploration and local refinement. At the global level, we leverage kernel sum-of-squares optimization to identify globally promising regions of the solution space. To enable reliable performance for the non-smooth landscapes inherent to contact-rich manipulation, we introduce a graduated non-convexity strategy based on log-sum-exp smoothing, which transitions the optimization landscape from a smoothed surrogate to the original non-smooth objective. Finally, we employ the model-predictive path integral method to locally refine the solution. We evaluate Global-MPPI on high-dimensional, long-horizon contact-rich tasks, including the PushT task and dexterous in-hand manipulation. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach robustly uncovers high-quality solutions, achieving faster convergence and lower final costs compared to existing baseline methods.

Current robots are capable of computing plans to accomplish complex tasks. However, real-world environments are inherently open and dynamic, and unforeseen situations frequently arise during plan execution, such as jamming doors and fallen objects on the floor. These situations may result from the robot's own action failures or from external disturbances, such as human activities. Detecting and handling such execution - time situations remains a significant challenge, limiting those robots' ability to achieve long-term autonomy. In this paper, we develop a planning and situation-handling framework, called VAP-TAMP, that enables robots to actively perceive and address unforeseen situations during plan execution. VAP-TAMP leverages action knowledge to strategically prompt vision-language models for active view selection and situation assessment, while constructing and reasoning over scene graphs for integrated task and motion planning. We evaluated VAP-TAMP using service tasks in simulation and on a mobile manipulation platform.

Recent advances in open-vocabulary mobile manipulation have brought robots into real domestic environments. In such settings, reliable long-horizon execution under open-set object references and frequent disturbances becomes essential. However, many failures persist. These are not caused by semantic misunderstanding but by inconsistencies between symbolic plans and the evolving physical world, manifested as three recurring limitations: (i) existing systems often rely on pre-scanned semantic maps that become inconsistent after scene changes and disturbances; (ii) they select navigation endpoints without considering downstream manipulation feasibility, causing the "arrived but inoperable" problem; and (iii) they handle anomalies through undifferentiated global replanning, which often fails to contain local errors. To address this execution inconsistency, we present ANCHOR, a physically grounded closed-loop framework that aligns symbolic reasoning with verifiable physical state during execution. ANCHOR integrates three mechanisms: (i) physically anchored task planning, which binds symbolic predicates to observable geometric anchors and re-validates them after each action; (ii) operability-aware base alignment, which ensures that navigation endpoints satisfy kinematic reachability and local collision feasibility; and (iii) minimum-responsible-layer hierarchical recovery, which localizes failures across perception, base-arm coordination, and execution layers to prevent cascading retries. Across 60 real-robot trials in previously unseen environments, ANCHOR improves task success from 53.3% to 71.7% and achieves a 71.4% recovery rate under perturbations, demonstrating that explicit physical grounding and structured failure containment are critical for robust mobile manipulation. Our project page is available at https://anchor9178.github.io/ANCHOR/ .

Embodied foundation models have achieved significant breakthroughs in robotic manipulation, yet they still depend heavily on large-scale robot demonstrations. Although recent works have explored leveraging human data to alleviate this dependency, effectively extracting transferable knowledge remains a significant challenge due to the inherent embodiment gap between human and robot. We argue that the intention underlying human actions can serve as a powerful intermediate representation for bridging this gap. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that explicitly learns and transfers human intention to facilitate robotic manipulation. Specifically, we model intention through gaze, as it naturally precedes physical actions and serves as an observable proxy for human intent. Our model is first pretrained on a large-scale egocentric human dataset to capture human intention and its synergy with action, followed by finetuning on a small set of robot and human data. During inference, the model adopts a Chain-of-Thought reasoning paradigm, sequentially predicting intention before executing the action. Extensive evaluations in simulation and real-world settings, across long-horizon and fine-grained tasks, and under few-shot and robustness benchmarks, show that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines, generalizes better, and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://gazevla.github.io .

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models promise generalist robot manipulation, but are typically trained and deployed as short-horizon policies that assume the latest observation is sufficient for action reasoning. This assumption breaks in non-Markovian long-horizon tasks, where task-relevant evidence can be occluded or appear only earlier in the trajectory, and where clutter and distractors make fine-grained visual grounding brittle. We present CodeGraphVLP, a hierarchical framework that enables reliable long-horizon manipulation by combining a persistent semantic-graph state with an executable code-based planner and progress-guided visual-language prompting. The semantic-graph maintains task-relevant entities and relations under partial observability. The synthesized planner executes over this semantic-graph to perform efficient progress checks and outputs a subtask instruction together with subtask-relevant objects. We use these outputs to construct clutter-suppressed observations that focus the VLA executor on critical evidence. On real-world non-Markovian tasks, CodeGraphVLP improves task completion over strong VLA baselines and history-enabled variants while substantially lowering planning latency compared to VLM-in-the-loop planning. We also conduct extensive ablation studies to confirm the contributions of each component.

