English

Bi-HIL: Bilateral Control-Based Multimodal Hierarchical Imitation Learning via Subtask-Level Progress Rate and Keyframe Memory for Long-Horizon Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

Robotics 2026-03-27 v2

Abstract

Long-horizon contact-rich robotic manipulation remains challenging due to partial observability and unstable subtask transitions under contact uncertainty. While hierarchical architectures improve temporal reasoning and bilateral imitation learning enables force-aware control, existing approaches often rely on flat policies that struggle with long-horizon coordination. We propose Bi-HIL, a bilateral control-based multimodal hierarchical imitation learning framework for long-horizon manipulation. Bi-HIL stabilizes hierarchical coordination by integrating keyframe memory with subtask-level progress rate that models phase progression within the active subtask and conditions both high- and low-level policies. We evaluate Bi-HIL on unimanual and bimanual real-robot tasks, demonstrating consistent improvements over flat and ablated variants. The results highlight the importance of explicitly modeling subtask progression together with force-aware control for robust long-horizon manipulation. For additional material, please check: https://mertcookimg.github.io/bi-hil

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.13315,
  title  = {Bi-HIL: Bilateral Control-Based Multimodal Hierarchical Imitation Learning via Subtask-Level Progress Rate and Keyframe Memory for Long-Horizon Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation},
  author = {Thanpimon Buamanee and Masato Kobayashi and Yuki Uranishi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.13315},
  year   = {2026}
}