HEX: Humanoid-Aligned Experts for Cross-Embodiment Whole-Body Manipulation
On the map: Vision-language-action models → Tactile, force-aware and humanoid VLA
Abstract (arXiv)
Humans achieve complex manipulation through coordinated whole-body control, whereas most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models treat robot body parts largely independently, making high-DoF humanoid control challenging and often unstable. We present HEX, a state-centric framework for coordinated manipulation on full-sized bipedal humanoid robots. HEX introduces a humanoid-aligned universal state representation for scalable learning across heterogeneous embodiments, and incorporates a Mixture-of-Experts Unified Proprioceptive Predictor to model whole-body coordination and temporal motion dynamics from large-scale multi-embodiment trajectory data. To efficiently capture temporal visual context, HEX uses lightweight history tokens to summarize past observations, avoiding repeated encoding of historical images during inference. It further employs a residual-gated fusion mechanism with a flow-matching action head to adaptively integrate visual-language cues with proprioceptive dynamics for action generation. Experiments on real-world humanoid manipulation tasks show that HEX achieves state-of-the-art performance in task success rate and generalization, particularly in fast-reaction and long-horizon scenarios.
Key facts. Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Tactile, force-aware and humanoid VLA, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models. Builds on 57 of its 61 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2026.
Builds on
57 of 61 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2025TrajBooster: Boosting Humanoid Whole-Body Manipulation via Trajectory-Centric Learning15 Sep
- 2025LeVERB: Humanoid Whole-Body Control with Latent Vision-Language Instruction16 Jun
Other references · 55
- 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,777
- 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
- 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,653
- 2023Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardwarecited by 1,490
- 2025GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robotscited by 1,167
- 2025AgiBot World Colosseo: A Large-scale Manipulation Platform for Scalable and Intelligent Embodied Systemscited by 390
- 2025UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actionscited by 386
- 2024OmniH2O: Universal and Dexterous Human-to-Humanoid Whole-Body Teleoperation and Learningcited by 167
- 2024RoboMIND: Benchmark on Multi-embodiment Intelligence Normative Data for Robot Manipulationcited by 166
- 2024HumanPlus: Humanoid Shadowing and Imitation from Humanscited by 164
- 2024Scaling Proprioceptive-Visual Learning with Heterogeneous Pre-trained Transformerscited by 145
- 2025VLA-Adapter: An Effective Paradigm for Tiny-Scale Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 140
38 more
- 2023Real-World Humanoid Locomotion with Reinforcement Learningcited by 132
- 2025BeyondMimic: From Motion Tracking to Versatile Humanoid Control via Guided Diffusioncited by 128
- 2025EgoVLA: Learning Vision-Language-Action Models from Egocentric Human Videoscited by 116
- 2024Scaling Cross-Embodied Learning: One Policy for Manipulation, Navigation, Locomotion and Aviationcited by 108
- 2025TWIST: Teleoperated Whole-Body Imitation Systemcited by 86
- 2025SONIC: Supersizing Motion Tracking for Natural Humanoid Whole-Body Controlcited by 83
- 2025ReconVLA: Reconstructive Vision-Language-Action Model as Effective Robot Perceivercited by 80
- 2025OpenHelix: A Short Survey, Empirical Analysis, and Open-Source Dual-System VLA Model for Robotic Manipulationcited by 79
- 2025GMT: General Motion Tracking for Humanoid Whole-Body Controlcited by 72
- 2025RoboCOIN: An Open-Sourced Bimanual Robotic Data Collection for Integrated Manipulationcited by 72
- 2025Humanoid Policy ~ Human Policycited by 65
- 2024OKAMI: Teaching Humanoid Robots Manipulation Skills through Single Video Imitationcited by 62
- 2026Being-H0.5: Scaling Human-Centric Robot Learning for Cross-Embodiment Generalizationcited by 61
- 2024Pushing the Limits of Cross-Embodiment Learning for Manipulation and Navigationcited by 60
- 2024Generalizable Humanoid Manipulation with 3D Diffusion Policiescited by 49
- 2025Long-VLA: Unleashing Long-Horizon Capability of Vision Language Action Model for Robot Manipulationcited by 48
- 2025Humanoid-VLA: Towards Universal Humanoid Control with Visual Integrationcited by 43
- 2023Hierarchical Planning and Control for Box Loco-Manipulationcited by 42
- 2024Mobile-TeleVision: Predictive Motion Priors for Humanoid Whole-Body Controlcited by 41
- 2025KungfuBot: Physics-Based Humanoid Whole-Body Control for Learning Highly-Dynamic Skillscited by 39