Long-horizon manipulation remains challenging for vision-language-action (VLA) policies: real tasks are multi-step, progress-dependent, and brittle to compounding execution errors. We present LoHo-Manip, a modular framework that scales short-horizon VLA execution to long-horizon instruction following via a dedicated task-management VLM. The manager is decoupled from the executor and is invoked in a receding-horizon manner: given the current observation, it predicts a progress-aware remaining plan that combines (i) a subtask sequence with an explicit done + remaining split as lightweight language memory, and (ii) a visual trace -- a compact 2D keypoint trajectory prompt specifying where to go and what to approach next. The executor VLA is adapted to condition on the rendered trace, thereby turning long-horizon decision-making into repeated local control by following the trace. Crucially, predicting the remaining plan at each step yields an implicit closed loop: failed steps persist in subsequent outputs, and traces update accordingly, enabling automatic continuation and replanning without hand-crafted recovery logic or brittle visual-history buffers. Extensive experiments spanning embodied planning, long-horizon reasoning, trajectory prediction, and end-to-end manipulation in simulation and on a real Franka robot demonstrate strong gains in long-horizon success, robustness, and out-of-distribution generalization. Project page: https://www.liuisabella.com/LoHoManip

Vision-language-action models (VLAs) have been extensively used in robotics applications, achieving great success in various manipulation problems. More recently, VLAs have been used in long-horizon tasks and evaluated on benchmarks, such as BEHAVIOR1K (B1K), for solving complex household chores. The common metric for measuring progress in such benchmarks is success rate or partial score based on satisfaction of progress-agnostic criteria, meaning only the final states of the objects are considered, regardless of the events that lead to such states. In this paper, we argue that using such evaluation protocols say little about safety aspects of operation and can potentially exaggerate reported performance, undermining core challenges for future real-world deployment. To this end, we conduct a thorough analysis of state-of-the-art models on the B1K Challenge and evaluate policies in terms of robustness via reproducibility and consistency of performance, safety aspects of policies operations, task awareness, and key elements leading to the incompletion of tasks. We then propose evaluation protocols to capture safety violations to better measure the true performance of the policies in more complex and interactive scenarios. At the end, we discuss the limitations of the existing VLAs and motivate future research.

Industrial robotic manipulation demands reliable long-horizon execution across embodiments, tasks, and changing object distributions. While Vision-Language-Action models have demonstrated strong generalization, they remain fundamentally reactive. By optimizing the next action given the current observation without evaluating potential futures, they are brittle to the compounding failure modes of long-horizon tasks. Cortex 2.0 shifts from reactive control to plan-and-act by generating candidate future trajectories in visual latent space, scoring them for expected success and efficiency, then committing only to the highest-scoring candidate. We evaluate Cortex 2.0 on a single-arm and dual-arm manipulation platform across four tasks of increasing complexity: pick and place, item and trash sorting, screw sorting, and shoebox unpacking. Cortex 2.0 consistently outperforms state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action baselines, achieving the best results across all tasks. The system remains reliable in unstructured environments characterized by heavy clutter, frequent occlusions, and contact-rich manipulation, where reactive policies fail. These results demonstrate that world-model-based planning can operate reliably in complex industrial environments.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models fail systematically on long-horizon manipulation tasks despite strong short-horizon performance. We show that this failure is not resolved by extending context length alone in the current reactive execution setting; instead, it stems from three recurring execution-loop deficiencies: the memory gap, the verification gap, and the recovery gap. We present HELM, a model-agnostic framework that addresses these deficiencies with three components: an Episodic Memory Module (EMM) that retrieves key task history via CLIP-indexed keyframes, a learned State Verifier (SV) that predicts action failure before execution from observation, action, subgoal, and memory-conditioned context, and a Harness Controller (HC) that performs rollback and replanning. The SV is the core learning contribution: it consistently outperforms rule-based feasibility checks and ensemble uncertainty baselines, and its effectiveness depends critically on access to episodic memory. On LIBERO-LONG, HELM improves task success rate by 23.1 percentage points over OpenVLA (58.4% to 81.5%), while extending the context window to H=32 yields only a 5.4-point gain and same-budget LoRA adaptation remains 12.2 points below HELM. HELM also improves long-horizon performance on CALVIN and substantially boosts recovery success under controlled perturbations. Ablations and mechanism analyses isolate the contribution of each component, and we release LIBERO-Recovery as a perturbation-injection protocol for evaluating failure recovery in long-horizon manipulation.

