# ManiAgent: An Agentic Framework for General Robotic Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11660 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11660/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Failure recovery and robustness, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models.
- Builds on 30 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- Vision-language-action models / [Failure recovery and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/vla/failure-recovery-and-robustness/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Multimodal and embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/multimodal-and-embodied-agents/)

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

- [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)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07753/) (2022)
- [VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05973/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Real-World Robot Manipulation Policies in Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05941/) (2024)
- [CogACT: A Foundational Vision-Language-Action Model for Synergizing Cognition and Action in Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19650/) (2024)
- [Florence-2: Advancing a Unified Representation for a Variety of Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06242/) (2023)
- [Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13139/) (2023)
- [ReKep: Spatio-Temporal Reasoning of Relational Keypoint Constraints for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01652/) (2024)
- [SayPlan: Grounding Large Language Models using 3D Scene Graphs for Scalable Robot Task Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06135/) (2023)
- [RT-H: Action Hierarchies Using Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01823/) (2024)
- [AnyGrasp: Robust and Efficient Grasp Perception in Spatial and Temporal Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08333/) (2022)
- [EASYTOOL: Enhancing LLM-based Agents with Concise Tool Instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06201/) (2024)
- [RoboCat: A Self-Improving Generalist Agent for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11706/) (2023)
- [What Matters in Building Vision-Language-Action Models for Generalist Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14058/) (2024)
- [AutoRT: Embodied Foundation Models for Large Scale Orchestration of Robotic Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12963/) (2024)
- [Internet of Agents: Weaving a Web of Heterogeneous Agents for Collaborative Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07061/) (2024)
- [Manipulate-Anything: Automating Real-World Robots using Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18915/) (2024)
- [RoboCerebra: A Large-scale Benchmark for Long-horizon Robotic Manipulation Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06677/) (2025)
- [Exploring the Limits of Vision-Language-Action Manipulations in Cross-task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15660/) (2025)
- [ReplanVLM: Replanning Robotic Tasks with Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21762/) (2024)
- [MALMM: Multi-Agent Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Robotics Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17636/) (2024)
- [Evolving Agents: Interactive Simulation of Dynamic and Diverse Human Personalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02718/) (2024)
- [GeoManip: Geometric Constraints as General Interfaces for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09783/) (2025)
- [CodeDiffuser: Attention-Enhanced Diffusion Policy via VLM-Generated Code for Instruction Ambiguity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16652/) (2025)
- [ExploreVLM: Closed-Loop Robot Exploration Task Planning with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11918/) (2025)
- [ROSA: Harnessing Robot States for Vision-Language and Action Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13679/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [From Reaction to Anticipation: Proactive Failure Recovery through Agentic Task Graph for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11951/) (2026)
- [Diagnosing Semantic Handoff Failures in Agent-Orchestrated Vision-Language-Action Skill Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06256/) (2026)
- [A Physical Agentic Loop for Language-Guided Grasping with Execution-State Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07395/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in robotic manipulation, their performance in complex reasoning and long-horizon task planning is limited by data scarcity and model capacity. To address this, we introduce ManiAgent, an agentic architecture for general manipulation tasks that achieves end-to-end output from task descriptions and environmental inputs to robotic manipulation actions. In this framework, multiple agents involve inter-agent communication to perform environmental perception, sub-task decomposition and action generation, enabling efficient handling of complex manipulation scenarios. Evaluations show ManiAgent achieves an 86.8% success rate on the SimplerEnv benchmark and 95.8% on real-world pick-and-place tasks, enabling efficient data collection that yields VLA models with performance comparable to those trained on human-annotated datasets. The project webpage is available at https://yi-yang929.github.io/ManiAgent/.
