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Aug 10

VAG: Dual-Stream Video-Action Generation for Embodied Data Synthesis

Recent advances in robot foundation models trained on large-scale human teleoperation data have enabled robots to perform increasingly complex real-world tasks. However, scaling these systems remains difficult because collecting task-specific demonstrations is expensive and labor-intensive. Synthetic data, especially generated videos, offer a promising direction, but existing World Models (WMs) are not directly suitable for policy learning since they do not provide paired action trajectories. World-Action (WA) models partially address this by predicting actions with visual outputs, yet often lack strong video-action alignment, while two-stage pipelines that generate video first and then infer actions introduce inefficiency and error accumulation. To address these limitations, we propose VAG, a unified flow-matching-based dual-stream framework that jointly generates video and action under visual and language conditioning. By synchronizing denoising in both branches and using an adaptive 3D pooling mechanism to transfer compact global video context to the action branch, VAG improves cross-modal consistency during generation. Across both simulated and real-world settings, VAG produces aligned video-action pairs with competitive prediction quality, supports executable trajectory replay, and provides useful synthetic pretraining data that improves downstream policy generalization, indicating its potential as a practical world-action model for embodied data synthesis.

  • 13 authors
·
Apr 9

MIND-V: Hierarchical Video Generation for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation with RL-based Physical Alignment

Embodied imitation learning is constrained by the scarcity of diverse, long-horizon robotic manipulation data. Existing video generation models for this domain are limited to synthesizing short clips of simple actions and often rely on manually defined trajectories. To this end, we introduce MIND-V, a hierarchical framework designed to synthesize physically plausible and logically coherent videos of long-horizon robotic manipulation. Inspired by cognitive science, MIND-V bridges high-level reasoning with pixel-level synthesis through three core components: a Semantic Reasoning Hub (SRH) that leverages a pre-trained vision-language model for task planning; a Behavioral Semantic Bridge (BSB) that translates abstract instructions into domain-invariant representations; and a Motor Video Generator (MVG) for conditional video rendering. MIND-V employs Staged Visual Future Rollouts, a test-time optimization strategy to enhance long-horizon robustness. To align the generated videos with physical laws, we introduce a GRPO reinforcement learning post-training phase guided by a novel Physical Foresight Coherence (PFC) reward. PFC leverages the V-JEPA world model to enforce physical plausibility by aligning the predicted and actual dynamic evolutions in the feature space. MIND-V demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in long-horizon robotic manipulation video generation, establishing a scalable and controllable paradigm for embodied data synthesis.

Tsinghua Tsinghua University
·
Dec 6, 2025 2

Scaling Spatial Reasoning in MLLMs through Programmatic Data Synthesis

Embodied intelligence, a grand challenge in artificial intelligence, is fundamentally constrained by the limited spatial understanding and reasoning capabilities of current models. Prevailing efforts to address this through enhancing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are trapped in a dilemma: template-based datasets are scalable but structurally rigid, while manual annotation is linguistically diverse but unscalable and, critically, computationally imprecise. We introduce SPRITE, a novel framework that overcomes this dilemma by leveraging simulators and large models to programmatically synthesize scalable, diverse, and high-quality spatial reasoning data. The core innovation of SPRITE is to reframe ground-truth generation as a code-generation task. We utilize LLMs to compile complex spatial questions into executable programs, which are then verified against high-precision scene meta-information extracted from simulators. This ensures our ground truth is both computationally precise and verifiable, while the generative power of LLMs provides vast linguistic diversity. Leveraging this pipeline, we have curated a dataset encompassing 3 simulators, 11k+ scenes, and 300k+ image/video instruction-tuning pairs. We demonstrate that a VLM trained on our data achieves significant performance gains on multiple spatial benchmarks and outperforms other open-source datasets of equivalent size. Furthermore, a scalability analysis confirms our hypothesis that overcoming the low-diversity nature of traditional template methods is essential for building robust, generalizable spatial intelligence. We will make the SPRITE framework code and the full 300k+ dataset publicly available to facilitate future research in spatial intelligence.

  • 12 authors
·
Dec 18, 2025

LLM-driven Indoor Scene Layout Generation via Scaled Human-aligned Data Synthesis and Multi-Stage Preference Optimization

Automatic indoor layout generation has attracted increasing attention due to its potential in interior design, virtual environment construction, and embodied AI. Existing methods fall into two categories: prompt-driven approaches that leverage proprietary LLM services (e.g., GPT APIs) and learning-based methods trained on layout data upon diffusion-based models. Prompt-driven methods often suffer from spatial inconsistency and high computational costs, while learning-based methods are typically constrained by coarse relational graphs and limited datasets, restricting their generalization to diverse room categories. In this paper, we revisit LLM-based indoor layout generation and present 3D-SynthPlace, a large-scale dataset that combines synthetic layouts generated via a 'GPT synthesize, Human inspect' pipeline, upgraded from the 3D-Front dataset. 3D-SynthPlace contains nearly 17,000 scenes, covering four common room types -- bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom -- enriched with diverse objects and high-level spatial annotations. We further introduce OptiScene, a strong open-source LLM optimized for indoor layout generation, fine-tuned based on our 3D-SynthPlace dataset through our two-stage training. For the warum-up stage I, we adopt supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which is taught to first generate high-level spatial descriptions then conditionally predict concrete object placements. For the reinforcing stage II, to better align the generated layouts with human design preferences, we apply multi-turn direct preference optimization (DPO), which significantly improving layout quality and generation success rates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OptiScene outperforms traditional prompt-driven and learning-based baselines. Moreover, OptiScene shows promising potential in interactive tasks such as scene editing and robot navigation.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 9, 2025

GigaWorld-0: World Models as Data Engine to Empower Embodied AI

World models are emerging as a foundational paradigm for scalable, data-efficient embodied AI. In this work, we present GigaWorld-0, a unified world model framework designed explicitly as a data engine for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) learning. GigaWorld-0 integrates two synergistic components: GigaWorld-0-Video, which leverages large-scale video generation to produce diverse, texture-rich, and temporally coherent embodied sequences under fine-grained control of appearance, camera viewpoint, and action semantics; and GigaWorld-0-3D, which combines 3D generative modeling, 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstruction, physically differentiable system identification, and executable motion planning to ensure geometric consistency and physical realism. Their joint optimization enables the scalable synthesis of embodied interaction data that is visually compelling, spatially coherent, physically plausible, and instruction-aligned. Training at scale is made feasible through our efficient GigaTrain framework, which exploits FP8-precision and sparse attention to drastically reduce memory and compute requirements. We conduct comprehensive evaluations showing that GigaWorld-0 generates high-quality, diverse, and controllable data across multiple dimensions. Critically, VLA model (e.g., GigaBrain-0) trained on GigaWorld-0-generated data achieve strong real-world performance, significantly improving generalization and task success on physical robots without any real-world interaction during training.

  • 25 authors
·
Nov 24, 2025 6

Xiaomi-Robotics-U0: Unified Embodied Synthesis with World Foundation Model

Recent foundation image and video generation models offer strong generalization and controllability, but their direct application to embodied scenarios is limited by requirements for multi-view consistency, geometric coherence, and robot embodiment constraints. Existing methods typically adapt foundation models with limited robot data, often sacrificing visual knowledge acquired during large-scale pre-training. We present Xiaomi-Robotics-U0, a 38-billion-parameter multimodal autoregressive model for unified embodied synthesis. It treats embodied generation as an extension of foundation image and video generation and jointly optimizes text-to-image generation, image editing, embodied scene generation, embodied transfer, and embodied video generation. This unified framework preserves the generalization of the pre-trained world foundation model while adapting it to embodied settings. Xiaomi-Robotics-U0 is the first model to support high-quality multi-view scene generation across multiple robot embodiments and to introduce structured, controllable embodied transfer for fine-grained editing while preserving multi-view consistency and interaction dynamics. It achieves state-of-the-art results on single-step and sequential generation tasks, outperforming GPT-Image-2.0 in human evaluations of embodied scene generation and transfer, ranking first on World Arena for embodied video generation, and improving the out-of-distribution success rate of pi_0.5 from 36.9% to 63.2% on challenging real-world manipulation tasks. These results show that foundation world models can serve both as embodied world models and scalable data engines for embodied intelligence. Code and checkpoints are available at https://robotics.xiaomi.com/xiaomi-robotics-u0.html.

Embody4D: A Generalist Data Engine for Embodied 4D World Modeling

Embodied agents require robust and comprehensive 3D spatiotemporal representations to support spatial reasoning, manipulation understanding, and downstream decision making. However, existing robot data are typically captured from fixed or sparse viewpoints, providing only partial and view-dependent observations, which limits multi-view perception and generalization across viewpoints. Given the difficulty of collecting additional viewpoints in real-world settings, we propose Embody4D, a dedicated video-to-video world model for embodied scenarios to bridge this observation gap by transforming a monocular robot video into novel-view videos from flexible target camera viewpoints. First, to tackle training data scarcity, we introduce a 3D-aware compositional synthesis pipeline to curate a heterogeneous dataset compositing cross-embodiment robotic arms with diverse backgrounds, promoting broad generalization. Second, to enforce geometric stability, we devise a latent confidence-aware expert modulation strategy, which estimates the reliability of warped latent priors and adaptively routes regions to copy, repair, or inpaint experts for spatiotemporally consistent 4D generation. Finally, to enhance the fidelity of the manipulation, we incorporate an interaction-aware attention mechanism that explicitly attends to the robotic interaction regions. Extensive experiments show that Embody4D achieves state-of-the-art performance on visual evaluation benchmarks, while both simulated and real-world robotic experiments further demonstrate its effectiveness as a robust data engine for synthesizing high-fidelity, view-consistent videos that empower downstream robotic planning and learning.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 5

EgoGen: An Egocentric Synthetic Data Generator

Understanding the world in first-person view is fundamental in Augmented Reality (AR). This immersive perspective brings dramatic visual changes and unique challenges compared to third-person views. Synthetic data has empowered third-person-view vision models, but its application to embodied egocentric perception tasks remains largely unexplored. A critical challenge lies in simulating natural human movements and behaviors that effectively steer the embodied cameras to capture a faithful egocentric representation of the 3D world. To address this challenge, we introduce EgoGen, a new synthetic data generator that can produce accurate and rich ground-truth training data for egocentric perception tasks. At the heart of EgoGen is a novel human motion synthesis model that directly leverages egocentric visual inputs of a virtual human to sense the 3D environment. Combined with collision-avoiding motion primitives and a two-stage reinforcement learning approach, our motion synthesis model offers a closed-loop solution where the embodied perception and movement of the virtual human are seamlessly coupled. Compared to previous works, our model eliminates the need for a pre-defined global path, and is directly applicable to dynamic environments. Combined with our easy-to-use and scalable data generation pipeline, we demonstrate EgoGen's efficacy in three tasks: mapping and localization for head-mounted cameras, egocentric camera tracking, and human mesh recovery from egocentric views. EgoGen will be fully open-sourced, offering a practical solution for creating realistic egocentric training data and aiming to serve as a useful tool for egocentric computer vision research. Refer to our project page: https://ego-gen.github.io/.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 16, 2024

ROBOSHACKLES: A Safety Dataset for Human-Injury Prevention in Embodied Foundation Models

Embodied Foundation Models (EFMs) integrate multimodal understanding, future-state reasoning, and executable robot actions. Yet their safety alignment for human-injury prevention remains underexplored, primarily because real-world data of robots harming humans or creating hazardous household situations cannot be safely or ethically collected. To address this challenge, we propose a safety-critical data construction pipeline for human-injury prevention in EFMs.Starting from real DROID observations, our construction pipeline proceeds through scene understanding, hazard-aware image editing, temporal prompt generation, and single-pass rollout synthesis. The temporal prompts specify the expected scene evolution, while Wan2.7 synthesizes realistic robotic rollouts from the edited hazardous states in a single pass. Using this pipeline, we construct ROBOSHACKLES, a 10,000-clip robotic video dataset derived from real DROID observations, spanning two direct-harm and four indirect-harm categories. To ensure dataset quality, we assess task completion and visual quality with automatic metrics, and evaluate six representative EFMs under a refusal-based safety criterion. Results show that all evaluated models produce unsafe actions in the tested safety-critical scenarios, yielding a 100% unsafe action generation rate. ROBOSHACKLES serves as a scalable benchmark and training resource for refusal learning and hazard anticipation before robot action execution.The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/YZW00/RoboShackles.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 16

Data Pyramid for Embodied Manipulation

Multimodal foundation models learned to see and to speak by consuming the whole internet. Embodied agents admit no such shortcut, since they require data that couple observations with physical states and actions. These signals can be provided, to varying degrees, by multiple data sources. In this work, we organize the embodied data ecosystem as a "pyramid" spanning five complementary sources: real-robot data, UMI-style data, egocentric and exocentric data, simulation data, and general vision-language data. We organize the pyramid around the tension between scalability and robot alignment, and further characterize each source in terms of data quality, diversity, reusability, and physical fidelity. We then analyze recent embodied foundation models through the lens of their data recipes, examining how different sources are selected, aligned, and mixed during pretraining. For embodied brain models, vision-language-action models, and world-action models alike, we relate data composition to capabilities in perception, reasoning, planning, action generation, and world prediction. We close by discussing six open challenges: building large-scale tactile datasets, collecting failure and recovery data, developing scalable data-collection pipelines, aligning actions across embodiments, leveraging egocentric data for dexterous manipulation, and designing principled data recipes for robot learning. We hope this work paves the foundation for the design of next-generation embodied systems.

