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Aug 7

iMaC: Translating Actions into Motion and Contact Images for Embodied World Models

Embodied world models have emerged as a pivotal paradigm for visual robotic decision-making and interactive environment simulation. However, conventional embodied frameworks rely on low-dimensional structured action vectors (e.g., joint angles and end-effector poses), which suffer from limited expressive capacity, poor generalization across diverse embodiments, and unnatural dynamic modeling for complex physical interactions. To address these limitations, this paper proposesiMac (Image as Action Control), a novel unified control paradigm that treats raw visual images as native action representations for embodied world models. Departing from traditional explicit kinematic action encoding, iMac formulates continuous visual manipulation as image-based action tokens, which inherently encapsulate spatial motion intentions, interactive geometric constraints and subtle physical dynamics. We construct a dual-branch embodied architecture consisting of an image-action encoder and a dynamic world predictor: the encoder compresses target-driven visual images into compact action embeddings, while the predictor learns environment transition rules conditioned on image actions to achieve high-fidelity future state prediction and closed-loop embodied control. Extensive experiments are conducted on public embodied manipulation benchmarks and real-world robotic scenarios. The results demonstrate that iMac outperforms vector-based action control baselines in prediction accuracy, task success rate and cross-scene generalization ability. Moreover, our image-action design eliminates the reliance on manually defined action spaces, realizing flexible and universal control for heterogeneous embodied agents. This work provides an innovative visual-action perspective for embodied world models, offering a simple yet effective paradigm for scalable robotic perception and manipulation.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 7 2

Bridging Scene Generation and Planning: Driving with World Model via Unifying Vision and Motion Representation

End-to-end autonomous driving aims to generate safe and plausible planning policies from raw sensor input. Driving world models have shown great potential in learning rich representations by predicting the future evolution of a driving scene. However, existing driving world models primarily focus on visual scene representation, and motion representation is not explicitly designed to be planner-shared and inheritable, leaving a schism between the optimization of visual scene generation and the requirements of precise motion planning. We present WorldDrive, a holistic framework that couples scene generation and real-time planning via unifying vision and motion representation. We first introduce a Trajectory-aware Driving World Model, which conditions on a trajectory vocabulary to enforce consistency between visual dynamics and motion intentions, enabling the generation of diverse and plausible future scenes conditioned on a specific trajectory. We transfer the vision and motion encoders to a downstream Multi-modal Planner, ensuring the driving policy operates on mature representations pre-optimized by scene generation. A simple interaction between motion representation, visual representation, and ego status can generate high-quality, multi-modal trajectories. Furthermore, to exploit the world model's foresight, we propose a Future-aware Rewarder, which distills future latent representation from the frozen world model to evaluate and select optimal trajectories in real-time. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM, NAVSIM-v2, and nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate that WorldDrive achieves leading planning performance among vision-only methods while maintaining high-fidelity action-controlled video generation capabilities, providing strong evidence for the effectiveness of unifying vision and motion representation for robust autonomous driving.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 16

MotionCanvas: Cinematic Shot Design with Controllable Image-to-Video Generation

This paper presents a method that allows users to design cinematic video shots in the context of image-to-video generation. Shot design, a critical aspect of filmmaking, involves meticulously planning both camera movements and object motions in a scene. However, enabling intuitive shot design in modern image-to-video generation systems presents two main challenges: first, effectively capturing user intentions on the motion design, where both camera movements and scene-space object motions must be specified jointly; and second, representing motion information that can be effectively utilized by a video diffusion model to synthesize the image animations. To address these challenges, we introduce MotionCanvas, a method that integrates user-driven controls into image-to-video (I2V) generation models, allowing users to control both object and camera motions in a scene-aware manner. By connecting insights from classical computer graphics and contemporary video generation techniques, we demonstrate the ability to achieve 3D-aware motion control in I2V synthesis without requiring costly 3D-related training data. MotionCanvas enables users to intuitively depict scene-space motion intentions, and translates them into spatiotemporal motion-conditioning signals for video diffusion models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a wide range of real-world image content and shot-design scenarios, highlighting its potential to enhance the creative workflows in digital content creation and adapt to various image and video editing applications.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 6, 2025 3

Learning Human-Humanoid Coordination for Collaborative Object Carrying

Human-humanoid collaboration shows significant promise for applications in healthcare, domestic assistance, and manufacturing. While compliant robot-human collaboration has been extensively developed for robotic arms, enabling compliant human-humanoid collaboration remains largely unexplored due to humanoids' complex whole-body dynamics. In this paper, we propose a proprioception-only reinforcement learning approach, COLA, that combines leader and follower behaviors within a single policy. The model is trained in a closed-loop environment with dynamic object interactions to predict object motion patterns and human intentions implicitly, enabling compliant collaboration to maintain load balance through coordinated trajectory planning. We evaluate our approach through comprehensive simulator and real-world experiments on collaborative carrying tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness, generalization, and robustness of our model across various terrains and objects. Simulation experiments demonstrate that our model reduces human effort by 24.7%. compared to baseline approaches while maintaining object stability. Real-world experiments validate robust collaborative carrying across different object types (boxes, desks, stretchers, etc.) and movement patterns (straight-line, turning, slope climbing). Human user studies with 23 participants confirm an average improvement of 27.4% compared to baseline models. Our method enables compliant human-humanoid collaborative carrying without requiring external sensors or complex interaction models, offering a practical solution for real-world deployment.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 16, 2025

