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    "story_id": "mp-2026-09-16-014",
    "source_story_id": "tmp-story-maniskillformer-geometric-contracts",
    "edition_id": "mp-2026-09-16-morning-0069",
    "edition_url": "https://themachinepress.com/edition/2026-09-16",
    "position": 14,
    "story_type": "dispatch",
    "section": "robotics",
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    "headline": "The Manipulation Skill Declared Its Geometry First",
    "slug": "the-manipulation-skill-declared-its-geometry-first",
    "dek": "Without new demonstrations, geometric contracts reached 88.24% pick-and-place and 75.00% average functional-task success.",
    "summary": "Without new demonstrations, geometric contracts reached 88.24% pick-and-place and 75.00% average functional-task success.",
    "body_text": "ManiSkillFormer replaces an end-to-end visuomotor policy with task-conditioned geometric contracts. Each skill declares the object keypoints, surface normals and other primitives perception must find; language-model agents generate contracts and motion templates inside human-defined skill structures. On a dual-arm robot, the authors report 88.24% zero-shot pick-and-place across eight object categories and 30 instances, 75.00% average success on unscrewing, pouring, pressing and folding, and 50% to 80% completion on three long-horizon tasks. The results are confined to the reported platform and skill library.",
    "why_it_matters": "Without new demonstrations, geometric contracts reached 88.24% pick-and-place and 75.00% average functional-task success.",
    "limitations": [],
    "importance": 9,
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    "first_published_at": "2026-09-16T09:00:00.000-04:00",
    "modified_at": "2026-09-16T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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    "tags": [
      "robot manipulation",
      "geometric reasoning",
      "zero-shot skills"
    ],
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    "corrections": []
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  "sources": [
    {
      "source_id": "source-2026-09-16-014",
      "title": "arXiv preprint 2609.16331",
      "publisher": "arXiv",
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      "published_at": "2026-09-14T20:00:00.000-04:00",
      "accessed_at": "2026-09-16T08:18:00.000-04:00",
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  "publisher": {
    "name": "The Machine Press",
    "url": "https://themachinepress.com",
    "description": "A daily newspaper for the age of artificial intelligence."
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  "cite_this_report": {
    "title": "The Manipulation Skill Declared Its Geometry First",
    "publisher": "The Machine Press",
    "published_at": "2026-09-16T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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