Embodied-R1.5: Evolving Physical Intelligence via Embodied Foundation Models

We introduce Embodied-R1.5, a unified Embodied Foundation Model (EFM) that integrates comprehensive embodied reasoning capabilities, spanning embodied cognition, task planning, correction, and pointing, within a single architecture toward general physical intelligence. Leveraging three automated data construction pipelines to significantly expand the data coverage of critical capabilities, we build a large-scale data system of over 15B tokens, and design a multi-task balanced RL recipe to alleviate heterogeneous task conflicts. We further introduce a Planner-Grounder-Corrector (PGC) closed-loop framework that enables a single model to autonomously execute and self-correct over long-horizon tasks. With only 8B parameters, Embodied-R1.5 achieves SOTA on 16 out of 24 embodied VLM benchmarks, surpassing leading models like Gemini-Robotics-ER-1.5 and GPT-5.4. Benefiting from the internalized embodied capabilities, Embodied-R1.5 can be fine-tuned into a VLA with only a small amount of data, outperforming leading VLA models like π_{0.5} across 4 popular manipulation benchmark suites. We further conduct extensive zero-shot real-robot experiments, validating performance in instruction following, affordance grounding, articulated object manipulation, and long-horizon complex tasks, demonstrating strong generalization to the physical world. We open-source model weights, datasets, training code, and EmbodiedEvalKit, an evaluation framework tailored for embodied tasks, to facilitate future research in EFMs.

  • 23 authors
·
Jun 8 1

InternData-A1: Pioneering High-Fidelity Synthetic Data for Pre-training Generalist Policy

Recent works explore how real and synthetic data contribute to Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models' generalization. While current VLA models have shown the strong effectiveness of large-scale real-robot pre-training, synthetic data has not previously demonstrated comparable capability at scale. This paper provides the first evidence that synthetic data alone can match the performance of the strongest π-dataset in pre-training a VLA model, revealing the substantial value of large-scale simulation. The resulting model also exhibits surprisingly zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on several challenging tasks. Our synthetic dataset, InternData-A1, contains over 630k trajectories and 7,433 hours across 4 embodiments, 18 skills, 70 tasks, and 227 scenes, covering rigid, articulated, deformable, and fluid-object manipulation. It is generated through a highly autonomous, fully decoupled, and compositional simulation pipeline that enables long-horizon skill composition, flexible task assembly, and heterogeneous embodiments with minimal manual tuning. Using the same architecture as π_0, we pre-train a model entirely on InternData-A1 and find that it matches the official π_0 across 49 simulation tasks, 5 real-world tasks, and 4 long-horizon dexterous tasks. We release the dataset and will open-source the generation pipeline to broaden access to large-scale robotic data and to lower the barrier to scalable data creation for embodied AI research.

  • 16 authors
·
Nov 20, 2025

Data Standards for Humanoid Robotics: The Missing Infrastructure for Physical AI

The scalability of humanoid robots will depend not only on models and hardware, but also on whether physical experience can accumulate across robots, tasks, organizations, and time. Drawing on the authors' work in developing ISO/WD 26264-1, Humanoid robot datasets -- Part 1: General requirements, within ISO/TC 299/WG 16, this article argues that data standards are becoming foundational infrastructure for Physical AI. We develop three insights. First, humanoid robot data is embodied interaction data, not a collection of isolated digital samples; a useful dataset must preserve the relationship among robot body, action, task, scene, execution trace, and outcome. Second, its value depends on physical coherence: multimodal streams are reusable only when timing, coordinate frames, calibration, kinematics, units, and synchronization assumptions remain inspectable. Third, the main bottleneck is not only data scarcity, but non-cumulative data caused by high collection costs, data silos, and inconsistent evaluation. We argue that humanoid robot data standards address these bottlenecks by making embodied experience interpretable, shareable, traceable, and reusable. A general standard should provide horizontal infrastructure for lifecycle management, metadata, provenance, quality, versioning, and traceability, while capability-specific parts should define domain grammar for manipulation, locomotion, human-robot interaction, cognition, and future humanoid capabilities. As AI moves from screens into bodies, data standards must evolve from organizing digital information to structuring physical interaction.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 17

Embodied AI: From LLMs to World Models

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an intelligent system paradigm for achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), serving as the cornerstone for various applications and driving the evolution from cyberspace to physical systems. Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) and World Models (WMs) have drawn significant attention for embodied AI. On the one hand, LLMs empower embodied AI via semantic reasoning and task decomposition, bringing high-level natural language instructions and low-level natural language actions into embodied cognition. On the other hand, WMs empower embodied AI by building internal representations and future predictions of the external world, facilitating physical law-compliant embodied interactions. As such, this paper comprehensively explores the literature in embodied AI from basics to advances, covering both LLM driven and WM driven works. In particular, we first present the history, key technologies, key components, and hardware systems of embodied AI, as well as discuss its development via looking from unimodal to multimodal angle. We then scrutinize the two burgeoning fields of embodied AI, i.e., embodied AI with LLMs/multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) and embodied AI with WMs, meticulously delineating their indispensable roles in end-to-end embodied cognition and physical laws-driven embodied interactions. Building upon the above advances, we further share our insights on the necessity of the joint MLLM-WM driven embodied AI architecture, shedding light on its profound significance in enabling complex tasks within physical worlds. In addition, we examine representative applications of embodied AI, demonstrating its wide applicability in real-world scenarios. Last but not least, we point out future research directions of embodied AI that deserve further investigation.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 24, 2025

Vision-Language-Action in Robotics: A Survey of Datasets, Benchmarks, and Data Engines

Despite remarkable progress in Vision--Language--Action (VLA) models, a central bottleneck remains underexamined: the data infrastructure that underlies embodied learning. In this survey, we argue that future advances in VLA will depend less on model architecture and more on the co-design of high-fidelity data engines and structured evaluation protocols. To this end, we present a systematic, data-centric analysis of VLA research organized around three pillars: datasets, benchmarks, and data engines. For datasets, we categorize real-world and synthetic corpora along embodiment diversity, modality composition, and action space formulation, revealing a persistent fidelity-cost trade-off that fundamentally constrains large-scale collection. For benchmarks, we analyze task complexity and environment structure jointly, exposing structural gaps in compositional generalization and long-horizon reasoning evaluation that existing protocols fail to address. For data engines, we examine simulation-based, video-reconstruction, and automated task-generation paradigms, identifying their shared limitations in physical grounding and sim-to-real transfer. Synthesizing these analyses, we distill four open challenges: representation alignment, multimodal supervision, reasoning assessment, and scalable data generation. Addressing them, we argue, requires treating data infrastructure as a first-class research problem rather than a background concern.

  • 10 authors
·
Apr 23

BEHAVIOR Vision Suite: Customizable Dataset Generation via Simulation

The systematic evaluation and understanding of computer vision models under varying conditions require large amounts of data with comprehensive and customized labels, which real-world vision datasets rarely satisfy. While current synthetic data generators offer a promising alternative, particularly for embodied AI tasks, they often fall short for computer vision tasks due to low asset and rendering quality, limited diversity, and unrealistic physical properties. We introduce the BEHAVIOR Vision Suite (BVS), a set of tools and assets to generate fully customized synthetic data for systematic evaluation of computer vision models, based on the newly developed embodied AI benchmark, BEHAVIOR-1K. BVS supports a large number of adjustable parameters at the scene level (e.g., lighting, object placement), the object level (e.g., joint configuration, attributes such as "filled" and "folded"), and the camera level (e.g., field of view, focal length). Researchers can arbitrarily vary these parameters during data generation to perform controlled experiments. We showcase three example application scenarios: systematically evaluating the robustness of models across different continuous axes of domain shift, evaluating scene understanding models on the same set of images, and training and evaluating simulation-to-real transfer for a novel vision task: unary and binary state prediction. Project website: https://behavior-vision-suite.github.io/

  • 23 authors
·
May 15, 2024

Large Model Empowered Embodied AI: A Survey on Decision-Making and Embodied Learning

Embodied AI aims to develop intelligent systems with physical forms capable of perceiving, decision-making, acting, and learning in real-world environments, providing a promising way to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Despite decades of explorations, it remains challenging for embodied agents to achieve human-level intelligence for general-purpose tasks in open dynamic environments. Recent breakthroughs in large models have revolutionized embodied AI by enhancing perception, interaction, planning and learning. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey on large model empowered embodied AI, focusing on autonomous decision-making and embodied learning. We investigate both hierarchical and end-to-end decision-making paradigms, detailing how large models enhance high-level planning, low-level execution, and feedback for hierarchical decision-making, and how large models enhance Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for end-to-end decision making. For embodied learning, we introduce mainstream learning methodologies, elaborating on how large models enhance imitation learning and reinforcement learning in-depth. For the first time, we integrate world models into the survey of embodied AI, presenting their design methods and critical roles in enhancing decision-making and learning. Though solid advances have been achieved, challenges still exist, which are discussed at the end of this survey, potentially as the further research directions.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 14, 2025

MultiPLY: A Multisensory Object-Centric Embodied Large Language Model in 3D World

Human beings possess the capability to multiply a melange of multisensory cues while actively exploring and interacting with the 3D world. Current multi-modal large language models, however, passively absorb sensory data as inputs, lacking the capacity to actively interact with the objects in the 3D environment and dynamically collect their multisensory information. To usher in the study of this area, we propose MultiPLY, a multisensory embodied large language model that could incorporate multisensory interactive data, including visual, audio, tactile, and thermal information into large language models, thereby establishing the correlation among words, actions, and percepts. To this end, we first collect Multisensory Universe, a large-scale multisensory interaction dataset comprising 500k data by deploying an LLM-powered embodied agent to engage with the 3D environment. To perform instruction tuning with pre-trained LLM on such generated data, we first encode the 3D scene as abstracted object-centric representations and then introduce action tokens denoting that the embodied agent takes certain actions within the environment, as well as state tokens that represent the multisensory state observations of the agent at each time step. In the inference time, MultiPLY could generate action tokens, instructing the agent to take the action in the environment and obtain the next multisensory state observation. The observation is then appended back to the LLM via state tokens to generate subsequent text or action tokens. We demonstrate that MultiPLY outperforms baselines by a large margin through a diverse set of embodied tasks involving object retrieval, tool use, multisensory captioning, and task decomposition.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 16, 2024

