HEX: Humanoid-Aligned Experts for Cross-Embodiment Whole-Body Manipulation

arXiv cs.RO / 4/10/2026

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Key Points

  • HEX introduces a state-centric framework for stable whole-body manipulation on full-sized bipedal humanoid robots, addressing the instability that arises when VLA models treat body parts independently.
  • The approach uses a humanoid-aligned universal state representation to enable scalable learning across heterogeneous robot embodiments and incorporates a Mixture-of-Experts proprioceptive predictor for coordinated motion modeling.
  • HEX leverages lightweight history tokens to retain temporal visual context efficiently, reducing the need to repeatedly encode past images during inference.
  • A residual-gated fusion mechanism combined with a flow-matching action head integrates visual-language cues with proprioceptive dynamics to generate actions.
  • Real-world humanoid manipulation experiments report state-of-the-art task success and improved generalization, especially for fast-reaction and long-horizon tasks.

Abstract

Humans achieve complex manipulation through coordinated whole-body control, whereas most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models treat robot body parts largely independently, making high-DoF humanoid control challenging and often unstable. We present HEX, a state-centric framework for coordinated manipulation on full-sized bipedal humanoid robots. HEX introduces a humanoid-aligned universal state representation for scalable learning across heterogeneous embodiments, and incorporates a Mixture-of-Experts Unified Proprioceptive Predictor to model whole-body coordination and temporal motion dynamics from large-scale multi-embodiment trajectory data. To efficiently capture temporal visual context, HEX uses lightweight history tokens to summarize past observations, avoiding repeated encoding of historical images during inference. It further employs a residual-gated fusion mechanism with a flow-matching action head to adaptively integrate visual-language cues with proprioceptive dynamics for action generation. Experiments on real-world humanoid manipulation tasks show that HEX achieves state-of-the-art performance in task success rate and generalization, particularly in fast-reaction and long-horizon scenarios.