Generalist embodied agents must perform interactive, causally-dependent reasoning, continually interacting with the environment, acquiring information, and updating plans to solve long-horizon tasks before they could be adopted in real-life scenarios. For instance, retrieving an apple from a cabinet may require opening multiple doors and drawers before the apple becomes visible and reachable, demanding sequential interaction under partial observability. However, existing benchmarks fail to systematically evaluate this essential capability. We introduce COIN, a benchmark designed to assess interactive reasoning in realistic robotic manipulation through three key contributions. First, we construct COIN-50: 50 interactive tasks in daily scenarios, and create COIN-Primitive required by causally-dependent tasks, and COIN-Composition with mid-term complexity for skill learning and generalization evaluation. Second, we develop a low-cost mobile AR teleoperation system and collect the COIN-Primitive Dataset with 50 demonstrations per primitive task (1,000 in total). Third, we develop systematic evaluation metrics about execution stability and generalization robustness to evaluate CodeAsPolicy, VLA, and language-conditioned H-VLA approaches. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals critical limitations in current methods: models struggle with interactive reasoning tasks due to significant gaps between visual understanding and motor execution. We provide fine-grained analysis of these limitations.

Robotic manipulation policies often degrade over extended horizons, yet existing benchmarks provide limited insight into why such failures occur. Most prior benchmarks are either simulation-based or report aggregate success, making it difficult to disentangle the distinct sources of temporal difficulty in real-world execution. We introduce LongBench, a real-world benchmark for evaluating long-horizon manipulation. LongBench consists of over 1,000 real-world episodes, covering two complementary regimes: Context-Independent (fully observable) and Context-Dependent (ambiguity-driven). By organizing tasks into capability- and ambiguity-specific subsets, LongBench enables mechanism-aware evaluation of execution robustness, temporal consistency, and context-dependent reasoning. Evaluating six state-of-the-art policies reveals that long-horizon performance is not governed by a single factor. We observe that performance in fully observable settings is more strongly associated with execution robustness, while contextual difficulty varies across tasks and is not consistently improved by memory-based methods. We hope that LongBench serves as a useful benchmark for studying long-horizon manipulation and for developing policies with stronger robustness across both execution and contextual challenges.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated significant potential for embodied decision-making; however, their application in complex chemical laboratory automation remains restricted by limited long-horizon reasoning and the absence of persistent experience accumulation. Existing frameworks typically treat planning and execution as decoupled processes, often failing to consolidate successful strategies, which results in inefficient trial-and-error in multi-stage protocols. In this paper, we propose ChemBot, a dual-layer, closed-loop framework that integrates an autonomous AI agent with a progress-aware VLA model (Skill-VLA) for hierarchical task decomposition and execution. ChemBot utilizes a dual-layer memory architecture to consolidate successful trajectories into retrievable assets, while a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server facilitates efficient sub-agent and tool orchestration. To address the inherent limitations of VLA models, we further implement a future-state-based asynchronous inference mechanism to mitigate trajectory discontinuities. Extensive experiments on collaborative robots demonstrate that ChemBot achieves superior operational safety, precision, and task success rates compared to existing VLA baselines in complex, long-horizon chemical experimentation.

While end-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, fine-tuning them on narrow control data often compromises the profound reasoning capabilities inherited from their base Vision-Language Models (VLMs). To resolve this fundamental trade-off, we propose HiVLA, a visual-grounded-centric hierarchical framework that explicitly decouples high-level semantic planning from low-level motor control. In high-level part, a VLM planner first performs task decomposition and visual grounding to generate structured plans, comprising a subtask instruction and a precise target bounding box. Then, to translate this plan into physical actions, we introduce a flow-matching Diffusion Transformer (DiT) action expert in low-level part equipped with a novel cascaded cross-attention mechanism. This design sequentially fuses global context, high-resolution object-centric crops and skill semantics, enabling the DiT to focus purely on robust execution. Our decoupled architecture preserves the VLM's zero-shot reasoning while allowing independent improvement of both components. Extensive experiments in simulation and the real world demonstrate that HiVLA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art end-to-end baselines, particularly excelling in long-horizon skill composition and the fine-grained manipulation of small objects in cluttered scenes.

