Flow policies can represent multimodal action distributions for robot manipulation, yet a robot must execute one action at each control step. When several proposals are sampled, critic-based ranking makes data collection depend on value estimates over candidate actions that may be weakly represented in replay. We introduce HCPG-Flow, an analytic rollout-time selector that augments SAC-Flow with hierarchical, object-centric contact-progress guidance while preserving its actor and critic objectives. HCPG switches from end-effector approach to task progress after contact, scores each proposal by the first-order reduction of a task-relevant distance, standardizes scores within the candidate set, and executes a temperature-controlled action embedding. Across ten simulated tasks, HCPG improves mean success over SAC-Flow on both benchmarks, including a 9.5 percentage-point gain on Maniskill. Four physical tasks further show high success with a 17.4% reduction in successful completion steps.Project page: https://hitxraz.github.io/HCPG-Flow/
Imitation learning has enabled remarkable progress in robotic manipulation, especially with diffusion and flow-based policies that generate complex visuomotor behaviors directly from demonstrations. Yet, despite their strong performance, these policies often fail to generalize ac…
Generalist robot manipulation policies have advanced rapidly, yet existing benchmarks remain limited in systematically evaluating their capabilities. Many rely on simple, short-horizon, or skill-narrow tasks with limited capability coverage, and are often conducted only in simula…
Learning-based manipulation policies usually predict robot actions from sensory observations and leave their execution to a separate low-level controller. In rigid contact, this separation can be problematic: the same motion to a virtual target or compliant motion command can lea…
Contact-rich robot manipulation requires physical interaction cues that are often invisible to cameras, making tactile sensing essential for robust control. However, scaling visuo-tactile robot learning remains difficult because real tactile interaction data are expensive to coll…
Tactile-enhanced vision-language-action (VLA) policies have been introduced for contact-rich manipulation, where critical interaction states are often hidden from vision. Future tactile prediction is a promising way to use touch because it turns tactile outcomes into supervision…
Real-world evaluation is the gold standard for robot policies because it tests them against the physical conditions and deployment challenges they are ultimately designed to handle. However, real-world evaluation is also the bottleneck for iterating on robot policies: it is costl…