Title: From Code to Action: Hierarchical Learning of Diffusion-VLM Policies
Primary area: applications to robotics, autonomy, planning
Keywords: Hierarchical Imitation Learning, Vision-Language Models, Diffusion Policies, Code Generation, Robotic Manipulation, Memory-Augmented Policies

Abstract: Imitation learning for robotic manipulation often suffers from limited generalization and data scarcity, especially in complex, long-horizon tasks. In this work, we introduce a hierarchical framework that leverages code-generating vision-language models (VLMs) in combination with low-level diffusion policies to effectively imitate and generalize robotic behavior. Our key insight is to treat open-source robotic APIs not only as execution interfaces but also as sources of structured supervision: the associated subtask functions - when exposed - can serve as modular, semantically meaningful labels. We train a VLM to decompose task descriptions into executable subroutines, which are then grounded through a diffusion policy trained to imitate the corresponding robot behavior. To handle the non-Markovian nature of both code execution and certain real-world tasks, such as object swapping, our architecture incorporates a memory mechanism that maintains subtask context across time. We find that this design enables interpretable policy decomposition, improves generalization when compared to flat policies and enables separate evaluation of high-level planning and low-level control.