# System Design for Maintaining Internal State Consistency in Long-Horizon Robotic Tabletop Games

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25405 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25405/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [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)
- [HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19256/) (2024)
- [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16054/) (2025)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [FoundationPose: Unified 6D Pose Estimation and Tracking of Novel Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08344/) (2023)
- [Putting the Object Back into Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12982/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Robotics: Opportunities, Challenges, and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04334/) (2024)
- [DexGraspVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Framework Towards General Dexterous Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20900/) (2025)
- [ChessGPT: Bridging Policy Learning and Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09200/) (2023)
- [MemER: Scaling Up Memory for Robot Control via Experience Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20328/) (2025)
- [Real-World Robot Applications of Foundation Models: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05741/) (2024)
- [Suphx: Mastering Mahjong with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13590/) (2020)
- [Plan-Seq-Learn: Language Model Guided RL for Solving Long Horizon Robotics Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01534/) (2024)
- [RoboGround: Robotic Manipulation with Grounded Vision-Language Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21530/) (2025)
- [UNO Arena for Evaluating Sequential Decision-Making Capability of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16382/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Task Decomposition for Execution Monitoring and Error Recovery: Understanding the Rationale Behind Task Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04565/) (2025)
- [Deep Instance Segmentation and Visual Servoing to Play Jenga with a Cost-Effective Robotic System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07977/) (2022)
- [Integration of Robotics, Computer Vision, and Algorithm Design: A Chinese Poker Self-Playing Robot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09455/) (2023)
- [An Open-Source Reproducible Chess Robot for Human-Robot Interaction Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18170/) (2024)
- [Gondola: Grounded Vision Language Planning for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11261/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Long-horizon tabletop games pose a distinct systems challenge for robotics: small perceptual or execution errors can invalidate accumulated task state, propagate across decision-making modules, and ultimately derail interaction. This paper studies how to maintain internal state consistency in turn-based, multi-human robotic tabletop games through deliberate system design rather than isolated component improvement. Using Mahjong as a representative long-horizon setting, we present an integrated architecture that explicitly maintains perceptual, execution, and interaction state, partitions high-level semantic reasoning from time-critical perception and control, and incorporates verified action primitives with tactile-triggered recovery to prevent premature state corruption. We further introduce interaction-level monitoring mechanisms to detect turn violations and hidden-information breaches that threaten execution assumptions. Beyond demonstrating complete-game operation, we provide an empirical characterization of failure modes, recovery effectiveness, cross-module error propagation, and hardware-algorithm trade-offs observed during deployment. Our results show that explicit partitioning, monitored state transitions, and recovery mechanisms are critical for sustaining executable consistency over extended play, whereas monolithic or unverified pipelines lead to measurable degradation in end-to-end reliability. The proposed system serves as an empirical platform for studying system-level design principles in long-horizon, turn-based interaction.
