# Rethinking Bimanual Robotic Manipulation: Learning with Decoupled Interaction Framework

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09186 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09186/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03476/) (2016)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12213/) (2024)
- [DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01095/) (2022)
- [Computational Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00567/) (2018)
- [RDT-1B: a Diffusion Foundation Model for Bimanual Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07864/) (2024)
- [SAPIEN: A SimulAted Part-based Interactive ENvironment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08515/) (2020)
- [Perceiver-Actor: A Multi-Task Transformer for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05451/) (2022)
- [Behavioral Cloning from Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01954/) (2018)
- [3D Diffuser Actor: Policy Diffusion with 3D Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10885/) (2024)
- [Any-point Trajectory Modeling for Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00025/) (2023)
- [ManipLLM: Embodied Multimodal Large Language Model for Object-Centric Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16217/) (2023)
- [SERL: A Software Suite for Sample-Efficient Robotic Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16013/) (2024)
- [ManiGaussian: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting for Multi-task Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08321/) (2024)
- [GNFactor: Multi-Task Real Robot Learning with Generalizable Neural Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16891/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Diffusion Policy for Kinematics-Aware Multi-Task Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03890/) (2024)
- [SkillDiffuser: Interpretable Hierarchical Planning via Skill Abstractions in Diffusion-Based Task Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11598/) (2023)
- [RoboTwin: Dual-Arm Robot Benchmark with Generative Digital Twins (early version)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02920/) (2024)
- [Learning Robotic Manipulation Policies from Point Clouds with Conditional Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07343/) (2024)
- [End-to-End Affordance Learning for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12941/) (2022)
- [DrM: Mastering Visual Reinforcement Learning through Dormant Ratio Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19668/) (2023)
- [PartManip: Learning Cross-Category Generalizable Part Manipulation Policy from Point Cloud Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16958/) (2023)
- [Grasp as You Say: Language-guided Dexterous Grasp Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19291/) (2024)
- [Surgical Robot Transformer (SRT): Imitation Learning for Surgical Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12998/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Exploring the Limits of Vision-Language-Action Manipulations in Cross-task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15660/) (2025)
- [3D FlowMatch Actor: Unified 3D Policy for Single- and Dual-Arm Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11002/) (2025)
- [VLANeXt: Recipes for Building Strong VLA Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18532/) (2026)
- [Morphologically Symmetric Reinforcement Learning for Ambidextrous Bimanual Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05287/) (2025)
- [Action-Geometry Prediction with 3D Geometric Prior for Bimanual Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23814/) (2026)
- [MA-VLA: Multi-Arm Vision-Language-Action Model for Collaboration and Compositional Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25864/) (2026)
- [GauDP: Reinventing Multi-Agent Collaboration through Gaussian-Image Synergy in Diffusion Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00998/) (2025)
- [See Selectively, Act Adaptively: Dual-Level Structural Decomposition for Bimanual Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13279/) (2026)
- [A Closed-Loop Multi-Agent Framework for Robust Multi-Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06990/) (2026)
- [Scalable Multi-Task Data Generation via Reinforcement Learning for Language-Conditioned Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22471/) (2026)
- [Holo-Captioning: Toward the Text Equivalent of 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02908/) (2026)
- [One Hand Watches The Other: Dynamic Multi-Agent Cooperation for Sample-Efficient Bimanual Manipulation in Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22119/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Bimanual robotic manipulation is an emerging and critical topic in the robotics community. Previous works primarily rely on integrated control models that take the perceptions and states of both arms as inputs to directly predict their actions. However, we think bimanual manipulation involves not only coordinated tasks but also various uncoordinated tasks that do not require explicit cooperation during execution, such as grasping objects with the closest hand, which integrated control frameworks ignore to consider due to their enforced cooperation in the early inputs. In this paper, we propose a novel decoupled interaction framework that considers the characteristics of different tasks in bimanual manipulation. The key insight of our framework is to assign an independent model to each arm to enhance the learning of uncoordinated tasks, while introducing a selective interaction module that adaptively learns weights from its own arm to improve the learning of coordinated tasks. Extensive experiments on seven tasks in the RoboTwin dataset demonstrate that: (1) Our framework achieves outstanding performance, with a 23.5% boost over the SOTA method. (2) Our framework is flexible and can be seamlessly integrated into existing methods. (3) Our framework can be effectively extended to multi-agent manipulation tasks, achieving a 28% boost over the integrated control SOTA. (4) The performance boost stems from the decoupled design itself, surpassing the SOTA by 16.5% in success rate with only 1/6 of the model size.