# CycleManip: Enabling Cyclic Task Manipulation via Effective Historical Perception and Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01022 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01022/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2025.

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

- [MEM: Multi-Scale Embodied Memory for Vision Language Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03596/) (2026)
- [EventVLA: Event-Driven Visual Evidence Memory for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20092/) (2026)
- [DynamicManip: Enabling Dynamic Manipulation from a Single Static Demonstration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01452/) (2026)
- [A Closed-Loop Multi-Agent Framework for Robust Multi-Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06990/) (2026)
- [Revision, Not Restart: Revisable Visual Plans for Closed-Loop World-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35439/) (2026)
- [Remember What You Did: Action-History Memory with Dual-Expert Denoising for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37307/) (2026)
- [PMTRM: Pseudo-Memory Temporal Re-encoding Module for Embodied Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11168/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we explore an important yet underexplored task in robot manipulation: cycle-based manipulation, where robots need to perform cyclic or repetitive actions with an expected terminal time. These tasks are crucial in daily life, such as shaking a bottle or knocking a nail. However, few prior works have explored this task, leading to two main challenges: 1) the imitation methods often fail to complete these tasks within the expected terminal time due to the ineffective utilization of history; 2) the absence of a benchmark with sufficient data and automatic evaluation tools hinders development of effective solutions in this area. To address these challenges, we first propose the CycleManip framework to achieve cycle-based task manipulation in an end-to-end imitation manner without requiring any extra models, hierarchical structure or significant computational overhead. The core insight is to enhance effective history perception by a cost-aware sampling strategy and to improve historical understanding by multi-task learning. Second, we introduce a cycle-based task manipulation benchmark, which provides diverse cycle-based tasks, and an automatic evaluation method. Extensive experiments conducted in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that our method achieves high success rates in cycle-based task manipulation. The results further show strong adaptability performance in general manipulation, and the plug-and-play ability on imitation policies such as Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. Moreover, the results show that our approach can be applied across diverse robotic platforms, including bi-arm grippers, dexterous hands, and humanoid robots.