Guava: An Effective and Universal Harness for Embodied Manipulation

Language models trained on large-scale vision-language data have demonstrated strong potential for embodied agents. Harnessing models through embodied tools use offers a promising alternative to end-to-end vision-language-action systems by combining high-level reasoning with external modules for perception, planning, and control. However, it remains unclear what makes an effective harness for embodied manipulation, and to what extent such a harness can unlock embodied capabilities in a wide range of reasoning models. In this work, we present Guava, a harness framework for embodied tool use developed through systematic exploration of the design space of agent workflows, action spaces, and observation spaces. Our study identifies three key ingredients for effective embodied agents: iterative perception-reasoning-action loops, semantic action abstractions, and multimodal observations. To understand whether these design principles are universal even to small models, we develop an end-to-end training pipeline that distills embodied manipulation capabilities into a 4B open-source model using fewer than 2K trajectories collected entirely in simulation. Experimental results in both simulation and real-world environments show performance comparable to frontier proprietary models while exhibiting strong generalization to unseen objects, novel instructions, and long-horizon tasks. Results suggest that a well-designed harness can serve as a scalable, model-agnostic interface for embodied manipulation, enabling strong emergent embodied capabilities in compact open-source models with minimal training data.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 15 5

Learning Primitive Embodied World Models: Towards Scalable Robotic Learning

While video-generation-based embodied world models have gained increasing attention, their reliance on large-scale embodied interaction data remains a key bottleneck. The scarcity, difficulty of collection, and high dimensionality of embodied data fundamentally limit the alignment granularity between language and actions and exacerbate the challenge of long-horizon video generation--hindering generative models from achieving a "GPT moment" in the embodied domain. There is a naive observation: the diversity of embodied data far exceeds the relatively small space of possible primitive motions. Based on this insight, we propose a novel paradigm for world modeling--Primitive Embodied World Models (PEWM). By restricting video generation to fixed short horizons, our approach 1) enables fine-grained alignment between linguistic concepts and visual representations of robotic actions, 2) reduces learning complexity, 3) improves data efficiency in embodied data collection, and 4) decreases inference latency. By equipping with a modular Vision-Language Model (VLM) planner and a Start-Goal heatmap Guidance mechanism (SGG), PEWM further enables flexible closed-loop control and supports compositional generalization of primitive-level policies over extended, complex tasks. Our framework leverages the spatiotemporal vision priors in video models and the semantic awareness of VLMs to bridge the gap between fine-grained physical interaction and high-level reasoning, paving the way toward scalable, interpretable, and general-purpose embodied intelligence.

  • 15 authors
·
Aug 28, 2025

D2E: Scaling Vision-Action Pretraining on Desktop Data for Transfer to Embodied AI

Large language models leverage internet-scale text data, yet embodied AI remains constrained by the prohibitive costs of physical trajectory collection. Desktop environments -- particularly gaming -- offer a compelling alternative: they provide rich sensorimotor interactions at scale while maintaining the structured observation-action coupling essential for embodied learning. We present D2E (Desktop to Embodied AI), a framework that demonstrates desktop interactions can serve as an effective pretraining substrate for robotics embodied AI tasks. Unlike prior work that remained domain-specific (e.g., VPT for Minecraft) or kept data proprietary (e.g., SIMA), D2E establishes a complete pipeline from scalable desktop data collection to verified transfer in embodied domains. Our framework comprises three components: (1) the OWA Toolkit that unifies diverse desktop interactions into a standardized format with 152x compression, (2) the Generalist-IDM that achieves strong zero-shot generalization across unseen games through timestamp-based event prediction, enabling internet-scale pseudo-labeling, and (3) VAPT that transfers desktop-pretrained representations to physical manipulation and navigation. Using 1.3K+ hours of data (259 hours of human demonstrations, and 1K+ hours of pseudo-labeled gameplay), we achieve a total of 96.6% success rate on LIBERO manipulation and 83.3% on CANVAS navigation benchmarks. This validates that sensorimotor primitives in digital interactions exhibit sufficient invariance to transfer meaningfully to physical embodied tasks, establishing desktop pretraining as a practical paradigm for robotics. We will make all our work public, including the OWA toolkit, datasets of human-collected and pseudo-labeled, and VAPT-trained models available at https://worv-ai.github.io/d2e/

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 7, 2025 3

EmbodiedCity: A Benchmark Platform for Embodied Agent in Real-world City Environment

Embodied artificial intelligence emphasizes the role of an agent's body in generating human-like behaviors. The recent efforts on EmbodiedAI pay a lot of attention to building up machine learning models to possess perceiving, planning, and acting abilities, thereby enabling real-time interaction with the world. However, most works focus on bounded indoor environments, such as navigation in a room or manipulating a device, with limited exploration of embodying the agents in open-world scenarios. That is, embodied intelligence in the open and outdoor environment is less explored, for which one potential reason is the lack of high-quality simulators, benchmarks, and datasets. To address it, in this paper, we construct a benchmark platform for embodied intelligence evaluation in real-world city environments. Specifically, we first construct a highly realistic 3D simulation environment based on the real buildings, roads, and other elements in a real city. In this environment, we combine historically collected data and simulation algorithms to conduct simulations of pedestrian and vehicle flows with high fidelity. Further, we designed a set of evaluation tasks covering different EmbodiedAI abilities. Moreover, we provide a complete set of input and output interfaces for access, enabling embodied agents to easily take task requirements and current environmental observations as input and then make decisions and obtain performance evaluations. On the one hand, it expands the capability of existing embodied intelligence to higher levels. On the other hand, it has a higher practical value in the real world and can support more potential applications for artificial general intelligence. Based on this platform, we evaluate some popular large language models for embodied intelligence capabilities of different dimensions and difficulties.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 12, 2024

EmbodiedBrain: Expanding Performance Boundaries of Task Planning for Embodied Intelligence

The realization of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) necessitates Embodied AI agents capable of robust spatial perception, effective task planning, and adaptive execution in physical environments. However, current large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) for embodied tasks suffer from key limitations, including a significant gap between model design and agent requirements, an unavoidable trade-off between real-time latency and performance, and the use of unauthentic, offline evaluation metrics. To address these challenges, we propose EmbodiedBrain, a novel vision-language foundation model available in both 7B and 32B parameter sizes. Our framework features an agent-aligned data structure and employs a powerful training methodology that integrates large-scale Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Step-Augumented Group Relative Policy Optimization (Step-GRPO), which boosts long-horizon task success by integrating preceding steps as Guided Precursors. Furthermore, we incorporate a comprehensive reward system, including a Generative Reward Model (GRM) accelerated at the infrastructure level, to improve training efficiency. For enable thorough validation, we establish a three-part evaluation system encompassing General, Planning, and End-to-End Simulation Benchmarks, highlighted by the proposal and open-sourcing of a novel, challenging simulation environment. Experimental results demonstrate that EmbodiedBrain achieves superior performance across all metrics, establishing a new state-of-the-art for embodied foundation models. Towards paving the way for the next generation of generalist embodied agents, we open-source all of our data, model weight, and evaluating methods, which are available at https://zterobot.github.io/EmbodiedBrain.github.io.

  • 20 authors
·
Oct 23, 2025

Hy-Embodied-VLM-1.0: Efficient Physical-World Agents

Building capable embodied agents requires not only multimodal perception and understanding, but also agentic capabilities for reasoning about actions, adapting to evolving situations, and interacting with the physical world. In this report, we introduce Hy-Embodied-VLM-1.0, an efficient and powerful embodied foundation model specifically designed for embodied agents operating in the physical world. To cultivate such capabilities from the pre-training stage onward, we define an action-centric capability taxonomy comprising three progressive dimensions: Action-Relevant State Understanding, Action-Transition Reasoning, and Sequential and Adaptive Reasoning. Guided by this taxonomy, we develop a systematic data pipeline and curate data mixtures spanning both pre-training and post-training. To deliver strong physical-world understanding and interaction capabilities while supporting latency-sensitive deployment, we build our model on the Hy3-A3B language backbone and the Hy-ViT2 vision encoder. Its efficient Mixture-of-Experts architecture combines strong model capacity with high inference efficiency. We evaluate Hy-Embodied-VLM-1.0 on a comprehensive suite of 38 benchmarks covering embodied perception, physical-world understanding, and embodied reasoning. The model achieves the best performance among similarly sized models on 19 of the 38 benchmarks and substantially outperforms strong competitors, including Qwen3.6-A3B and Cosmos 3. Compared with the previous-generation Hy-Embodied-0.5 MoT-2B, Hy-Embodied-VLM-1.0 improves average performance by 8.4%. Despite activating only 3B parameters, it achieves performance close to that of the previous-generation model with 32B activated parameters. Beyond static benchmark evaluation, Hy-Embodied-VLM-1.0 also demonstrates strong performance on embodied agentic tasks requiring multi-turn interaction and long-horizon reasoning.

  • 22 authors
·
Jul 13

Automating the Design of Embodied Agent Architectures

Embodied agents are typically built as hand-designed compositions of perception, memory, planning, and action modules. This modularity exposes a large architectural design space, but current systems still rely on researcher intuition to choose where information is stored, how observations are processed, and how model calls are connected. Agent Architecture Search (AAS) automates such design for text-domain agents, but has not been systematically evaluated on perceptual embodied agents through simulator rollouts. We study this transfer. We introduce AgentCanvas, a typed-graph runtime that hosts embodied executors as editable node-and-wire programs with simulator-aware execution and episode-level logs, and KDLoop, a coding-agent search procedure that cycles through proposal, critique, experiment, and distillation, with triggered reflection after stalls. We evaluate three AAS variants across four embodied executors spanning vision-language navigation, embodied question answering, and language-conditioned manipulation. The resulting 3x4 matrix shows that architecture-level search can produce deployable and directional success-rate gains on embodied tasks, while one apparent high-scoring candidate is rejected as leak-bearing. At the same time, the experiments expose constraints that are muted in text-domain AAS: optimization signals can be masked by rollout noise, search can become trapped in local edit basins, and episode-level credit assignment only partially emerges even when detailed logs are available. These results characterize both the promise and the current limits of automated architecture search for embodied agents.

EmbodiedBench: Comprehensive Benchmarking Multi-modal Large Language Models for Vision-Driven Embodied Agents

Leveraging Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to create embodied agents offers a promising avenue for tackling real-world tasks. While language-centric embodied agents have garnered substantial attention, MLLM-based embodied agents remain underexplored due to the lack of comprehensive evaluation frameworks. To bridge this gap, we introduce EmbodiedBench, an extensive benchmark designed to evaluate vision-driven embodied agents. EmbodiedBench features: (1) a diverse set of 1,128 testing tasks across four environments, ranging from high-level semantic tasks (e.g., household) to low-level tasks involving atomic actions (e.g., navigation and manipulation); and (2) six meticulously curated subsets evaluating essential agent capabilities like commonsense reasoning, complex instruction understanding, spatial awareness, visual perception, and long-term planning. Through extensive experiments, we evaluated 13 leading proprietary and open-source MLLMs within EmbodiedBench. Our findings reveal that: MLLMs excel at high-level tasks but struggle with low-level manipulation, with the best model, GPT-4o, scoring only 28.9% on average. EmbodiedBench provides a multifaceted standardized evaluation platform that not only highlights existing challenges but also offers valuable insights to advance MLLM-based embodied agents. Our code is available at https://embodiedbench.github.io.

