EMPIRE: Explicit Manipulation Planning as a Learnable Intermediate Representation for Egocentric Hand-Motion Forecasting

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22449v1
• Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2026 14:58:31 GMT
• Title: EMPIRE: Explicit Manipulation Planning as a Learnable Intermediate Representation for Egocentric Hand-Motion Forecasting
• Abstract summary: We propose a two-stage framework that introduces Explicit Manipulation Planning as an Intermediate Representation for Egocentric hand-motion forecasting.<n>A motion generator synthesizes future bimanual hand motions conditioned on frozen planner representations.<n>Our method achieves state-of-the-art forecasting accuracy, with an MPJPE of 84.53 mm and a finger-relative error of 38.97mm.
• Score: 75.76075128622837
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Forecasting dexterous hand motions from egocentric observations is fundamental to intelligent interactive systems. Existing VLM-based methods typically map observations directly to future motions, overlooking the underlying manipulation process that governs hand-object interactions. Moreover, end-to-end optimization couples manipulation learning with motion synthesis, causing motion-generation gradients to interfere with the pre-learned manipulation-aware representations. To overcome these limitations, we propose EMPIRE, a two-stage framework that introduces Explicit Manipulation Planning as an Intermediate Representation for Egocentric hand-motion forecasting. Stage I: Learn to Plan. EMPIRE first learns explicit manipulation plans from multimodal context to capture the progression of hand-object interactions. Stage II: Learn to Act. A motion generator synthesizes future bimanual hand motions conditioned on frozen planner representations, preventing motion-generation gradients from affecting manipulation planning. To support our method, we further construct EMPIRE-651K, a bimanual hand-motion forecasting dataset comprising 650,910 training windows across 111 tasks, each paired with an explicit per-hand manipulation plan. Under identical training and evaluation protocols, EMPIRE achieves state-of-the-art forecasting accuracy, with an MPJPE of 84.53 mm and a finger-relative error of 38.97mm. We release the code and dataset at https://github.com/wangwen-banban/EMPIRE.

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