HiVLA: A Visual-Grounded-Centric Hierarchical Embodied Manipulation System

Tianshuo Yang; Guanyu Chen; Yutian Chen; Zhixuan Liang; Yitian Liu; Zanxin Chen; Chunpu Xu; Haotian Liang; Jiangmiao Pang; Yao Mu; Ping Luo

arXiv · 2604.14125

HiVLA: A Visual-Grounded-Centric Hierarchical Embodied Manipulation System

Tianshuo Yang·Guanyu Chen·Yutian Chen·Zhixuan Liang·Yitian Liu·Zanxin Chen·Chunpu Xu·Haotian Liang·Jiangmiao Pang·Yao Mu·Ping Luo

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Abstract

While end-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, fine-tuning them on narrow control data often compromises the profound reasoning capabilities inherited from their base Vision-Language Models (VLMs). To resolve this fundamental trade-off, we propose HiVLA, a visual-grounded-centric hierarchical framework that explicitly decouples high-level semantic planning from low-level motor control. In high-level part, a VLM planner first performs task decomposition and visual grounding to generate structured plans, comprising a subtask instruction and a precise target bounding box. Then, to translate this plan into physical actions, we introduce a flow-matching Diffusion Transformer (DiT) action expert in low-level part equipped with a novel cascaded cross-attention mechanism. This design sequentially fuses global context, high-resolution object-centric crops and skill semantics, enabling the DiT to focus purely on robust execution. Our decoupled architecture preserves the VLM's zero-shot reasoning while allowing independent improvement of both components. Extensive experiments in simulation and the real world demonstrate that HiVLA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art end-to-end baselines, particularly excelling in long-horizon skill composition and the fine-grained manipulation of small objects in cluttered scenes.

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Tianshuo Yang, Guanyu Chen, Yutian Chen, Zhixuan Liang, Yitian Liu, Zanxin Chen, Chunpu Xu, Haotian Liang, Jiangmiao Pang, Yao Mu, Ping Luo. 2026-04-15. HiVLA: A Visual-Grounded-Centric Hierarchical Embodied Manipulation System. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14125

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