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 13, 2025 2

TwinOR: Photorealistic Digital Twins of Dynamic Operating Rooms for Embodied AI Research

Developing embodied AI for intelligent surgical systems requires safe, controllable environments for continual learning and evaluation. However, safety regulations and operational constraints in operating rooms (ORs) limit embodied agents from freely perceiving and interacting in realistic settings. Digital twins provide high-fidelity, risk-free environments for exploration and training. How we may create photorealistic and dynamic digital representations of ORs that capture relevant spatial, visual, and behavioral complexity remains unclear. We introduce TwinOR, a framework for constructing photorealistic, dynamic digital twins of ORs for embodied AI research. The system reconstructs static geometry from pre-scan videos and continuously models human and equipment motion through multi-view perception of OR activities. The static and dynamic components are fused into an immersive 3D environment that supports controllable simulation and embodied exploration. The proposed framework reconstructs complete OR geometry with centimeter level accuracy while preserving dynamic interaction across surgical workflows, enabling realistic renderings and a virtual playground for embodied AI systems. In our experiments, TwinOR simulates stereo and monocular sensor streams for geometry understanding and visual localization tasks. Models such as FoundationStereo and ORB-SLAM3 on TwinOR-synthesized data achieve performance within their reported accuracy on real indoor datasets, demonstrating that TwinOR provides sensor-level realism sufficient for perception and localization challenges. By establishing a real-to-sim pipeline for constructing dynamic, photorealistic digital twins of OR environments, TwinOR enables the safe, scalable, and data-efficient development and benchmarking of embodied AI, ultimately accelerating the deployment of embodied AI from sim-to-real.

  • 14 authors
·
Nov 10, 2025

Agent AI: Surveying the Horizons of Multimodal Interaction

Multi-modal AI systems will likely become a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives. A promising approach to making these systems more interactive is to embody them as agents within physical and virtual environments. At present, systems leverage existing foundation models as the basic building blocks for the creation of embodied agents. Embedding agents within such environments facilitates the ability of models to process and interpret visual and contextual data, which is critical for the creation of more sophisticated and context-aware AI systems. For example, a system that can perceive user actions, human behavior, environmental objects, audio expressions, and the collective sentiment of a scene can be used to inform and direct agent responses within the given environment. To accelerate research on agent-based multimodal intelligence, we define "Agent AI" as a class of interactive systems that can perceive visual stimuli, language inputs, and other environmentally-grounded data, and can produce meaningful embodied action with infinite agent. In particular, we explore systems that aim to improve agents based on next-embodied action prediction by incorporating external knowledge, multi-sensory inputs, and human feedback. We argue that by developing agentic AI systems in grounded environments, one can also mitigate the hallucinations of large foundation models and their tendency to generate environmentally incorrect outputs. The emerging field of Agent AI subsumes the broader embodied and agentic aspects of multimodal interactions. Beyond agents acting and interacting in the physical world, we envision a future where people can easily create any virtual reality or simulated scene and interact with agents embodied within the virtual environment.

  • 14 authors
·
Jan 7, 2024

Towards a Unified Understanding of Robot Manipulation: A Comprehensive Survey

Embodied intelligence has witnessed remarkable progress in recent years, driven by advances in computer vision, natural language processing, and the rise of large-scale multimodal models. Among its core challenges, robot manipulation stands out as a fundamental yet intricate problem, requiring the seamless integration of perception, planning, and control to enable interaction within diverse and unstructured environments. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of robotic manipulation, encompassing foundational background, task-organized benchmarks and datasets, and a unified taxonomy of existing methods. We extend the classical division between high-level planning and low-level control by broadening high-level planning to include language, code, motion, affordance, and 3D representations, while introducing a new taxonomy of low-level learning-based control grounded in training paradigms such as input modeling, latent learning, and policy learning. Furthermore, we provide the first dedicated taxonomy of key bottlenecks, focusing on data collection, utilization, and generalization, and conclude with an extensive review of real-world applications. Compared with prior surveys, our work offers both a broader scope and deeper insight, serving as an accessible roadmap for newcomers and a structured reference for experienced researchers. All related resources, including research papers, open-source datasets, and projects, are curated for the community at https://github.com/BaiShuanghao/Awesome-Robotics-Manipulation.

  • 18 authors
·
Oct 12, 2025

A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied AI

Embodied AI is widely recognized as a key element of artificial general intelligence because it involves controlling embodied agents to perform tasks in the physical world. Building on the success of large language models and vision-language models, a new category of multimodal models -- referred to as vision-language-action models (VLAs) -- has emerged to address language-conditioned robotic tasks in embodied AI by leveraging their distinct ability to generate actions. In recent years, a myriad of VLAs have been developed, making it imperative to capture the rapidly evolving landscape through a comprehensive survey. To this end, we present the first survey on VLAs for embodied AI. This work provides a detailed taxonomy of VLAs, organized into three major lines of research. The first line focuses on individual components of VLAs. The second line is dedicated to developing control policies adept at predicting low-level actions. The third line comprises high-level task planners capable of decomposing long-horizon tasks into a sequence of subtasks, thereby guiding VLAs to follow more general user instructions. Furthermore, we provide an extensive summary of relevant resources, including datasets, simulators, and benchmarks. Finally, we discuss the challenges faced by VLAs and outline promising future directions in embodied AI. We have created a project associated with this survey, which is available at https://github.com/yueen-ma/Awesome-VLA.

  • 5 authors
·
May 22, 2024

How Good are Foundation Models in Step-by-Step Embodied Reasoning?

Embodied agents operating in the physical world must make decisions that are not only effective but also safe, spatially coherent, and grounded in context. While recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) have shown promising capabilities in visual understanding and language generation, their ability to perform structured reasoning for real-world embodied tasks remains underexplored. In this work, we aim to understand how well foundation models can perform step-by-step reasoning in embodied environments. To this end, we propose the Foundation Model Embodied Reasoning (FoMER) benchmark, designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of LMMs in complex embodied decision-making scenarios. Our benchmark spans a diverse set of tasks that require agents to interpret multimodal observations, reason about physical constraints and safety, and generate valid next actions in natural language. We present (i) a large-scale, curated suite of embodied reasoning tasks, (ii) a novel evaluation framework that disentangles perceptual grounding from action reasoning, and (iii) empirical analysis of several leading LMMs under this setting. Our benchmark includes over 1.1k samples with detailed step-by-step reasoning across 10 tasks and 8 embodiments, covering three different robot types. Our results highlight both the potential and current limitations of LMMs in embodied reasoning, pointing towards key challenges and opportunities for future research in robot intelligence. Our data and code will be made publicly available.

EmbodMocap: In-the-Wild 4D Human-Scene Reconstruction for Embodied Agents

Human behaviors in the real world naturally encode rich, long-term contextual information that can be leveraged to train embodied agents for perception, understanding, and acting. However, existing capture systems typically rely on costly studio setups and wearable devices, limiting the large-scale collection of scene-conditioned human motion data in the wild. To address this, we propose EmbodMocap, a portable and affordable data collection pipeline using two moving iPhones. Our key idea is to jointly calibrate dual RGB-D sequences to reconstruct both humans and scenes within a unified metric world coordinate frame. The proposed method allows metric-scale and scene-consistent capture in everyday environments without static cameras or markers, bridging human motion and scene geometry seamlessly. Compared with optical capture ground truth, we demonstrate that the dual-view setting exhibits a remarkable ability to mitigate depth ambiguity, achieving superior alignment and reconstruction performance over single iphone or monocular models. Based on the collected data, we empower three embodied AI tasks: monocular human-scene-reconstruction, where we fine-tune on feedforward models that output metric-scale, world-space aligned humans and scenes; physics-based character animation, where we prove our data could be used to scale human-object interaction skills and scene-aware motion tracking; and robot motion control, where we train a humanoid robot via sim-to-real RL to replicate human motions depicted in videos. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our pipeline and its contributions towards advancing embodied AI research.

  • 11 authors
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Feb 26 2

Can LLMs Generate Human-Like Wayfinding Instructions? Towards Platform-Agnostic Embodied Instruction Synthesis

We present a novel approach to automatically synthesize "wayfinding instructions" for an embodied robot agent. In contrast to prior approaches that are heavily reliant on human-annotated datasets designed exclusively for specific simulation platforms, our algorithm uses in-context learning to condition an LLM to generate instructions using just a few references. Using an LLM-based Visual Question Answering strategy, we gather detailed information about the environment which is used by the LLM for instruction synthesis. We implement our approach on multiple simulation platforms including Matterport3D, AI Habitat and ThreeDWorld, thereby demonstrating its platform-agnostic nature. We subjectively evaluate our approach via a user study and observe that 83.3% of users find the synthesized instructions accurately capture the details of the environment and show characteristics similar to those of human-generated instructions. Further, we conduct zero-shot navigation with multiple approaches on the REVERIE dataset using the generated instructions, and observe very close correlation with the baseline on standard success metrics (< 1% change in SR), quantifying the viability of generated instructions in replacing human-annotated data. We finally discuss the applicability of our approach in enabling a generalizable evaluation of embodied navigation policies. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first LLM-driven approach capable of generating "human-like" instructions in a platform-agnostic manner, without training.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 18, 2024

Embodied-RAG: General non-parametric Embodied Memory for Retrieval and Generation

There is no limit to how much a robot might explore and learn, but all of that knowledge needs to be searchable and actionable. Within language research, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) has become the workhouse of large-scale non-parametric knowledge, however existing techniques do not directly transfer to the embodied domain, which is multimodal, data is highly correlated, and perception requires abstraction. To address these challenges, we introduce Embodied-RAG, a framework that enhances the foundational model of an embodied agent with a non-parametric memory system capable of autonomously constructing hierarchical knowledge for both navigation and language generation. Embodied-RAG handles a full range of spatial and semantic resolutions across diverse environments and query types, whether for a specific object or a holistic description of ambiance. At its core, Embodied-RAG's memory is structured as a semantic forest, storing language descriptions at varying levels of detail. This hierarchical organization allows the system to efficiently generate context-sensitive outputs across different robotic platforms. We demonstrate that Embodied-RAG effectively bridges RAG to the robotics domain, successfully handling over 200 explanation and navigation queries across 19 environments, highlighting its promise for general-purpose non-parametric system for embodied agents.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 26, 2024 2

EmbodiedGPT: Vision-Language Pre-Training via Embodied Chain of Thought

Embodied AI is a crucial frontier in robotics, capable of planning and executing action sequences for robots to accomplish long-horizon tasks in physical environments. In this work, we introduce EmbodiedGPT, an end-to-end multi-modal foundation model for embodied AI, empowering embodied agents with multi-modal understanding and execution capabilities. To achieve this, we have made the following efforts: (i) We craft a large-scale embodied planning dataset, termed EgoCOT. The dataset consists of carefully selected videos from the Ego4D dataset, along with corresponding high-quality language instructions. Specifically, we generate a sequence of sub-goals with the "Chain of Thoughts" mode for effective embodied planning. (ii) We introduce an efficient training approach to EmbodiedGPT for high-quality plan generation, by adapting a 7B large language model (LLM) to the EgoCOT dataset via prefix tuning. (iii) We introduce a paradigm for extracting task-related features from LLM-generated planning queries to form a closed loop between high-level planning and low-level control. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of EmbodiedGPT on embodied tasks, including embodied planning, embodied control, visual captioning, and visual question answering. Notably, EmbodiedGPT significantly enhances the success rate of the embodied control task by extracting more effective features. It has achieved a remarkable 1.6 times increase in success rate on the Franka Kitchen benchmark and a 1.3 times increase on the Meta-World benchmark, compared to the BLIP-2 baseline fine-tuned with the Ego4D dataset.

