ManiSkillFormer: Demonstration-Free Compositional Manipulation via Geometric Contracts and Agentic Skill Graph
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Multimodal and embodied agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Adapting robotic manipulation to new objects and tasks often requires additional demonstrations or manual engineering. Reusable manipulation skills can reduce this effort, but adapting these skills to new scenes remains challenging. We present ManiSkillFormer, a framework for demonstration-free and compositional manipulation that connects perception and action through explicit geometric contracts. Building on reusable skill schemas, LLM agents generate contracts specifying the geometry primitives required by each skill, together with corresponding motion templates for semantic objects and task contexts. These contracts guide a perception module to ground task-relevant 3D geometry from observations, which is then used to instantiate reusable motion templates in a skill library. We evaluate ManiSkillFormer on a dual-arm robot across demonstration-free pick-and-place with 30 instances from 8 object categories, functional manipulation including unscrewing, pouring, pressing, and folding, and three long-horizon tasks. ManiSkillFormer achieves an average success rate of 88.97% for pick-and-place, 75.00% for functional manipulation, and completion rates of 50--80% across the long-horizon tasks, outperforming the evaluated baselines and two ablated pipelines. These results demonstrate the potential of explicit geometric contracts to support skill reuse and composition across objects and tasks without per-object policy fine-tuning or additional robot demonstrations. The project website is at https://patricia1019.github.io/ManiSkillFormer/.
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 18 of its 21 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Sep 2026.
Builds on
18 of 21 references.
References · 18
- 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,777
- 2022Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordancescited by 2,302
- 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,297
- 2022Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Controlcited by 1,172
- 2023VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Modelscited by 733
- 2024Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Modelscited by 321
- 2024ReKep: Spatio-Temporal Reasoning of Relational Keypoint Constraints for Robotic Manipulationcited by 305
- 2024RoboPoint: A Vision-Language Model for Spatial Affordance Prediction for Roboticscited by 242
- 2024MOKA: Open-World Robotic Manipulation through Mark-Based Visual Promptingcited by 126
- 2024CoPa: General Robotic Manipulation through Spatial Constraints of Parts with Foundation Modelscited by 97
- 2025OmniManip: Towards General Robotic Manipulation via Object-Centric Interaction Primitives as Spatial Constraintscited by 58
- 2023KITE: Keypoint-Conditioned Policies for Semantic Manipulationcited by 39
6 more
- 2024RoboMatrix: A Skill-centric Hierarchical Framework for Scalable Robot Task Planning and Execution in Open-Worldcited by 22
- 2024Keypoint Abstraction using Large Models for Object-Relative Imitation Learningcited by 18
- 2022STAP: Sequencing Task-Agnostic Policiescited by 17
- 2025GeoManip: Geometric Constraints as General Interfaces for Robot Manipulationcited by 13
- 2024HACMan++: Spatially-Grounded Motion Primitives for Manipulationcited by 5
- 2025NeSyPack: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Bimanual Logistics Packingcited by 2
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.
1 paper.
Similar, not cited
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- 2024Manipulate-Anything: Automating Real-World Robots using Vision-Language Models
- 2026GTA-2: A Multi-VLM Framework for Synthesizing Robot Manipulation Skills via Grounded Task Axes ↗
- 2026Video2Skill: From Streaming Experience to Reusable Embodied Skills
- 2026ManipulationNet: An Infrastructure for Benchmarking Real-World Robot Manipulation with Physical Skill Challenges and Embodied Multimodal Reasoning
- 2026IMBench: A Benchmark for Intuitive Robotic Manipulation
- 2025RobotSmith: Generative Robotic Tool Design for Acquisition of Complex Manipulation Skills
- 2026Uni-Skill: Building Self-Evolving Skill Repository for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation