H-GAR: A Hierarchical Interaction Framework via Goal-Driven Observation-Action Refinement for Robotic Manipulation

Read full text
Authors: Association for Artificial Intelligence 2026, Jie He, Jizhihui Liu, Ziyang Liu, Rui Shao, Jiuru Wang, Zitong Yu, Yijie Zhu
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Unified video and action prediction models hold great potential for robotic manipulation, as future observations offer contextual cues for planning, while actions reveal how interactions shape the environment. However, most existing approaches treat observation and action generation in a monolithic and goal-agnostic manner, often leading to semantically misaligned predictions and incoherent behaviors. To this end, we propose H-GAR, a Hierarchical interaction framework via Goal-driven observation-Action Refinement. To anchor prediction to the task objective, H-GAR first produces a goal observation and a coarse action sketch that outline a high-level route toward the goal. To enable explicit interaction between observation and action under the guidance of the goal observation for more coherent decision-making, we devise two synergistic modules. (1) Goal-Conditioned Observation Synthesizer (GOS) synthesizes intermediate observations based on the coarse-grained actions and the predicted goal observation. (2) Interaction-Aware Action Refiner (IAAR) refines coarse actions into fine-grained, goal-consistent actions by leveraging feedback from the intermediate observations and a Historical Action Memory Bank that encodes prior actions to ensure temporal consistency. By integrating goal grounding with explicit action-observation interaction in a coarse-to-fine manner, H-GAR enables more accurate manipulation. Extensive experiments on both simulation and real-world robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that H-GAR achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Robot Manipulation and Learning Reinforcement Learning in Robotics AI-based Problem Solving and Planning

Publication details

Journal / source
Underline Science Inc.
Publication date
7 January 2026
Language
EN