arXiv:2603.25903v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling robot learning to long-horizon tasks remains a formidable challenge. While end-to-end policies often lack the structural priors needed for effective long-term reasoning, traditional neuro-symbolic methods rely heavily on hand-crafted symbolic priors. We introduce ENAP (Emergent Neural Automaton Policy), a neuro-symbolic imitation learning framework in which a bi-level policy adaptively emerges from visuomotor demonstrations. Specifically, we employ adaptive clustering and an extension of the L* algorithm to learn the task structure from demonstrations as a Mealy state machine, which serves as an interpretable high-level planner capturing latent task modes. This discrete structure then guides a low-level reactive residual network to learn precise continuous control via behavior cloning (BC). By explicitly modeling discrete transitions and continuous residuals, ENAP achieves sample efficiency and interpretability without task-specific labels. Experiments on complex manipulation and long-horizon tasks show that ENAP outperforms state-of-the-art end-to-end vision-language-action (VLA) policies by up to 27% in low-data regimes. ENAP can also distill task structure from the latent space of a pre-trained VLA, surpassing it on CALVIN benchmark with 39% fewer parameters (Fig. 1).