Humanoid Agent via Embodied Chain-of-Action Reasoning with
Multimodal Foundation Models for Zero-Shot Loco-Manipulation

1Anonymous,

Video

Abstract

Humanoid loco-manipulation, which integrates whole-body locomotion with dexterous manipulation, remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. Beyond whole-body coordination and balance, a central difficulty lies in understanding human instructions and translating them into coherent sequences of embodied actions. Recent advances in foundation models provide transferable multimodal representations and reasoning capabilities, yet existing efforts remain largely restricted to either locomotion or manipulation in isolation, with limited applicability to humanoid settings. In this paper, we propose Humanoid-COA, the first humanoid agent framework that integrates foundation model reasoning with an Embodied Chain-of-Action (CoA) mechanism for zero-shot loco-manipulation. Built upon the perception–reasoning–action paradigm, CoA Reasoning decomposes high-level human instructions into structured sequences of locomotion and manipulation primitives through affordance analysis, spatial inference, and whole-body action reasoning. Extensive experiments on two humanoid robots, Unitree H1-2 and G1, in both an open test area and an apartment environment, demonstrate that our framework substantially outperforms prior baselines across manipulation, locomotion, and loco-manipulation tasks, achieving robust generalization to long-horizon and unstructured scenarios.

Methodology

Pipeline Figure

Performance Metrics

Manipulation Results Table Locomotion Table Loco-Manipulation Table Action Table

References used in performance metrics

[14] J. Wang, A. Laurenzi, and N. Tsagarakis, "Autonomous Behavior Planning For Humanoid Loco-manipulation Through Grounded Language Model," in 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024, pp. 10855-10862.

[25] M. Murooka, I. Kumagai, M. Morisawa, F. Kanehiro, and A. Kheddar, "Humanoid loco-manipulation planning based on graph search and reachability maps," IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 1840–1847, 2021.

[26] W. Huang, P. Abbeel, D. Pathak, and I. Mordatch, "Language models as zero-shot planners: Extracting actionable knowledge for embodied agents," in International conference on machine learning, pp. 9118–9147, PMLR, 2022.

BibTeX

@article{onsubmission,
  author    = {},
  title     = {Humanoid Agent via Embodied Chain-of-Action Reasoning with Multimodal Foundation Models for Zero-Shot Loco-Manipulation},
  journal   = {},
  year      = {2025},
}