Recent vision-language-action (VLA) systems have demonstrated strong capabilities in embodied manipulation. However, most existing VLA policies rely on limited observation windows and end-to-end action prediction, which makes them brittle in long-horizon, memory-dependent tasks with partial observability, occlusions, and multi-stage dependencies. Such tasks require not only precise visuomotor control, but also persistent memory, adaptive task decomposition, and explicit recovery from execution failures. To address these limitations, we propose a dual-system framework for long-horizon embodied manipulation. Our framework explicitly separates high-level semantic reasoning from low-level motor execution. A high-level planner, implemented as a VLM-based agentic module, maintains structured task memory and performs goal decomposition, outcome verification, and error-driven correction. A low-level executor, instantiated as a VLA-based visuomotor controller, carries out each sub-task through diffusion-based action generation conditioned on geometry-preserving filtered observations. Together, the two systems form a closed loop between planning and execution, enabling memory-aware reasoning, adaptive replanning, and robust online recovery. Experiments on representative RMBench tasks show that the proposed framework substantially outperforms representative baselines, achieving a 32.4% average success rate compared with 9.8% for the strongest baseline. Ablation studies further confirm the importance of structured memory and closed-loop recovery for long-horizon manipulation.

Coordinating navigation and manipulation with robust performance is essential for embodied AI in complex indoor environments. However, as tasks extend over long horizons, existing methods often struggle due to catastrophic forgetting, spatial inconsistency, and rigid execution. To address these issues, we propose ESCAPE (Episodic Spatial Memory Coupled with an Adaptive Policy for Execution), operating through a tightly coupled perception-grounding-execution workflow. For robust perception, ESCAPE features a Spatio-Temporal Fusion Mapping module to autoregressively construct a depth-free, persistent 3D spatial memory, alongside a Memory-Driven Target Grounding module for precise interaction mask generation. To achieve flexible action, our Adaptive Execution Policy dynamically orchestrates proactive global navigation and reactive local manipulation to seize opportunistic targets. ESCAPE achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ALFRED benchmark, reaching 65.09% and 60.79% success rates in test seen and unseen environments with step-by-step instructions. By reducing redundant exploration, our ESCAPE attains substantial improvements in path-length-weighted metrics and maintains robust performance (61.24% / 56.04%) even without detailed guidance for long-horizon tasks.

We present a screw geometry-based manipulation planning framework for the robotic automation of solution-based synthesis, exemplified through the preparation of gold and magnetite nanoparticles. The synthesis protocols are inherently long-horizon, multi-step tasks, requiring skills such as pick-and-place, pouring, turning a knob, and periodic visual inspection to detect reaction completion. A central challenge is that some skills, notably pouring, transferring containers with solutions, and turning a knob, impose geometric and kinematic constraints on the end-effector motion. To address this, we use a programming by demonstration paradigm where the constraints can be extracted from a single demonstration. This combination of screw-based motion representation and demonstration-driven specification enables domain experts, such as chemists, to readily adapt and reprogram the system for new experimental protocols and laboratory setups without requiring expertise in robotics or motion planning. We extract sequences of constant screws from demonstrations, which compactly encode the motion constraints while remaining coordinate-invariant. This representation enables robust generalization across variations in grasp placement and allows parameterized reuse of a skill learned from a single example. By composing these screw-parameterized primitives according to the synthesis protocol, the robot autonomously generates motion plans that execute the complete experiment over repeated runs. Our results highlight that screw-theoretic planning, combined with programming by demonstration, provides a rigorous and generalizable foundation for long-horizon laboratory automation, thereby enabling fundamental kinematics to have a translational impact on the use of robots in developing scalable solution-based synthesis protocols.

