A key requirement for generalist robots is compositional generalization - the ability to combine atomic skills to solve complex, long-horizon tasks. While prior work has primarily focused on synthesizing a planner that sequences pre-learned skills, robust execution of the individual skills themselves remains challenging, as visuomotor policies often fail under distribution shifts induced by scene composition. To address this, we introduce a scene graph-based representation that focuses on task-relevant objects and relations, thereby mitigating sensitivity to irrelevant variation. Building on this idea, we develop a scene-graph skill learning framework that integrates graph neural networks with diffusion-based imitation learning, and further combine "focused" scene-graph skills with a vision-language model (VLM) based task planner. Experiments in both simulation and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate substantially higher success rates than state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting improved robustness and compositional generalization in long-horizon tasks.
@article{arxiv.2509.16053,
title = {Compose by Focus: Scene Graph-based Atomic Skills},
author = {Han Qi and Changhe Chen and Heng Yang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.16053},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Acceptance to ICRA 2026. Website: https://computationalrobotics.seas.harvard.edu/SkillComposition/