  • 10 authors
·
May 24, 2023

ACE-Data-0: Human-Centric Ambient Capture as Embodied Data Engine

Embodied intelligence faces a fundamental data bottleneck. Models must capture how first-person perception, whole-body motion, dexterous manipulation, object state, sound, and touch evolve together as humans pursue goals over time. Existing datasets fragment this experience across viewpoints, modalities, or spatial scales, leaving the full perception-action loop only partially observed. We introduce the Ambient Capture Engine (ACE), a human-centric data engine that transforms real home environments into spatially calibrated, temporally synchronized recording studios. ACE operates at two complementary scales: a table-scale configuration resolves hand-object manipulation, while a room-scale configuration captures whole-body motion, locomotion, and interactions across a furnished home. ACE records egocentric and multi-view exocentric video, full-body and articulated hand motion, object geometry and 6-DoF trajectories, audio, and tactile signals as a unified multisensory stream. Using ACE, we build ACE-Data-0, comprising 150 hours and 17M video frames across 200 task categories, performed by 50 participants in 2 environments, for a total of 75,000 interaction episodes. The dataset spans atomic manipulation, long-horizon chains of household activities, and human-scene interaction, while preserving natural behavioral variation through goal-level rather than step-by-step instructions. We further introduce a hierarchical benchmark that progresses from signals to scene components and then to interactions. Evaluations of state-of-the-art methods expose substantial gaps under contact, occlusion, egomotion, and long temporal horizons. ACE-Data-0 provides synchronized human demonstrations with aligned perceptual, kinematic, and contact supervision, offering a scalable foundation for imitation learning, world models, vision-language-action systems, and embodied AI.

  • 16 authors
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Jul 29 1

Robobench: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models as Embodied Brain

Building robots that can perceive, reason, and act in dynamic, unstructured environments remains a core challenge. Recent embodied systems often adopt a dual-system paradigm, where System 2 handles high-level reasoning while System 1 executes low-level control. In this work, we refer to System 2 as the embodied brain, emphasizing its role as the cognitive core for reasoning and decision-making in manipulation tasks. Given this role, systematic evaluation of the embodied brain is essential. Yet existing benchmarks emphasize execution success, or when targeting high-level reasoning, suffer from incomplete dimensions and limited task realism, offering only a partial picture of cognitive capability. To bridge this gap, we introduce RoboBench, a benchmark that systematically evaluates multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as embodied brains. Motivated by the critical roles across the full manipulation pipeline, RoboBench defines five dimensions-instruction comprehension, perception reasoning, generalized planning, affordance prediction, and failure analysis-spanning 14 capabilities, 25 tasks, and 6092 QA pairs. To ensure realism, we curate datasets across diverse embodiments, attribute-rich objects, and multi-view scenes, drawing from large-scale real robotic data. For planning, RoboBench introduces an evaluation framework, MLLM-as-world-simulator. It evaluate embodied feasibility by simulating whether predicted plans can achieve critical object-state changes. Experiments on 14 MLLMs reveal fundamental limitations: difficulties with implicit instruction comprehension, spatiotemporal reasoning, cross-scenario planning, fine-grained affordance understanding, and execution failure diagnosis. RoboBench provides a comprehensive scaffold to quantify high-level cognition, and guide the development of next-generation embodied MLLMs. The project page is in https://robo-bench.github.io.

  • 21 authors
·
Oct 20, 2025

EmbodiedGen: Towards a Generative 3D World Engine for Embodied Intelligence

Constructing a physically realistic and accurately scaled simulated 3D world is crucial for the training and evaluation of embodied intelligence tasks. The diversity, realism, low cost accessibility and affordability of 3D data assets are critical for achieving generalization and scalability in embodied AI. However, most current embodied intelligence tasks still rely heavily on traditional 3D computer graphics assets manually created and annotated, which suffer from high production costs and limited realism. These limitations significantly hinder the scalability of data driven approaches. We present EmbodiedGen, a foundational platform for interactive 3D world generation. It enables the scalable generation of high-quality, controllable and photorealistic 3D assets with accurate physical properties and real-world scale in the Unified Robotics Description Format (URDF) at low cost. These assets can be directly imported into various physics simulation engines for fine-grained physical control, supporting downstream tasks in training and evaluation. EmbodiedGen is an easy-to-use, full-featured toolkit composed of six key modules: Image-to-3D, Text-to-3D, Texture Generation, Articulated Object Generation, Scene Generation and Layout Generation. EmbodiedGen generates diverse and interactive 3D worlds composed of generative 3D assets, leveraging generative AI to address the challenges of generalization and evaluation to the needs of embodied intelligence related research. Code is available at https://horizonrobotics.github.io/robot_lab/embodied_gen/index.html.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 12, 2025 2

An Anatomy of Vision-Language-Action Models: From Modules to Milestones and Challenges

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are driving a revolution in robotics, enabling machines to understand instructions and interact with the physical world. This field is exploding with new models and datasets, making it both exciting and challenging to keep pace with. This survey offers a clear and structured guide to the VLA landscape. We design it to follow the natural learning path of a researcher: we start with the basic Modules of any VLA model, trace the history through key Milestones, and then dive deep into the core Challenges that define recent research frontier. Our main contribution is a detailed breakdown of the five biggest challenges in: (1) Representation, (2) Execution, (3) Generalization, (4) Safety, and (5) Dataset and Evaluation. This structure mirrors the developmental roadmap of a generalist agent: establishing the fundamental perception-action loop, scaling capabilities across diverse embodiments and environments, and finally ensuring trustworthy deployment-all supported by the essential data infrastructure. For each of them, we review existing approaches and highlight future opportunities. We position this paper as both a foundational guide for newcomers and a strategic roadmap for experienced researchers, with the dual aim of accelerating learning and inspiring new ideas in embodied intelligence. A live version of this survey, with continuous updates, is maintained on our https://suyuz1.github.io/Survery/{project page}.

IRootech IROOTECH TECHNOLOGY
·
Dec 12, 2025 3

HY-Embodied-0.5: Embodied Foundation Models for Real-World Agents

We introduce HY-Embodied-0.5, a family of foundation models specifically designed for real-world embodied agents. To bridge the gap between general Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and the demands of embodied agents, our models are developed to enhance the core capabilities required by embodied intelligence: spatial and temporal visual perception, alongside advanced embodied reasoning for prediction, interaction, and planning. The HY-Embodied-0.5 suite comprises two primary variants: an efficient model with 2B activated parameters designed for edge deployment, and a powerful model with 32B activated parameters targeted for complex reasoning. To support the fine-grained visual perception essential for embodied tasks, we adopt a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture to enable modality-specific computing. By incorporating latent tokens, this design effectively enhances the perceptual representation of the models. To improve reasoning capabilities, we introduce an iterative, self-evolving post-training paradigm. Furthermore, we employ on-policy distillation to transfer the advanced capabilities of the large model to the smaller variant, thereby maximizing the performance potential of the compact model. Extensive evaluations across 22 benchmarks, spanning visual perception, spatial reasoning, and embodied understanding, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our MoT-2B model outperforms similarly sized state-of-the-art models on 16 benchmarks, while the 32B variant achieves performance comparable to frontier models such as Gemini 3.0 Pro. In downstream robot control experiments, we leverage our robust VLM foundation to train an effective Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, achieving compelling results in real-world physical evaluations. Code and models are open-sourced at https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HY-Embodied.

EmbodiedEval: Evaluate Multimodal LLMs as Embodied Agents

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown significant advancements, providing a promising future for embodied agents. Existing benchmarks for evaluating MLLMs primarily utilize static images or videos, limiting assessments to non-interactive scenarios. Meanwhile, existing embodied AI benchmarks are task-specific and not diverse enough, which do not adequately evaluate the embodied capabilities of MLLMs. To address this, we propose EmbodiedEval, a comprehensive and interactive evaluation benchmark for MLLMs with embodied tasks. EmbodiedEval features 328 distinct tasks within 125 varied 3D scenes, each of which is rigorously selected and annotated. It covers a broad spectrum of existing embodied AI tasks with significantly enhanced diversity, all within a unified simulation and evaluation framework tailored for MLLMs. The tasks are organized into five categories: navigation, object interaction, social interaction, attribute question answering, and spatial question answering to assess different capabilities of the agents. We evaluated the state-of-the-art MLLMs on EmbodiedEval and found that they have a significant shortfall compared to human level on embodied tasks. Our analysis demonstrates the limitations of existing MLLMs in embodied capabilities, providing insights for their future development. We open-source all evaluation data and simulation framework at https://github.com/thunlp/EmbodiedEval.

  • 12 authors
·
Jan 20, 2025 2

PCA-Bench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in Perception-Cognition-Action Chain

We present PCA-Bench, a multimodal decision-making benchmark for evaluating the integrated capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Departing from previous benchmarks focusing on simplistic tasks and individual model capability, PCA-Bench introduces three complex scenarios: autonomous driving, domestic robotics, and open-world games. Given task instructions and diverse contexts, the model is required to seamlessly integrate multiple capabilities of Perception, Cognition, and Action in a reasoning chain to make accurate decisions. Moreover, PCA-Bench features error localization capabilities, scrutinizing model inaccuracies in areas such as perception, knowledge, or reasoning. This enhances the reliability of deploying MLLMs. To balance accuracy and efficiency in evaluation, we propose PCA-Eval, an automatic evaluation protocol, and assess 10 prevalent MLLMs. The results reveal significant performance disparities between open-source models and powerful proprietary models like GPT-4 Vision. To address this, we introduce Embodied-Instruction-Evolution (EIE), an automatic framework for synthesizing instruction tuning examples in multimodal embodied environments. EIE generates 7,510 training examples in PCA-Bench and enhances the performance of open-source MLLMs, occasionally surpassing GPT-4 Vision (+3\% in decision accuracy), thereby validating the effectiveness of EIE. Our findings suggest that robust MLLMs like GPT4-Vision show promise for decision-making in embodied agents, opening new avenues for MLLM research.

  • 10 authors
·
Feb 21, 2024 1

Embodied Web Agents: Bridging Physical-Digital Realms for Integrated Agent Intelligence

AI agents today are mostly siloed - they either retrieve and reason over vast amount of digital information and knowledge obtained online; or interact with the physical world through embodied perception, planning and action - but rarely both. This separation limits their ability to solve tasks that require integrated physical and digital intelligence, such as cooking from online recipes, navigating with dynamic map data, or interpreting real-world landmarks using web knowledge. We introduce Embodied Web Agents, a novel paradigm for AI agents that fluidly bridge embodiment and web-scale reasoning. To operationalize this concept, we first develop the Embodied Web Agents task environments, a unified simulation platform that tightly integrates realistic 3D indoor and outdoor environments with functional web interfaces. Building upon this platform, we construct and release the Embodied Web Agents Benchmark, which encompasses a diverse suite of tasks including cooking, navigation, shopping, tourism, and geolocation - all requiring coordinated reasoning across physical and digital realms for systematic assessment of cross-domain intelligence. Experimental results reveal significant performance gaps between state-of-the-art AI systems and human capabilities, establishing both challenges and opportunities at the intersection of embodied cognition and web-scale knowledge access. All datasets, codes and websites are publicly available at our project page https://embodied-web-agent.github.io/.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 18, 2025 2

Image2Sim: Scaling Embodied Navigation via Generative Neural Simulator

Embodied navigation aims to build agents that interpret multimodal goals, reason in 3D space, and reach target destinations reliably in the real world. However, progress remains constrained by the lack of scalable, high-fidelity, and physically grounded interactive environments. Although real-world scanned datasets offer visual realism, they are limited by scale. In contrast, synthetic simulators scale more easily but often exhibit large sim-to-real gaps. We introduce Image2Sim, a real-time neural simulation framework that constructs high-quality interactive environments from posed RGB-D image sequences. The central idea is to decouple 3D spatial anchoring from photorealistic observation synthesis. For scene construction, Image2Sim uses a feed-forward feature Gaussian model that lifts posed RGB-D observations into a 3D feature-Gaussian representation in a single pass. For rendering, we propose a Geometry-Aware One-Step Pixel Flow model that transforms sparse and noisy Gaussian projections into high-quality panoramic RGB-D observations. Image2Sim also serves as a fully automated embodied data engine that generates high-fidelity observations, executable actions, and diverse navigation instructions at scale. It converts large collections of videos and images into nearly 20K interactive scenes and synthesizes more than 10 million navigation training samples. Navigation models trained entirely in these neural environments achieve strong improvements on major benchmarks and transfer effectively to real-world zero-shot settings. These results suggest that scalable neural simulation can serve as a practical training substrate for embodied navigation at scale.