- 2025HDMI: Learning Interactive Humanoid Whole-Body Control from Human Videoscited by 32
- 2025Towards a Unified Understanding of Robot Manipulation: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 32
- 2025WholeBodyVLA: Towards Unified Latent VLA for Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation Controlcited by 32
- 2025RoboMIND 2.0: A Multimodal, Bimanual Mobile Manipulation Dataset for Generalizable Embodied Intelligencecited by 31
- 2025FALCON: Learning Force-Adaptive Humanoid Loco-Manipulationcited by 28
- 2024Learning from Massive Human Videos for Universal Humanoid Pose Controlcited by 27
- 2025EgoBridge: Domain Adaptation for Generalizable Imitation from Egocentric Human Datacited by 27
- 2025Humanoid Everyday: A Comprehensive Robotic Dataset for Open-World Humanoid Manipulationcited by 22
- 2025VIRAL: Visual Sim-to-Real at Scale for Humanoid Loco-Manipulationcited by 21
- 2026Latent Reasoning VLA: Latent Thinking and Prediction for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 19
- 2026EgoHumanoid: Unlocking In-the-Wild Loco-Manipulation with Robot-Free Egocentric Demonstrationcited by 18
- 2025From Language to Locomotion: Retargeting-free Humanoid Control via Motion Latent Guidancecited by 17
- 2025SwitchVLA: Execution-Aware Task Switching for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 15
- 2025Hand-Eye Autonomous Delivery: Learning Humanoid Navigation, Locomotion and Reachingcited by 12
- 2025HiMoE-VLA: Hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts for Generalist Vision-Language-Action Policiescited by 10
- 2025SLAC: Safe and Efficient Real-Robot Reinforcement Learning via Unsupervised Simulation Pre-Trainingcited by 7
- 2025Embodied Robot Manipulation in the Era of Foundation Models: Planning and Learning Perspectivescited by 7
- 2025HACTS: a Human-As-Copilot Teleoperation System for Robot Learningcited by 6
50 most cited of 55 All 55 (JSON)
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 10.
10 papers.
- 2026From Foundation to Application: Improving VLA Models in Practicecited by 25
- 2026G0.5: One Autoregressive Stream for Robot Reasoning and Actioncited by 17
- 2026Robots Need More than VLA and World Modelscited by 2
- 2026How Should Vision-Language-Action Models Use Proprioceptive State?cited by 1
- 2026CapVector: Learning Transferable Capability Vectors in Parametric Space for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 0
- 2026Any2Any: Efficient Cross-Embodiment Transfer for Humanoid Whole-Body Trackingcited by 0
- 2026WholeBodyWAM: Generalizing Pre-trained World-Action Priors to Humanoid Loco-Manipulation via WBC-Grounded Coordinationcited by 0
- 2026Weave: Learning Whole-Body Dexterous Loco-Manipulation from Human-Object Interactionscited by 0
- 2026WholeBodyWAM: Learning Whole-Body World Action Models with Scalable Motion Priorscited by 0
- 2026Humanoid World Action Model With Joint State--Action Generationcited by 0
- 2026Humanoid World Action Model With Joint State--Action Generation8 Oct 2026
- 2026WholeBodyWAM: Learning Whole-Body World Action Models with Scalable Motion Priors16 Sep 2026
- 2026Weave: Learning Whole-Body Dexterous Loco-Manipulation from Human-Object Interactions15 Sep 2026
- 2026WholeBodyWAM: Generalizing Pre-trained World-Action Priors to Humanoid Loco-Manipulation via WBC-Grounded Coordination15 Sep 2026
- 2026G0.5: One Autoregressive Stream for Robot Reasoning and Action12 Aug 2026
- 2026How Should Vision-Language-Action Models Use Proprioceptive State?4 Aug 2026
- 2026From Foundation to Application: Improving VLA Models in Practice7 Jul 2026
- 2026Robots Need More than VLA and World Models4 Jun 2026
- 2026Any2Any: Efficient Cross-Embodiment Transfer for Humanoid Whole-Body Tracking22 May 2026
- 2026CapVector: Learning Transferable Capability Vectors in Parametric Space for Vision-Language-Action Models11 May 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026RoboTacDex: A Dexterous Visual-Tactile-Action Dataset for Humanoid Manipulation ↗
- 2026ω-0: A Latent Predictive World Action Model for Concurrent Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
- 2026Towards a General Humanoid Loco-Manipulation Model via Egocentric Whole-Body Human Data Pretraining ↗
- 2026Whole-Body UMI: Transferring UMI Manipulation Skills to Humanoid Whole-Body Manipulation via Real-Time Motion Generation ↗
- 2026HumanX: Toward Agile and Generalizable Humanoid Interaction Skills from Human Videos
- 2026HumanoidMimicGen: Data Generation for Loco-Manipulation via Whole-Body Planning
- 2026MetaWorld-X: Hierarchical World Modeling via VLM-Orchestrated Experts for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
- 2026RoboReact: Agentic Skill Distillation from Generated Egocentric Videos for Generalizable Whole-Body Manipulation