UniManip: General-Purpose Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation with Agentic Operational Graph
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Multimodal and embodied agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Achieving general-purpose robotic manipulation requires robots to seamlessly bridge high-level semantic intent with low-level physical interaction in unstructured environments. However, existing approaches falter in zero-shot generalization: end-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models often lack the precision required for long-horizon tasks, while traditional hierarchical planners suffer from semantic rigidity when facing open-world variations. To address this, we present UniManip, a framework grounded in a Bi-level Agentic Operational Graph (AOG) that unifies semantic reasoning and physical grounding. By coupling a high-level Agentic Layer for task orchestration with a low-level Scene Layer for dynamic state representation, the system continuously aligns abstract planning with geometric constraints, enabling robust zero-shot execution. Unlike static pipelines, UniManip operates as a dynamic agentic loop: it actively instantiates object-centric scene graphs from unstructured perception, parameterizes these representations into collision-free trajectories via a safety-aware local planner, and exploits structured memory to autonomously diagnose and recover from execution failures. Extensive experiments validate the system's robust zero-shot capability on unseen objects and tasks, demonstrating a 22.5% and 25.0% higher success rate compared to state-of-the-art VLA and hierarchical baselines, respectively. Notably, the system enables direct zero-shot transfer from fixed-base setups to mobile manipulation without fine-tuning or reconfiguration. Our open-source project page can be found at https://henryhcliu.github.io/unimanip.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 36 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Feb 2026.
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Other references · 35
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.
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