SP-HLM: Sparse-Pose-Driven Motion Generation and Whole-Body Control for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

Abstract

Humanoid loco-manipulation requires an effective interface between high-level task policies and whole-body control. Existing interfaces typically rely on a single action representation for both task intent and whole-body coordination. This may burden the high-level policy or leave one aspect underspecified. We present SP-HLM, a framework built on a sparse-pose-driven interface. The interface combines five task-critical body poses with a learned latent motion prior to represent spatial intent and whole-body coordination in complementary forms. SP-VLA, a vision-language-action model, first predicts task-relevant sparse poses and finger joint positions from multimodal observations and language instructions using asynchronous action-chunk inference. Given these sparse targets, SP-MGM, a motion generation model trained through two-stage distillation, reconstructs coordinated full-body motion in real time. A pretrained motion encoder maps this motion to a compact latent representation. SP-GMT, a general motion tracker, then integrates the explicit sparse targets with this implicit motion prior for whole-body control. Experiments in simulation and on a real humanoid robot demonstrate improved motion tracking, whole-body coordination, and loco-manipulation success over existing approaches. Additional results and videos are available on our \href{https://sp-hlm.github.io/}{\textcolor{blue}{project page}}.