Look Before You Move: Agent-Interface-Aligned Supervision for Open-World Mobile Manipulation

Abstract:Open-world mobile manipulation requires a robot to find an object, approach it, and move it to a target receptacle from a language instruction. Training vision-language model (VLM) agents for these tasks requires demonstrations of both action selection and active vision. Existing pipelines often convert planned trajectories into high-level action labels, but shortest-path progress provides limited supervision for deciding where to look. We introduce Agent-Interface Data Alignment (AIDA), a data collection pipeline in which a teacher directly selects and executes actions through the deployed agent's skill interface. For mobile manipulation, we design teachers that maintain target visibility, recover lost targets, and approach for picking or placing. We add template-based spatial reasoning supervision and use a shared harness to organize observations, history, and outputs during training and inference. The resulting agent, AIDA-OWMM, achieves 71.76% full-task success on 170 held-out OWMM episodes. Teacher sensitivity analysis shows that active-vision demonstrations improve student success. The simulation-trained agent achieves 38% end-to-end success on a real mobile robot without additional training. Applying AIDA to a navigation subset of EmbodiedBench further demonstrates the pipeline's utility for navigation tasks.

Accepted at CoRL 2026. Project website: this https URL

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.15572 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.15572v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.15572 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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