ACE-Brain-0.5: A Unified Embodied Foundational Model for Physical Agentic AI

Embodied AI is moving from isolated perception or action modules toward physical agents that understand, plan under goals, act through robot bodies, monitor progress, and improve from experience. Existing systems address this loop only in parts: end-to-end policies generate actions but often lack spatial reasoning, planning, and execution assessment, while robot-agent systems orchestrate tools or specialists but do not learn a shared representation. This fragmentation limits general Physical Agentic AI. We present ACE-Brain-0.5, a unified embodied foundation model that organizes robot intelligence into five coupled functions: spatial perception, decision making, embodied interaction, self-monitoring, and self-improvement. Built on ACE-Brain-0, which established spatial intelligence as a shared scaffold across robot platforms, ACE-Brain-0.5 extends an understanding-centric model into a closed-loop foundation model. A single 8B backbone instantiates the first four functions: grounding objects and affordances, reasoning over 3D and egocentric spatial relations, decomposing instructions into subgoals, generating navigation and manipulation actions, and estimating progress for verification and recovery. To unify these capabilities without cross-task interference, we introduce SSR+, which extends Scaffold-Specialize-Reconcile with a Reactivate stage after task-vector merging. The fifth function, self-improvement, is realized by a companion framework that updates external execution state, including task schemas, spatial memory, and failure-recovery cases, from rollouts. Across fifteen benchmarks, ACE-Brain-0.5 improves over ACE-Brain-0 on 14 of 18 spatial perception and grounding benchmarks, achieves competitive navigation and manipulation performance, and provides strong progress estimation in ID and OOD settings. Together, these results mark an early step toward general Physical Agentic AI.

  • 31 authors
·
Jul 4

EmbodiedOneVision: Interleaved Vision-Text-Action Pretraining for General Robot Control

The human ability to seamlessly perform multimodal reasoning and physical interaction in the open world is a core goal for general-purpose embodied intelligent systems. Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models, which are co-trained on large-scale robot and visual-text data, have demonstrated notable progress in general robot control. However, they still fail to achieve human-level flexibility in interleaved reasoning and interaction. In this work, introduce EO-Robotics, consists of EO-1 model and EO-Data1.5M dataset. EO-1 is a unified embodied foundation model that achieves superior performance in multimodal embodied reasoning and robot control through interleaved vision-text-action pre-training. The development of EO-1 is based on two key pillars: (i) a unified architecture that processes multimodal inputs indiscriminately (image, text, video, and action), and (ii) a massive, high-quality multimodal embodied reasoning dataset, EO-Data1.5M, which contains over 1.5 million samples with emphasis on interleaved vision-text-action comprehension. EO-1 is trained through synergies between auto-regressive decoding and flow matching denoising on EO-Data1.5M, enabling seamless robot action generation and multimodal embodied reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of interleaved vision-text-action learning for open-world understanding and generalization, validated through a variety of long-horizon, dexterous manipulation tasks across multiple embodiments. This paper details the architecture of EO-1, the data construction strategy of EO-Data1.5M, and the training methodology, offering valuable insights for developing advanced embodied foundation models.

  • 15 authors
·
Aug 28, 2025 3

Video Generation Models in Robotics -- Applications, Research Challenges, Future Directions

Video generation models have emerged as high-fidelity models of the physical world, capable of synthesizing high-quality videos capturing fine-grained interactions between agents and their environments conditioned on multi-modal user inputs. Their impressive capabilities address many of the long-standing challenges faced by physics-based simulators, driving broad adoption in many problem domains, e.g., robotics. For example, video models enable photorealistic, physically consistent deformable-body simulation without making prohibitive simplifying assumptions, which is a major bottleneck in physics-based simulation. Moreover, video models can serve as foundation world models that capture the dynamics of the world in a fine-grained and expressive way. They thus overcome the limited expressiveness of language-only abstractions in describing intricate physical interactions. In this survey, we provide a review of video models and their applications as embodied world models in robotics, encompassing cost-effective data generation and action prediction in imitation learning, dynamics and rewards modeling in reinforcement learning, visual planning, and policy evaluation. Further, we highlight important challenges hindering the trustworthy integration of video models in robotics, which include poor instruction following, hallucinations such as violations of physics, and unsafe content generation, in addition to fundamental limitations such as significant data curation, training, and inference costs. We present potential future directions to address these open research challenges to motivate research and ultimately facilitate broader applications, especially in safety-critical settings.

  • 12 authors
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Jan 12

A Comprehensive Survey on World Models for Embodied AI

Embodied AI requires agents that perceive, act, and anticipate how actions reshape future world states. World models serve as internal simulators that capture environment dynamics, enabling forward and counterfactual rollouts to support perception, prediction, and decision making. This survey presents a unified framework for world models in embodied AI. Specifically, we formalize the problem setting and learning objectives, and propose a three-axis taxonomy encompassing: (1) Functionality, Decision-Coupled vs. General-Purpose; (2) Temporal Modeling, Sequential Simulation and Inference vs. Global Difference Prediction; (3) Spatial Representation, Global Latent Vector, Token Feature Sequence, Spatial Latent Grid, and Decomposed Rendering Representation. We systematize data resources and metrics across robotics, autonomous driving, and general video settings, covering pixel prediction quality, state-level understanding, and task performance. Furthermore, we offer a quantitative comparison of state-of-the-art models and distill key open challenges, including the scarcity of unified datasets and the need for evaluation metrics that assess physical consistency over pixel fidelity, the trade-off between model performance and the computational efficiency required for real-time control, and the core modeling difficulty of achieving long-horizon temporal consistency while mitigating error accumulation. Finally, we maintain a curated bibliography at https://github.com/Li-Zn-H/AwesomeWorldModels.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 19, 2025

Embodied Agent Interface: Benchmarking LLMs for Embodied Decision Making

We aim to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for embodied decision making. While a significant body of work has been leveraging LLMs for decision making in embodied environments, we still lack a systematic understanding of their performance because they are usually applied in different domains, for different purposes, and built based on different inputs and outputs. Furthermore, existing evaluations tend to rely solely on a final success rate, making it difficult to pinpoint what ability is missing in LLMs and where the problem lies, which in turn blocks embodied agents from leveraging LLMs effectively and selectively. To address these limitations, we propose a generalized interface (Embodied Agent Interface) that supports the formalization of various types of tasks and input-output specifications of LLM-based modules. Specifically, it allows us to unify 1) a broad set of embodied decision-making tasks involving both state and temporally extended goals, 2) four commonly-used LLM-based modules for decision making: goal interpretation, subgoal decomposition, action sequencing, and transition modeling, and 3) a collection of fine-grained metrics which break down evaluation into various types of errors, such as hallucination errors, affordance errors, various types of planning errors, etc. Overall, our benchmark offers a comprehensive assessment of LLMs' performance for different subtasks, pinpointing the strengths and weaknesses in LLM-powered embodied AI systems, and providing insights for effective and selective use of LLMs in embodied decision making.

  • 15 authors
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Oct 9, 2024

GIRAF: Towards Generalizable Human Interactions with Articulated Objects

Synthesizing realistic full-body human interactions with articulated objects is a fundamental challenge for embodied AI and graphics, with applications in robotics training and virtual agents. Existing models remain limited: some focus on simple activities with static objects, while others restrict attention to hand-only manipulation. This leaves open the problem of generating coordinated full-body motion that approaches, manipulates, and moves articulated objects in a realistic and generalizable way. The key difficulty lies in reasoning jointly about locomotion, fine-grained contact, and object articulation. Models must capture subtle hand-object correspondences that transfer across object geometries, while also producing seamless transitions from navigation to manipulation. At the same time, the scarcity of large-scale paired motion-scene data makes it difficult to generalize across diverse object positions and shapes. We introduce a text-conditioned diffusion model that addresses these challenges through three core ideas: an object-centric representation that unifies hand-object contact with object surfaces, a mixed-domain training strategy that balances locomotion and interaction, and a contact-based augmentation scheme that expands training diversity. Through experiments, our method demonstrated strong generalization to unseen object configurations, surpassing current state-of-the-art methods.

  • 6 authors
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Jul 7

From World Action Models to Embodied Brains: A Roadmap for Open-World Physical Intelligence

Artificial general intelligence ultimately requires agents that can reason and act in the physical world. Action models, vision-language-action policies, and world models have advanced this goal, while World Action Models (WAMs) are particularly promising because they connect candidate interventions with predicted consequences. However, progress remains fragmented: models use incompatible action spaces and prediction targets, datasets and tasks follow different conventions, and runtime systems expose limited interfaces for reuse and evaluation. We review the evolution toward WAMs and organize these limitations into three coupled gaps: model roles and representations, objectives and standardization, and system composition. Building on this analysis, we propose a co-evolution roadmap for physical intelligence centered on the embodied brain, a long-term model target for integrating multimodal context, comparing candidate interventions, and issuing state-transition or capability requests rather than direct actuator commands. WAMs provide promising prototypes for its predictive functions, while a physical harness grounds model outputs through tools, controllers, verification, and trace logging. Shared contracts align heterogeneous models, data, tasks, and embodiments, and closed-loop post-training converts verified interaction into reusable experience. Together, these components define a modular physical-intelligence stack for adaptive and self-improving embodied agents.

  • 5 authors
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Jul 12

HumanScale: Egocentric Human Video Can Outperform Real-Robot Data for Embodied Pretraining

Embodied foundation models are expected to benefit from data scaling like large language models, but face a much tighter data bottleneck. Teleoperated real-robot trajectories remain the dominant pretraining source due to their precise action supervision and embodiment alignment, yet their scalability is limited by high collection cost, acquisition difficulty, and low behavioral and environmental diversity. These limitations have sparked interest in egocentric human video as a scalable, substantially lower-cost, and more diverse alternative for embodied model pretraining. However, its effectiveness compared to teleoperated real-robot data remains underexplored. To address this question, we conduct a systematic study comparing egocentric human video and teleoperated real-robot trajectories as pretraining data sources for embodied foundation models, under fixed post-training and validation protocols. Surprisingly, we find that egocentric data, when processed through a carefully designed filtering and labeling pipeline, is not merely a viable substitute for model pretraining but can lead to superior performance. With the same amount of pretraining data, models pretrained on egocentric data achieve a 24% lower validation loss on real-robot action prediction, as well as 52.5% and 90% higher success rates on in-distribution and out-of-distribution real-robot task execution, respectively. This finding verifies a scalable paradigm for embodied foundation models: pretrain on egocentric human video to learn diverse world representations, then adapt with a small amount of labeled real-robot data for action-space alignment. We hope this study encourages broader exploration of egocentric data and offers guidance for data quality assessment before costly robot data collection.

  • 22 authors
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Jun 17 2

Holodeck: Language Guided Generation of 3D Embodied AI Environments

3D simulated environments play a critical role in Embodied AI, but their creation requires expertise and extensive manual effort, restricting their diversity and scope. To mitigate this limitation, we present Holodeck, a system that generates 3D environments to match a user-supplied prompt fully automatedly. Holodeck can generate diverse scenes, e.g., arcades, spas, and museums, adjust the designs for styles, and can capture the semantics of complex queries such as "apartment for a researcher with a cat" and "office of a professor who is a fan of Star Wars". Holodeck leverages a large language model (GPT-4) for common sense knowledge about what the scene might look like and uses a large collection of 3D assets from Objaverse to populate the scene with diverse objects. To address the challenge of positioning objects correctly, we prompt GPT-4 to generate spatial relational constraints between objects and then optimize the layout to satisfy those constraints. Our large-scale human evaluation shows that annotators prefer Holodeck over manually designed procedural baselines in residential scenes and that Holodeck can produce high-quality outputs for diverse scene types. We also demonstrate an exciting application of Holodeck in Embodied AI, training agents to navigate in novel scenes like music rooms and daycares without human-constructed data, which is a significant step forward in developing general-purpose embodied agents.

