# SAGE: Scene Graph-Aware Guidance and Execution for Long-Horizon Manipulation Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21928 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21928/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [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)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [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)
- [VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05973/) (2023)
- [AnyDoor: Zero-shot Object-level Image Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09481/) (2023)
- [SayPlan: Grounding Large Language Models using 3D Scene Graphs for Scalable Robot Task Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06135/) (2023)
- [Integrated Task and Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01083/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation with Pretrained Image-Editing Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10639/) (2023)
- [Break-A-Scene: Extracting Multiple Concepts from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16311/) (2023)
- [ViNT: A Foundation Model for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14846/) (2023)
- [Pre-Trained Language Models for Interactive Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01771/) (2022)
- [MAT: Mask-Aware Transformer for Large Hole Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15270/) (2022)
- [RT-H: Action Hierarchies Using Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01823/) (2024)
- [PIVOT: Iterative Visual Prompting Elicits Actionable Knowledge for VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07872/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Successfully solving long-horizon manipulation tasks remains a fundamental challenge. These tasks involve extended action sequences and complex object interactions, presenting a critical gap between high-level symbolic planning and low-level continuous control. To bridge this gap, two essential capabilities are required: robust long-horizon task planning and effective goal-conditioned manipulation. Existing task planning methods, including traditional and LLM-based approaches, often exhibit limited generalization or sparse semantic reasoning. Meanwhile, image-conditioned control methods struggle to adapt to unseen tasks. To tackle these problems, we propose SAGE, a novel framework for Scene Graph-Aware Guidance and Execution in Long-Horizon Manipulation Tasks. SAGE utilizes semantic scene graphs as a structural representation for scene states. A structural scene graph enables bridging task-level semantic reasoning and pixel-level visuo-motor control. This also facilitates the controllable synthesis of accurate, novel sub-goal images. SAGE consists of two key components: (1) a scene graph-based task planner that uses VLMs and LLMs to parse the environment and reason about physically-grounded scene state transition sequences, and (2) a decoupled structural image editing pipeline that controllably converts each target sub-goal graph into a corresponding image through image inpainting and composition. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that SAGE achieves state-of-the-art performance on distinct long-horizon tasks.