Paper Detail

Long-Horizon Manipulation via Trace-Conditioned VLA Planning

Isabella Liu, An-Chieh Cheng, Rui Yan, Geng Chen, Ri-Zhao Qiu, Xueyan Zou, Sha Yi, Hongxu Yin, Xiaolong Wang, Sifei Liu

arxiv Score 11.3

Published 2026-04-23 · First seen 2026-04-24

General AI

Abstract

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

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BibTeX

@article{liu2026long,
  title = {Long-Horizon Manipulation via Trace-Conditioned VLA Planning},
  author = {Isabella Liu and An-Chieh Cheng and Rui Yan and Geng Chen and Ri-Zhao Qiu and Xueyan Zou and Sha Yi and Hongxu Yin and Xiaolong Wang and Sifei Liu},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {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 pla},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21924},
  keywords = {cs.RO},
  eprint = {2604.21924},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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