  • 14 authors
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Dec 14, 2023 2

Physically Viable World Models: A Case for Query-Conditioned Embodied AI

World models for embodied AI must be physically viable: constructed to answer intervention queries by representing the physical structure governing action outcomes, rather than merely predicting future observations. Existing observation-predictive world models can produce visually plausible but physically wrong rollouts. This failure is structural; distinct physical systems can look identical yet diverge under intervention. We expose this problem with controlled benchmarks that fix the visible scene while varying latent physics. We show that such models may recommend infeasible actions, mispredict interaction outcomes, or certify unsafe behavior. We argue that embodied AI requires world models that identify the simplest physical abstraction sufficient to answer an intervention query. Such a model comprises modular components, including environment representation, latent state and parameter estimation, action specification, interventional dynamics, and query-level response. An autonomous orchestrator should identify the relevant abstraction and compose compatible learned and structured components per query. When closed-form physics is unavailable, uncertain, or costly, the transition model may be analytic, simulated, learned, or hybrid, but it must preserve the structure that determines interventional outcomes. This decomposition makes the model interpretable, its components verifiable, and its outputs auditable against the query. It also provides a design principle for new world models and a feasibility test for existing ones: the right abstraction is not the most detailed model of the world, but the simplest model that preserves the distinctions relevant to the query. We demonstrate this approach on queries that existing systems fail to answer correctly, and outline how an orchestrator can dynamically assemble and adapt physically viable models for planning, control, and verification.

  • 9 authors
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May 27

V-CAGE: Context-Aware Generation and Verification for Scalable Long-Horizon Embodied Tasks

Learning long-horizon embodied behaviors from synthetic data remains challenging because generated scenes are often physically implausible, language-driven programs frequently "succeed" without satisfying task semantics, and high-level instructions require grounding into executable action sequences. To address these limitations, we introduce V-CAGE, a closed-loop framework for generating robust, semantically aligned manipulation datasets at scale. First, we propose a context-aware instantiation mechanism that enforces geometric consistency during scene synthesis. By dynamically maintaining a map of prohibited spatial areas as objects are placed, our system prevents interpenetration and ensures reachable, conflict-free configurations in cluttered environments. Second, to bridge the gap between abstract intent and low-level control, we employ a hierarchical instruction decomposition module. This decomposes high-level goals (e.g., "get ready for work") into compositional action primitives, facilitating coherent long-horizon planning. Crucially, we enforce semantic correctness through a VLM-based verification loop. Acting as a visual critic, the VLM performs rigorous rejection sampling after each subtask, filtering out "silent failures" where code executes but fails to achieve the visual goal. Experiments demonstrate that V-CAGE yields datasets with superior physical and semantic fidelity, significantly boosting the success rate and generalization of downstream policies compared to non-verified baselines.

  • 3 authors
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Jan 20

EmbodiedMidtrain: Bridging the Gap between Vision-Language Models and Vision-Language-Action Models via Mid-training

Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) inherit their visual and linguistic capabilities from Vision-Language Models (VLMs), yet most VLAs are built from off-the-shelf VLMs that are not adapted to the embodied domain, limiting their downstream performance. In this work, we propose EmbodiedMidtrain to bridge the gap between VLMs and VLAs. We first characterize the data distribution gap between them, showing that VLA data occupy compact regions that are largely separated from the broader VLM distribution, while the degree of alignment varies substantially both across and within VLM data sources. Then, we build a mid-training data engine that leverages a lightweight learnable proximity estimator to select the most VLA-aligned candidates from a large VLM pool, and mid-trains the VLM on this curated mixture before downstream VLA fine-tuning. Experiments on three robot manipulation benchmarks show that mid-training consistently improves performance across different VLM backbones, achieving results competitive with expert VLAs and off-the-shelf VLMs trained with larger model scale and training budgets. Further analysis reveals that mid-training provides a stronger initialization for VLA fine-tuning, with gains emerging from the earliest steps and widening throughout training. Moreover, the data engine captures both dataset-level and sample-level alignment signals, favoring spatial reasoning over text-centric tasks while preserving the diversity of the VLM data. We will release all code, data and models for future research.

Motion-2-to-3: Leveraging 2D Motion Data to Boost 3D Motion Generation

Text-driven human motion synthesis is capturing significant attention for its ability to effortlessly generate intricate movements from abstract text cues, showcasing its potential for revolutionizing motion design not only in film narratives but also in virtual reality experiences and computer game development. Existing methods often rely on 3D motion capture data, which require special setups resulting in higher costs for data acquisition, ultimately limiting the diversity and scope of human motion. In contrast, 2D human videos offer a vast and accessible source of motion data, covering a wider range of styles and activities. In this paper, we explore leveraging 2D human motion extracted from videos as an alternative data source to improve text-driven 3D motion generation. Our approach introduces a novel framework that disentangles local joint motion from global movements, enabling efficient learning of local motion priors from 2D data. We first train a single-view 2D local motion generator on a large dataset of text-motion pairs. To enhance this model to synthesize 3D motion, we fine-tune the generator with 3D data, transforming it into a multi-view generator that predicts view-consistent local joint motion and root dynamics. Experiments on the HumanML3D dataset and novel text prompts demonstrate that our method efficiently utilizes 2D data, supporting realistic 3D human motion generation and broadening the range of motion types it supports. Our code will be made publicly available at https://zju3dv.github.io/Motion-2-to-3/.

  • 11 authors
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Dec 17, 2024

OmniEVA: Embodied Versatile Planner via Task-Adaptive 3D-Grounded and Embodiment-aware Reasoning

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have opened new opportunities for embodied intelligence, enabling multimodal understanding, reasoning, and interaction, as well as continuous spatial decision-making. Nevertheless, current MLLM-based embodied systems face two critical limitations. First, Geometric Adaptability Gap: models trained solely on 2D inputs or with hard-coded 3D geometry injection suffer from either insufficient spatial information or restricted 2D generalization, leading to poor adaptability across tasks with diverse spatial demands. Second, Embodiment Constraint Gap: prior work often neglects the physical constraints and capacities of real robots, resulting in task plans that are theoretically valid but practically infeasible.To address these gaps, we introduce OmniEVA -- an embodied versatile planner that enables advanced embodied reasoning and task planning through two pivotal innovations: (1) a Task-Adaptive 3D Grounding mechanism, which introduces a gated router to perform explicit selective regulation of 3D fusion based on contextual requirements, enabling context-aware 3D grounding for diverse embodied tasks. (2) an Embodiment-Aware Reasoning framework that jointly incorporates task goals and embodiment constraints into the reasoning loop, resulting in planning decisions that are both goal-directed and executable. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that OmniEVA not only achieves state-of-the-art general embodied reasoning performance, but also exhibits a strong ability across a wide range of downstream scenarios. Evaluations of a suite of proposed embodied benchmarks, including both primitive and composite tasks, confirm its robust and versatile planning capabilities. Project page: https://omnieva.github.io

  • 13 authors
·
Sep 11, 2025 2

A Survey on Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) represent a significant frontier in embodied intelligence, aiming to bridge digital knowledge with physical-world interaction. While these models have demonstrated remarkable generalist capabilities, their deployment is severely hampered by the substantial computational and data requirements inherent to their underlying large-scale foundation models. Motivated by the urgent need to address these challenges, this survey presents the first comprehensive review of Efficient Vision-Language-Action models (Efficient VLAs) across the entire data-model-training process. Specifically, we introduce a unified taxonomy to systematically organize the disparate efforts in this domain, categorizing current techniques into three core pillars: (1) Efficient Model Design, focusing on efficient architectures and model compression; (2) Efficient Training, which reduces computational burdens during model learning; and (3) Efficient Data Collection, which addresses the bottlenecks in acquiring and utilizing robotic data. Through a critical review of state-of-the-art methods within this framework, this survey not only establishes a foundational reference for the community but also summarizes representative applications, delineates key challenges, and charts a roadmap for future research. We maintain a continuously updated project page to track our latest developments: https://evla-survey.github.io/

Tongji Tongji Unversity
·
Oct 27, 2025 2

Embodied.cpp: A Portable Inference Runtime of Embodied AI Models on Heterogeneous Robots

Embodied AI models now span vision-language-action (VLA) models and world-action models (WAMs), but practical deployment remains fragmented across model-specific Python stacks, backend assumptions, and robot-side glue code, especially on heterogeneous edge devices. Existing inference runtimes are designed mainly for request-response serving and therefore do not satisfy the runtime contract of embodied deployment: multi-rate execution inside closed-loop control, latency-first batch-1 inference on heterogeneous hardware, and extensible embodied interfaces beyond fixed token I/O. We present Embodied.cpp, a portable C++ inference runtime for embodied models. Based on an architectural analysis of representative VLA models and WAMs, Embodied.cpp captures a shared execution path and organizes it into five layers: input adapters, sequence builders, backbone execution, head plugins, and deployment adapters. The runtime provides modular multi-rate execution, latency-first fused inference, and extensible operator and I/O support, enabling deployment across heterogeneous devices, robots, and simulators through one backend abstraction. We evaluate Embodied.cpp on two VLA models, HY-VLA and pi0.5, and on a preliminary WAM benchmark using a LingBot-VA Transformer block. The VLA deployments achieve successful closed-loop execution with 100.0% and 91.0% task success rates, respectively. The WAM benchmark reduces block memory from 312.2 MiB to 88.1 MiB. These results show that Embodied.cpp improves deployment efficiency while preserving high accuracy across diverse embodied model architectures.

RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulation

Simulation-based data synthesis has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing real-world robotic manipulation. However, existing synthetic datasets remain insufficient for robust bimanual manipulation due to two challenges: (1) the lack of an efficient, scalable data generation method for novel tasks, and (2) oversimplified simulation environments that fail to capture real-world complexity. We present RoboTwin 2.0, a scalable simulation framework that enables automated, large-scale generation of diverse and realistic data, along with unified evaluation protocols for dual-arm manipulation. We first construct RoboTwin-OD, a large-scale object library comprising 731 instances across 147 categories, each annotated with semantic and manipulation-relevant labels. Building on this foundation, we develop an expert data synthesis pipeline that combines multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with simulation-in-the-loop refinement to generate task-level execution code automatically. To improve sim-to-real transfer, RoboTwin 2.0 incorporates structured domain randomization along five axes: clutter, lighting, background, tabletop height and language instructions, thereby enhancing data diversity and policy robustness. We instantiate this framework across 50 dual-arm tasks spanning five robot embodiments, and pre-collect over 100,000 domain-randomized expert trajectories. Empirical results show a 10.9% gain in code generation success and improved generalization to novel real-world scenarios. A VLA model fine-tuned on our dataset achieves a 367% relative improvement (42.0% vs. 9.0%) on unseen scene real-world tasks, while zero-shot models trained solely on our synthetic data achieve a 228% relative gain, highlighting strong generalization without real-world supervision. We release the data generator, benchmark, dataset, and code to support scalable research in robust bimanual manipulation.