Pretrained video generation models provide strong priors for robot control, but existing unified world action models still struggle to decode reliable actions without substantial robot-specific training. We attribute this limitation to a structural mismatch: while video models capture how scenes evolve, action generation requires explicit reasoning about where to interact and the underlying manipulation intent. We introduce AIM, an intent-aware unified world action model that bridges this gap via an explicit spatial interface. Instead of decoding actions directly from future visual representations, AIM predicts an aligned spatial value map that encodes task-relevant interaction structure, enabling a control-oriented abstraction of future dynamics. Built on a pretrained video generation model, AIM jointly models future observations and value maps within a shared mixture-of-transformers architecture. It employs intent-causal attention to route future information to the action branch exclusively through the value representation. We further propose a self-distillation reinforcement learning stage that freezes the video and value branches and optimizes only the action head using dense rewards derived from projected value-map responses together with sparse task-level signals. To support training and evaluation, we construct a simulation dataset of 30K manipulation trajectories with synchronized multi-view observations, actions, and value-map annotations. Experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 benchmark show that AIM achieves a 94.0% average success rate, significantly outperforming prior unified world action baselines. Notably, the improvement is more pronounced in long-horizon and contact-sensitive manipulation tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of explicit spatial-intent modeling as a bridge between visual world modeling and robot control.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Imitation Learning (IL) are the standard frameworks for policy acquisition in manipulation. While IL offers efficient policy derivation, it suffers from compounding errors and distribution shift. Conversely, RL facilitates autonomous exploration but is frequently hindered by low sample efficiency and the high cost of trial and error. Since existing hybrid methods often struggle with complex tasks, we introduce Mixture of RL and IL Experts (MoRI). This system dynamically switches between IL and RL experts based on the variance of expert actions to handle coarse movements and fine-grained manipulations. MoRI employs an offline pre-training stage followed by online fine-tuning to accelerate convergence. To maintain exploration safety and minimize human intervention, the system applies IL-based regularization to the RL component. Evaluation across four complex real-world tasks shows that MoRI achieves an average success rate of 97.5% within 2 to 5 hours of fine-tuning. Compared to baseline RL algorithms, MoRI reduces human intervention by 85.8% and shortens convergence time by 21%, demonstrating its capability in robotic manipulation.

Robotic imitation learning faces a fundamental trade-off between modeling long-horizon dependencies and enabling fine-grained closed-loop control. Existing fixed-frequency action chunking approaches struggle to achieve both. Building on this insight, we propose HiPolicy, a hierarchical multi-frequency action chunking framework that jointly predicts action sequences at different frequencies to capture both coarse high-level plans and precise reactive motions. We extract and fuse hierarchical features from history observations aligned to each frequency for multi-frequency chunk generation, and introduce an entropy-guided execution mechanism that adaptively balances long-horizon planning with fine-grained control based on action uncertainty. Experiments on diverse simulated benchmarks and real-world manipulation tasks show that HiPolicy can be seamlessly integrated into existing 2D and 3D generative policies, delivering consistent improvements in performance while significantly enhancing execution efficiency.

Bimanual manipulation, i.e., the coordinated use of two robotic arms to complete tasks, is essential for achieving human-level dexterity in robotics. Recent simulation benchmarks, e.g., RoboTwin and RLBench2, have advanced data-driven learning for bimanual manipulation. However, existing tasks are short-horizon and only loosely coordinated, failing to capture the spatial-temporal coupling inherent in real-world bimanual behaviors. To address this gap, we introduce BiCoord, a benchmark for long-horizon and tightly coordinated bimanual manipulation. Specifically, BiCoord comprises diverse tasks that require continuous inter-arm dependency and dynamic role exchange across multiple sub-goals. Also, we propose a suite of quantitative metrics that evaluate coordination from temporal, spatial, and spatial-temporal perspectives, enabling systematic measurement of bimanual cooperation. Experimental results show that representative manipulation policies, e.g., DP, RDT, Pi0, and OpenVLA-OFT, struggle with long-duration and highly coupled tasks, revealing fundamental challenges in achieving long-horizon and tight coordination tasks. We hope BiCoord can serve as a foundation for studying long-horizon cooperative manipulation and inspire future research on coordination-aware robotic learning. All datasets, codes and supplements could be found at https://buaa-colalab.github.io/BiCoord/.

Humans seamlessly fuse anticipatory planning with immediate feedback to perform successive mobile manipulation tasks without stopping, achieving both high efficiency and reliability. Replicating this fluid and reliable behavior in robots remains fundamentally challenging, not only due to conflicts between long-horizon planning and real-time reactivity, but also because excessively pursuing efficiency undermines reliability in uncertain environments: it impairs stable perception and the potential for compensation, while also increasing the risk of unintended contact. In this work, we present a unified framework that synergizes efficiency and reliability for continuous mobile manipulation. It features a reliability-aware trajectory planner that embeds essential elements for reliable execution into spatiotemporal optimization, generating efficient and reliability-promising global trajectories. It is coupled with a phase-dependent switching controller that seamlessly transitions between global trajectory tracking for efficiency and task-error compensation for reliability. We also investigate a hierarchical initialization that facilitates online replanning despite the complexity of long-horizon planning problems. Real-world evaluations demonstrate that our approach enables efficient and reliable completion of successive tasks under uncertainty (e.g., dynamic disturbances, perception and control errors). Moreover, the framework generalizes to tasks with diverse end-effector constraints. Compared with state-of-the-art baselines, our method consistently achieves the highest efficiency while improving the task success rate by 26.67%--81.67%. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the contribution of each component. The source code will be released.