The Price Is Not Right: Neuro-Symbolic Methods Outperform VLAs on Structured Long-Horizon Manipulation Tasks with Significantly Lower Energy Consumption

Timothy Duggan and Pierrick Lorang and Hong Lu and Matthias Scheutz

Head-to-head comparison of fine-tuned Vision-Language-Action models and a neuro-symbolic architecture on structured long-horizon manipulation, showing substantially higher success and dramatically lower energy consumption for the neuro-symbolic approach.

@inproceedings{dugganetal26icra,
  title={The Price Is Not Right: Neuro-Symbolic Methods Outperform VLAs on Structured Long-Horizon Manipulation Tasks with Significantly Lower Energy Consumption},
  author={Timothy Duggan and Pierrick Lorang and Hong Lu and Matthias Scheutz},
  year={2026},
  booktitle={IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  url={https://hrilab.tufts.edu/publications/dugganetal26icra.pdf}
}