EMPIRE: Explicit Manipulation Planning as a Learnable Intermediate Representation for Egocentric Hand-Motion Forecasting

Forecasting dexterous hand motions from egocentric observations is fundamental to intelligent interactive systems. Existing VLM-based methods typically map observations directly to future motions, overlooking the underlying manipulation process that governs hand-object interactions. Moreover, end-to-end optimization couples manipulation learning with motion synthesis, causing motion-generation gradients to interfere with the pre-learned manipulation-aware representations. To overcome these limitations, we propose EMPIRE, a two-stage framework that introduces Explicit Manipulation Planning as an Intermediate Representation for Egocentric hand-motion forecasting. Stage I: Learn to Plan. EMPIRE first learns explicit manipulation plans from multimodal context to capture the progression of hand-object interactions. Stage II: Learn to Act. A motion generator synthesizes future bimanual hand motions conditioned on frozen planner representations, preventing motion-generation gradients from affecting manipulation planning. To support our method, we further construct EMPIRE-651K, a bimanual hand-motion forecasting dataset comprising 650,910 training windows across 111 tasks, each paired with an explicit per-hand manipulation plan. Under identical training and evaluation protocols, EMPIRE achieves state-of-the-art forecasting accuracy, with an MPJPE of 84.53 mm and a finger-relative error of 38.97mm. We release the code and dataset at https://github.com/wangwen-banban/EMPIRE.

Affordance-Based Manipulation Planning with Text Goals and Sim-to-Real Generalisation via Real-to-Sim Image Conversion

We present a manipulation planning system based on affordance recognition and action effect prediction. The system reasons through possible futures in visual form, and evaluates candidate plans by agreement of predicted outcomes with text-based goals set at run-time, using a multi-modal goal-matching module. Positions of objects named in the goal text are tracked through predictions even when occluded, making it possible to generate action plans even when objects become occluded, or when their initial descriptors cease to identify them in future states. We further expand the system with an image conversion module for translating real-world state images with objects of varied shapes and visual appearances into a consistent visual appearance, to facilitate manipulation planning in a physical robot setup. We evaluate performance of the system's modules in isolation and demonstrate the integrated system's manipulation planning capabilities on a set of challenging tasks in both simulation and on hardware.

Physics-Informed Eikonal Caging for Whole-Arm Manipulation Planning

Planning contact-rich whole-arm manipulation is challenging because interactions that involve extended robot geometry give rise to complex contact dynamics that are difficult to model accurately. This creates a need for planning principles that do not rely heavily on precise contact models. Caging offers one such geometric notion of robustness to modeling inaccuracy by restricting object escape through geometrically enclosing the object. However, existing caging formulations are difficult to incorporate into continuous optimization-based manipulation planning. We reformulate caging as a minimum-time escape problem in which the object seeks to leave an enclosing robot geometry in the shortest time. This yields a continuous escape-time field that measures the robot's enclosure quality and we show it satisfies an eikonal equation. We therefore can approximate this field using a physics-informed neural network, producing a smooth differentiable representation that can be embedded directly into manipulation planning. The resulting objective supports whole-arm manipulation planning to favor robot configurations resisting object escape. This improves the manipulation robustness to contact model mismatch, thus enabling planning with simplified contact models, including quasi-dynamic approximations and simplified object geometry. Across simulation and real-world experiments, we show improved robustness to disturbances and contact-model mismatch relative to baselines. These results suggest that geometric enclosure can serve as a practical robustness primitive for whole-arm manipulation. A supplementary video, which includes an intuitive overview of our method and experiment video results, is available on our project webpage.