Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

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Overview

Long-horizon robotic manipulation concerns tasks that require many dependent actions, such as assembling furniture, preparing food, or moving objects through changing environments. Common approaches combine hierarchical planning and reusable skills with vision-language-action policies, world models, symbolic task representations, and memory of past actions or object states. Researchers train these systems with demonstrations, reinforcement learning, simulated experience, and human corrections, and evaluate them in multi-stage benchmarks and real-robot settings. A central challenge is that strong performance on individual skills does not guarantee reliable task completion: errors can accumulate at skill transitions, while memory, recovery, and safety remain difficult to evaluate and generalize.

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435 papers88 papers in the last four weeks, up 49% on the four weeks before. 0.5% of all new papers.

  1. ROSClaw: A Hierarchical Semantic-Physical Framework for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Collaboration

    Apr 6, 2026Rongfeng Zhao, Xuanhao Zhang, Zhaochen Guo +4VLMs for RoboticsCross-Embodiment Robot Learning

    Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Shanghai 201210, China · National Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems (Tongji University), Shanghai 201210, China · Frontiers Science Center for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Shanghai 201210, China +1

  2. Hierarchical Planning with Latent World Models

    Apr 3, 2026Wancong Zhang, Basile Terver, Artem Zholus +7Hierarchical PlanningHierarchical Robot Control

    FAIR at Meta · New York University · Mila - Québec AI Institute +1

  3. SpatialVAM:Spatial-Aware Multi-View Video Diffusion as a Data-Efficient Robot Policy

    Apr 3, 2026Peiyan Li, Yixiang Chen, Yuan Xu +13Multi-Task Robotic ManipulationData-Efficient Robot Learning

    New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Tsinghua University +4

  4. ARM: Advantage Reward Modeling for Long-Horizon Manipulation

    Apr 3, 2026Yiming Mao, Zixi Yu, Weixin Mao +5Reward ModelingLong-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

    LimX Dynamics · Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · Zhejiang University

  5. Long-Reach Robotic Cleaning for Lunar Solar Arrays

    Mar 31, 2026Stanley Wang, Velin Kojouharov, Long Yin Chung +2RoboticsSpace Robotics

    All authors are with the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.

  6. Generalizable Dense Reward for Long-Horizon Robotic Tasks

    Mar 31, 2026Silong Yong, Stephen Sheng, Carl Qi +6Reinforcement LearningLong-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

    Carnegie Mellon University · Amazon Robotics · UT Austin

  7. Spectral Decomposition of Inverse Dynamics for Fast Exploration in Model-Based Manipulation

    Mar 29, 2026Solvin Sigurdson, Benjamin Riviere, Joel BurdickLong-Horizon Robotic ManipulationMotion Planning

    Department of Control and Dynamical Systems, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA · Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Department of Computer Science, New York University, New York City, NY 10012, USA

  8. ProgressVLA: Progress-Guided Diffusion Policy for Vision-Language Robotic Manipulation

    Mar 29, 2026Hongyu Yan, Qiwei Li, Jiaolong Yang +1Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

    Peking University · Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA)

  9. Emergent Neural Automaton Policies: Learning Symbolic Structure from Visuomotor Trajectories

    Mar 26, 2026Yiyuan Pan, Xusheng Luo, Hanjiang Hu +2Automata LearningVisuomotor Policy Learning

    Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

  10. System Design for Maintaining Internal State Consistency in Long-Horizon Robotic Tabletop Games

    Mar 26, 2026Guangyu Zhao, Ceyao Zhang, Chengdong Ma +16RoboticsHuman-Robot Interaction

    Peking University · PKU-PsiBot Joint Lab · Nanyang Technological University +1

  11. Chameleon: Control-Indexed Prospective Memory for Visuomotor Manipulation

    Mar 25, 2026Xinying Guo, Chenxi Jiang, Hyun Bin Kim +4Memory-Augmented AgentsLong-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

    MARS Lab, Nanyang Technological University · Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR · National University of Singapore

  12. DexDrummer: In-Hand, Contact-Rich, and Long-Horizon Dexterous Robot Drumming

    Mar 23, 2026Hung-Chieh Fang, Amber Xie, Jennifer Grannen +2Dexterous ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Stanford University

  13. BiPreManip: Learning Affordance-Based Bimanual Preparatory Manipulation through Anticipatory Collaboration

    Mar 23, 2026Yan Shen, Feng Jiang, Zichen He +5Affordance-Based Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    CFCS, School of Computer Science, Peking University

  14. PRM-as-a-Judge: A Dense Evaluation Paradigm for Fine-Grained Robotic Auditing

    Mar 23, 2026Yuheng Ji, Yuyang Liu, Huajie Tan +15Robotic Policy EvaluationProcess Reward Models

    State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University +4

  15. MemoAct: Atkinson-Shiffrin-Inspired Hierarchical Memory-Augmented Policy for Robotic Manipulation

    Mar 19, 2026Liufan Tan, Jiale Li, Gangshan JingMemory-Augmented AgentsRobot Policy Learning

  16. Large Reward Models: Generalizable Online Robot Reward Generation with Vision-Language Models

    Mar 17, 2026Yanru Wu, Weiduo Yuan, Esteban Martinez Licon +4Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationRobot Skill Learning

    USC Physical Superintelligence Lab

  17. ExpertGen: Scalable Sim-to-Real Expert Policy Learning from Imperfect Behavior Priors

    Mar 16, 2026Zifan Xu, Ran Gong, Maria Vittoria Minniti +10Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationRobot Skill Learning

    Robotics and AI Institute · University of Texas at Austin · Sony AI

  18. RoCo Challenge at AAAI 2026: Benchmarking Robotic Collaborative Manipulation for Assembly Towards Industrial Automation

    Mar 16, 2026Haichao Liu, Yuheng Zhou, Zhenyu Wu +14Robot Manipulation BenchmarksRobotic Assembly

    Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China · Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA +1

  19. ST-VLA: Enabling 4D-Aware Spatiotemporal Understanding for General Robot Manipulation

    Mar 14, 2026You Wu, Zixuan Chen, Cunxu Ou +9Robotic ManipulationVLMs for Robotics

    School of Computer Science, Nanjing University · School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University · School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University +2

  20. REFINE-DP: Diffusion Policy Fine-tuning for Humanoid Loco-manipulation via Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 14, 2026Zhaoyuan Gu, Yipu Chen, Zimeng Chai +11Humanoid Loco-ManipulationDiffusion Policy

    Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332 USA

  21. RoboStream: Weaving Spatio-Temporal Reasoning with Memory in Vision-Language Models for Robotics

    Mar 13, 2026Yuzhi Huang, Jie Wu, Weijue Bu +9Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationRobot Task Planning

    Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University · YuanxingGuangnian Robotics · China University of Mining and Technology +3

  22. Spatially Grounded Long-Horizon Task Planning in the Wild

    Mar 13, 2026Sehun Jung, HyunJee Song, Dong-Hee Kim +4Robot Task PlanningLong-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

    Korea University · Microsoft Research · University of Wisconsin-Madison

  23. Beyond Dense Futures: World Models as Structured Planners for Robotic Manipulation

    Mar 13, 2026Minghao Jin, Mozheng Liao, Mingfei Han +2World Model-Based PlanningRobotic Manipulation

    University of Science and Technology of China · Department of CV, MBZUAI

  24. Concurrent Prehensile and Nonprehensile Manipulation: A Practical Approach to Multi-Stage Dexterous Tasks

    Mar 12, 2026Hao Jiang, Yue Wu, Yue Wang +2Dexterous ManipulationLong-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, USA.

  25. RoboClaw: An Agentic Framework for Scalable Long-Horizon Robotic Tasks

    Mar 12, 2026Ruiying Li, Yunlang Zhou, YuYao Zhu +15Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationVLMs for Robotics

    AgiBot, China · National University of Singapore · Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China +1

  26. Deployment-Time Reliability of Learned Robot Policies

    Mar 12, 2026Christopher AgiaRoboticsRobotic Policy Evaluation

    THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY

  27. Cybo-Waiter: A Physical Agentic Framework for Humanoid Whole-Body Locomotion-Manipulation

    Mar 11, 2026Peng Ren, Haoyang Ge, Chuan Qi +5Humanoid Loco-ManipulationLong-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

    Beihang University, Beijing, China · Zhongguancun Academy, Beijing, China · Tianjin University, Tianjin, China +3

  28. SELF-VLA: A Skill Enhanced Agentic Vision-Language-Action Framework for Contact-Rich Disassembly

    Mar 10, 2026Chang Liu, Sibo Tian, Xiao Liang +1Vision-Language-Action ModelsContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA. · Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.

  29. Perceptive Hierarchical-Task MPC for Sequential Mobile Manipulation in Unstructured Semi-Static Environments

    Mar 10, 2026Xintong Du, Jingxing Qian, Siqi Zhou +13D Scene Change DetectionMobile Manipulation

    University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) and the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Canada. · School of Computing Science, Faculty of Applied Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada. · Learning Systems and Robotics lab at the Technical University of Munich and the Munich Institute for Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), Germany.

  30. Beyond Short-Horizon: VQ-Memory for Robust Long-Horizon Manipulation in Non-Markovian Simulation Benchmarks

    Mar 10, 2026Honghui Wang, Zhi Jing, Jicong Ao +4Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationRobot Manipulation Benchmarks

    Tsinghua University · Fudan University · Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom