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arXiv · 2609.29091

From Passive Execution to Active Exploration: Agentic Embodied Manipulation in Realistic Environments

Shilin Ma·Chubin Zhang·Xulong Bai·Zifeng Gao·Shiyi Zhang·Yansong Tang
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Abstract

Recent advances in agentic systems have substantially enhanced the long-horizon capability of embodied manipulation. However, many existing frameworks still follow a passive execution paradigm, which limits their applicability to real-world scenarios involving textual semantic cues, distractors, and initially invisible targets. To bridge this gap, we propose an agent-based active exploration framework that enables robots to dynamically interact with the environment rather than merely execute predefined instructions. Specifically, our framework consists of three collaborative modules: a planning module for high-level task reasoning, a perception module for visual scene understanding, and an execution module for low-level manipulation. This design allows the robot to actively acquire task-relevant information, adapt its behavior based on environmental feedback, and complete manipulation tasks under partial observability. Furthermore, we introduce a fine-grained perception-execution interleaving strategy, which tightly couples visual feedback with skill execution to improve exploration robustness. We evaluate our method on a realistic Find-and-Place task, demonstrating its effectiveness in challenging environments where target objects must be actively discovered before manipulation.

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Shilin Ma, Chubin Zhang, Xulong Bai, Zifeng Gao, Shiyi Zhang, Yansong Tang. 2026-09-24. From Passive Execution to Active Exploration: Agentic Embodied Manipulation in Realistic Environments. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29091

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