Bimanual Robot Manipulation via Multi-Agent In-Context Learning
Alessio Palma, Indro Spinelli, Vignesh Prasad, Luca Scofano, Yufeng Jin + 2 more
TLDR
BiCICLe introduces a multi-agent in-context learning framework, allowing standard LLMs to perform few-shot bimanual robot manipulation.
Key contributions
- Presents BiCICLe, the first framework for few-shot bimanual robot manipulation using standard LLMs.
- Decouples bimanual control into sequential, conditioned single-arm predictions via a leader-follower model.
- Incorporates "Arms' Debate" and an LLM-as-Judge for iterative trajectory refinement.
- Achieves 71.1% success on TWIN benchmark, outperforming training-free baselines and supervised methods.
Why it matters
This paper addresses the challenge of applying in-context learning to complex bimanual robot tasks, which typically overwhelm LLM context windows. By introducing a novel multi-agent approach, BiCICLe allows off-the-shelf LLMs to achieve high success rates in few-shot bimanual manipulation without fine-tuning, pushing the boundaries of LLM capabilities in embodied AI.
Original Abstract
Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful reasoning engines for embodied control. In particular, In-Context Learning (ICL) enables off-the-shelf, text-only LLMs to predict robot actions without any task-specific training while preserving their generalization capabilities. Applying ICL to bimanual manipulation remains challenging, as the high-dimensional joint action space and tight inter-arm coordination constraints rapidly overwhelm standard context windows. To address this, we introduce BiCICLe (Bimanual Coordinated In-Context Learning), the first framework that enables standard LLMs to perform few-shot bimanual manipulation without fine-tuning. BiCICLe frames bimanual control as a multi-agent leader-follower problem, decoupling the action space into sequential, conditioned single-arm predictions. This naturally extends to Arms' Debate, an iterative refinement process, and to the introduction of a third LLM-as-Judge to evaluate and select the most plausible coordinated trajectories. Evaluated on 13 tasks from the TWIN benchmark, BiCICLe achieves up to 71.1% average success rate, outperforming the best training-free baseline by 6.7 percentage points and surpassing most supervised methods. We further demonstrate strong few-shot generalization on novel tasks.
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