# Chain-of-Modality: Learning Manipulation Programs from Multimodal Human Videos with Vision-Language-Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13351 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13351/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 64 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07753/) (2022)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05608/) (2022)
- [Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07207/) (2022)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12168/) (2024)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (2023)
- [CLIPort: What and Where Pathways for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12098/) (2021)
- [ProgPrompt: Generating Situated Robot Task Plans using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11302/) (2022)
- [Socratic Models: Composing Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning with Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00598/) (2022)
- [LLM+P: Empowering Large Language Models with Optimal Planning Proficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11477/) (2023)
- [Time-Contrastive Networks: Self-Supervised Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06888/) (2017)
- [LM-Nav: Robotic Navigation with Large Pre-Trained Models of Language, Vision, and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04429/) (2022)
- [Describe, Explain, Plan and Select: Interactive Planning with Large Language Models Enables Open-World Multi-Task Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01560/) (2023)
- [VIP: Towards Universal Visual Reward and Representation via Value-Implicit Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00030/) (2022)
- [ReKep: Spatio-Temporal Reasoning of Relational Keypoint Constraints for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01652/) (2024)
- [Language to Rewards for Robotic Skill Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08647/) (2023)
- [ActionFormer: Localizing Moments of Actions with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07925/) (2022)
- [Prompting Visual-Language Models for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04478/) (2021)
- [Reconstructing Hands in 3D with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05251/) (2023)
- [Temporal Segment Networks for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02953/) (2017)
- [Human Action Recognition and Prediction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.11230/) (2018)
- [Affordances from Human Videos as a Versatile Representation for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08488/) (2023)
- [Text2Motion: From Natural Language Instructions to Feasible Plans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12153/) (2023)
- [MimicPlay: Long-Horizon Imitation Learning by Watching Human Play](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12422/) (2023)
- [Foundation Models in Robotics: Applications, Challenges, and the Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07843/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Perception, Reason, Think, and Plan: A Survey on Large Multimodal Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04921/) (2025)
- [Large VLM-based Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13073/) (2025)
- [Uni-Hand: Universal Hand Motion Forecasting in Egocentric Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12878/) (2025)
- [Optimizing Multimodal LLMs for Egocentric Video Understanding: A Solution for the HD-EPIC VQA Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10228/) (2026)
- [RAPID: Robot Agentic Programming from Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30249/) (2026)
- [APEX: Empowering LLMs with Physics-Based Task Planning for Real-time Insight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13921/) (2025)
- [D3Grasp: Diverse and Deformable Dexterous Grasping for General Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19892/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning to perform manipulation tasks from human videos is a promising approach for teaching robots. However, many manipulation tasks require changing control parameters during task execution, such as force, which visual data alone cannot capture. In this work, we leverage sensing devices such as armbands that measure human muscle activities and microphones that record sound, to capture the details in the human manipulation process, and enable robots to extract task plans and control parameters to perform the same task. To achieve this, we introduce Chain-of-Modality (CoM), a prompting strategy that enables Vision Language Models to reason about multimodal human demonstration data -- videos coupled with muscle or audio signals. By progressively integrating information from each modality, CoM refines a task plan and generates detailed control parameters, enabling robots to perform manipulation tasks based on a single multimodal human video prompt. Our experiments show that CoM delivers a threefold improvement in accuracy for extracting task plans and control parameters compared to baselines, with strong generalization to new task setups and objects in real-world robot experiments. Videos and code are available at https://chain-of-modality.github.io