  • 26 authors
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Jun 22, 2025 1

BEAT: A Large-Scale Semantic and Emotional Multi-Modal Dataset for Conversational Gestures Synthesis

Achieving realistic, vivid, and human-like synthesized conversational gestures conditioned on multi-modal data is still an unsolved problem due to the lack of available datasets, models and standard evaluation metrics. To address this, we build Body-Expression-Audio-Text dataset, BEAT, which has i) 76 hours, high-quality, multi-modal data captured from 30 speakers talking with eight different emotions and in four different languages, ii) 32 millions frame-level emotion and semantic relevance annotations. Our statistical analysis on BEAT demonstrates the correlation of conversational gestures with facial expressions, emotions, and semantics, in addition to the known correlation with audio, text, and speaker identity. Based on this observation, we propose a baseline model, Cascaded Motion Network (CaMN), which consists of above six modalities modeled in a cascaded architecture for gesture synthesis. To evaluate the semantic relevancy, we introduce a metric, Semantic Relevance Gesture Recall (SRGR). Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate metrics' validness, ground truth data quality, and baseline's state-of-the-art performance. To the best of our knowledge, BEAT is the largest motion capture dataset for investigating human gestures, which may contribute to a number of different research fields, including controllable gesture synthesis, cross-modality analysis, and emotional gesture recognition. The data, code and model are available on https://pantomatrix.github.io/BEAT/.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 10, 2022

Long Grounded Thoughts: Distilling Compositional Visual Reasoning Chains at Scale

Recent progress in multimodal reasoning has been driven largely by undisclosed datasets and proprietary data synthesis recipes, leaving open questions about how to systematically build large-scale, vision-centric reasoning datasets, particularly for tasks that go beyond visual math. In this work, we introduce a new reasoning data generation framework spanning diverse skills and levels of complexity with over 1M high-quality synthetic vision-centric questions. The dataset also includes preference data and instruction prompts supporting both offline and online RL. Our synthesis framework proceeds in two stages: (1) scale; and (2) complexity. Reasoning traces are then synthesized through a two-stage process that leverages VLMs and reasoning LLMs, producing CoT traces for VLMs that capture the richness and diverse cognitive behaviors found in frontier reasoning models. Remarkably, we show that finetuning Qwen2.5-VL-7B on our data outperforms all open-data baselines across all evaluated vision-centric benchmarks, and even surpasses strong closed-data models such as MiMo-VL-7B-RL on V* Bench, CV-Bench and MMStar-V. Perhaps most surprising, despite being entirely vision-centric, our data transfers positively to text-only reasoning (MMLU-Pro) and audio reasoning (MMAU), demonstrating its effectiveness. Similarly, despite not containing videos or embodied visual data, we observe notable gains when evaluating on a single-evidence embodied QA benchmark (NiEH). Finally, we use our data to analyze the entire VLM post-training pipeline. Our empirical analysis highlights that (i) SFT on high-quality data with non-linear reasoning traces is essential for effective online RL, (ii) staged offline RL matches online RL's performance while reducing compute demands, and (iii) careful SFT on high quality data can substantially improve out-of-domain, cross-modality transfer.

nvidia NVIDIA
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Nov 7, 2025 2

AgentSense: Virtual Sensor Data Generation Using LLM Agents in Simulated Home Environments

A major challenge in developing robust and generalizable Human Activity Recognition (HAR) systems for smart homes is the lack of large and diverse labeled datasets. Variations in home layouts, sensor configurations, and individual behaviors further exacerbate this issue. To address this, we leverage the idea of embodied AI agents -- virtual agents that perceive and act within simulated environments guided by internal world models. We introduce AgentSense, a virtual data generation pipeline in which agents live out daily routines in simulated smart homes, with behavior guided by Large Language Models (LLMs). The LLM generates diverse synthetic personas and realistic routines grounded in the environment, which are then decomposed into fine-grained actions. These actions are executed in an extended version of the VirtualHome simulator, which we augment with virtual ambient sensors that record the agents' activities. Our approach produces rich, privacy-preserving sensor data that reflects real-world diversity. We evaluate AgentSense on five real HAR datasets. Models pretrained on the generated data consistently outperform baselines, especially in low-resource settings. Furthermore, combining the generated virtual sensor data with a small amount of real data achieves performance comparable to training on full real-world datasets. These results highlight the potential of using LLM-guided embodied agents for scalable and cost-effective sensor data generation in HAR. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZikangLeng/AgentSense.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 13, 2025

ERA: Transforming VLMs into Embodied Agents via Embodied Prior Learning and Online Reinforcement Learning

Recent advances in embodied AI highlight the potential of vision language models (VLMs) as agents capable of perception, reasoning, and interaction in complex environments. However, top-performing systems rely on large-scale models that are costly to deploy, while smaller VLMs lack the necessary knowledge and skills to succeed. To bridge this gap, we present Embodied Reasoning Agent (ERA), a two-stage framework that integrates prior knowledge learning and online reinforcement learning (RL). The first stage, Embodied Prior Learning, distills foundational knowledge from three types of data: (1) Trajectory-Augmented Priors, which enrich existing trajectory data with structured reasoning generated by stronger models; (2) Environment-Anchored Priors, which provide in-environment knowledge and grounding supervision; and (3) External Knowledge Priors, which transfer general knowledge from out-of-environment datasets. In the second stage, we develop an online RL pipeline that builds on these priors to further enhance agent performance. To overcome the inherent challenges in agent RL, including long horizons, sparse rewards, and training instability, we introduce three key designs: self-summarization for context management, dense reward shaping, and turn-level policy optimization. Extensive experiments on both high-level planning (EB-ALFRED) and low-level control (EB-Manipulation) tasks demonstrate that ERA-3B surpasses both prompting-based large models and previous training-based baselines. Specifically, it achieves overall improvements of 8.4\% on EB-ALFRED and 19.4\% on EB-Manipulation over GPT-4o, and exhibits strong generalization to unseen tasks. Overall, ERA offers a practical path toward scalable embodied intelligence, providing methodological insights for future embodied AI systems.

Beyond Description: Cognitively Benchmarking Fine-Grained Action for Embodied Agents

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show promising results as decision-making engines for embodied agents operating in complex, physical environments. However, existing benchmarks often prioritize high-level planning or spatial reasoning, leaving the fine-grained action intelligence required for embodied physical interaction underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce CFG-Bench, a new benchmark designed to systematically evaluate this crucial capability. CFG-Bench consists of 1,368 curated videos paired with 19,562 three-modalities question-answer pairs targeting four cognitive abilities: 1) Physical Interaction, 2) Temporal-Causal Relation, 3) Intentional Understanding, and 4) Evaluative Judgment. Together, these dimensions provide a systematic framework for assessing a model's ability to translate visual observations into actionable knowledge, moving beyond mere surface-level recognition. Our comprehensive evaluation on CFG-Bench reveals that leading MLLMs struggle to produce detailed instructions for physical interactions and exhibit profound limitations in the higher-order reasoning of intention and evaluation. Moreover, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on our data demonstrates that teaching an MLLMs to articulate fine-grained actions directly translates to significant performance gains on established embodied benchmarks. Our analysis highlights these limitations and offers insights for developing more capable and grounded embodied agents.

ZhejiangUniversity Zhejiang University
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Nov 23, 2025 2

EmbodiedVSR: Dynamic Scene Graph-Guided Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Visual Spatial Tasks

While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made groundbreaking progress in embodied intelligence, they still face significant challenges in spatial reasoning for complex long-horizon tasks. To address this gap, we propose EmbodiedVSR (Embodied Visual Spatial Reasoning), a novel framework that integrates dynamic scene graph-guided Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to enhance spatial understanding for embodied agents. By explicitly constructing structured knowledge representations through dynamic scene graphs, our method enables zero-shot spatial reasoning without task-specific fine-tuning. This approach not only disentangles intricate spatial relationships but also aligns reasoning steps with actionable environmental dynamics. To rigorously evaluate performance, we introduce the eSpatial-Benchmark, a comprehensive dataset including real-world embodied scenarios with fine-grained spatial annotations and adaptive task difficulty levels. Experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing MLLM-based methods in accuracy and reasoning coherence, particularly in long-horizon tasks requiring iterative environment interaction. The results reveal the untapped potential of MLLMs for embodied intelligence when equipped with structured, explainable reasoning mechanisms, paving the way for more reliable deployment in real-world spatial applications. The codes and datasets will be released soon.

  • 16 authors
·
Mar 14, 2025

FindingDory: A Benchmark to Evaluate Memory in Embodied Agents

Large vision-language models have recently demonstrated impressive performance in planning and control tasks, driving interest in their application to real-world robotics. However, deploying these models for reasoning in embodied contexts is limited by their ability to incorporate long-term experience collected across multiple days and represented by vast collections of images. Current VLMs typically struggle to process more than a few hundred images concurrently, highlighting the need for more efficient mechanisms to handle long-term memory in embodied settings. To effectively evaluate these models for long-horizon control, a benchmark must specifically target scenarios where memory is crucial for success. Existing long-video QA benchmarks overlook embodied challenges like object manipulation and navigation, which demand low-level skills and fine-grained reasoning over past interactions. Moreover, effective memory integration in embodied agents involves both recalling relevant historical information and executing actions based on that information, making it essential to study these aspects together rather than in isolation. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark for long-range embodied tasks in the Habitat simulator. This benchmark evaluates memory-based capabilities across 60 tasks requiring sustained engagement and contextual awareness in an environment. The tasks can also be procedurally extended to longer and more challenging versions, enabling scalable evaluation of memory and reasoning. We also present baselines that integrate state-of-the-art VLMs with low level navigation policies, assessing their performance on these memory-intensive tasks and highlight areas for improvement.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 18, 2025

DM0: An Embodied-Native Vision-Language-Action Model towards Physical AI

Moving beyond the traditional paradigm of adapting internet-pretrained models to physical tasks, we present DM0, an Embodied-Native Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework designed for Physical AI. Unlike approaches that treat physical grounding as a fine-tuning afterthought, DM0 unifies embodied manipulation and navigation by learning from heterogeneous data sources from the onset. Our methodology follows a comprehensive three-stage pipeline: Pretraining, Mid-Training, and Post-Training. First, we conduct large-scale unified pretraining on the Vision-Language Model (VLM) using diverse corpora--seamlessly integrating web text, autonomous driving scenarios, and embodied interaction logs-to jointly acquire semantic knowledge and physical priors. Subsequently, we build a flow-matching action expert atop the VLM. To reconcile high-level reasoning with low-level control, DM0 employs a hybrid training strategy: for embodied data, gradients from the action expert are not backpropagated to the VLM to preserve generalized representations, while the VLM remains trainable on non-embodied data. Furthermore, we introduce an Embodied Spatial Scaffolding strategy to construct spatial Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, effectively constraining the action solution space. Experiments on the RoboChallenge benchmark demonstrate that DM0 achieves state-of-the-art performance in both Specialist and Generalist settings on Table30.

  • 49 authors
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Feb 16

RoboOS: A Hierarchical Embodied Framework for Cross-Embodiment and Multi-Agent Collaboration

The dawn of embodied intelligence has ushered in an unprecedented imperative for resilient, cognition-enabled multi-agent collaboration across next-generation ecosystems, revolutionizing paradigms in autonomous manufacturing, adaptive service robotics, and cyber-physical production architectures. However, current robotic systems face significant limitations, such as limited cross-embodiment adaptability, inefficient task scheduling, and insufficient dynamic error correction. While End-to-end VLA models demonstrate inadequate long-horizon planning and task generalization, hierarchical VLA models suffer from a lack of cross-embodiment and multi-agent coordination capabilities. To address these challenges, we introduce RoboOS, the first open-source embodied system built on a Brain-Cerebellum hierarchical architecture, enabling a paradigm shift from single-agent to multi-agent intelligence. Specifically, RoboOS consists of three key components: (1) Embodied Brain Model (RoboBrain), a MLLM designed for global perception and high-level decision-making; (2) Cerebellum Skill Library, a modular, plug-and-play toolkit that facilitates seamless execution of multiple skills; and (3) Real-Time Shared Memory, a spatiotemporal synchronization mechanism for coordinating multi-agent states. By integrating hierarchical information flow, RoboOS bridges Embodied Brain and Cerebellum Skill Library, facilitating robust planning, scheduling, and error correction for long-horizon tasks, while ensuring efficient multi-agent collaboration through Real-Time Shared Memory. Furthermore, we enhance edge-cloud communication and cloud-based distributed inference to facilitate high-frequency interactions and enable scalable deployment. Extensive real-world experiments across various scenarios, demonstrate RoboOS's versatility in supporting heterogeneous embodiments. Project website: https://github.com/FlagOpen/RoboOS

  • 8 authors
·
May 6, 2025