Shape-for-Motion: Precise and Consistent Video Editing with 3D Proxy

Recent advances in deep generative modeling have unlocked unprecedented opportunities for video synthesis. In real-world applications, however, users often seek tools to faithfully realize their creative editing intentions with precise and consistent control. Despite the progress achieved by existing methods, ensuring fine-grained alignment with user intentions remains an open and challenging problem. In this work, we present Shape-for-Motion, a novel framework that incorporates a 3D proxy for precise and consistent video editing. Shape-for-Motion achieves this by converting the target object in the input video to a time-consistent mesh, i.e., a 3D proxy, allowing edits to be performed directly on the proxy and then inferred back to the video frames. To simplify the editing process, we design a novel Dual-Propagation Strategy that allows users to perform edits on the 3D mesh of a single frame, and the edits are then automatically propagated to the 3D meshes of the other frames. The 3D meshes for different frames are further projected onto the 2D space to produce the edited geometry and texture renderings, which serve as inputs to a decoupled video diffusion model for generating edited results. Our framework supports various precise and physically-consistent manipulations across the video frames, including pose editing, rotation, scaling, translation, texture modification, and object composition. Our approach marks a key step toward high-quality, controllable video editing workflows. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our approach. Project page: https://shapeformotion.github.io/

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 27, 2025 1

LIME: Learning Intent-aware Camera Motion from Egocentric Video

Autonomous robots often need to move their camera before they can act: to inspect an object, reveal an occluded region, or obtain a view that responds to a user's intent. While vision-language navigation translates instructions to base motion and vision-language-action policies map instructions to manipulation actions, language-conditioned camera motion remains comparatively underexplored as a first-class action. We formulate language-conditioned camera motion generation: given a current RGB observation and a free-form natural-language intent, predict a relative target camera pose for the next observation. This task is inherently non-trivial: viewpoint changes are driven by latent perceptual intentions, and a valid motion may operate at different semantic granularity, from entering a room to looking around a corner, inspecting a visible object, or revealing an occluded detail. To model this structure, we mine multi-intention camera-motion supervision from egocentric video, pairing plausible intents and observation-gain descriptions with relative SE(3) target poses. We propose LIME, a vision-language camera-motion generator that combines an auto-regressive observation-gain output with a continuous flow-matching pose head. This design lets the model jointly predict what the next view should reveal while representing multi-hypothesis target views. Across experiments and downstream robotic tasks, we show that LIME can learn to actively choose camera poses from passive human video, turning ordinary egocentric recordings into supervision for intent-aware active perception.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 1

MoGIC: Boosting Motion Generation via Intention Understanding and Visual Context

Existing text-driven motion generation methods often treat synthesis as a bidirectional mapping between language and motion, but remain limited in capturing the causal logic of action execution and the human intentions that drive behavior. The absence of visual grounding further restricts precision and personalization, as language alone cannot specify fine-grained spatiotemporal details. We propose MoGIC, a unified framework that integrates intention modeling and visual priors into multimodal motion synthesis. By jointly optimizing multimodal-conditioned motion generation and intention prediction, MoGIC uncovers latent human goals, leverages visual priors to enhance generation, and exhibits versatile multimodal generative capability. We further introduce a mixture-of-attention mechanism with adaptive scope to enable effective local alignment between conditional tokens and motion subsequences. To support this paradigm, we curate Mo440H, a 440-hour benchmark from 21 high-quality motion datasets. Experiments show that after finetuning, MoGIC reduces FID by 38.6\% on HumanML3D and 34.6\% on Mo440H, surpasses LLM-based methods in motion captioning with a lightweight text head, and further enables intention prediction and vision-conditioned generation, advancing controllable motion synthesis and intention understanding. The code is available at https://github.com/JunyuShi02/MoGIC

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 3, 2025

RHINO: Learning Real-Time Humanoid-Human-Object Interaction from Human Demonstrations

Humanoid robots have shown success in locomotion and manipulation. Despite these basic abilities, humanoids are still required to quickly understand human instructions and react based on human interaction signals to become valuable assistants in human daily life. Unfortunately, most existing works only focus on multi-stage interactions, treating each task separately, and neglecting real-time feedback. In this work, we aim to empower humanoid robots with real-time reaction abilities to achieve various tasks, allowing human to interrupt robots at any time, and making robots respond to humans immediately. To support such abilities, we propose a general humanoid-human-object interaction framework, named RHINO, i.e., Real-time Humanoid-human Interaction and Object manipulation. RHINO provides a unified view of reactive motion, instruction-based manipulation, and safety concerns, over multiple human signal modalities, such as languages, images, and motions. RHINO is a hierarchical learning framework, enabling humanoids to learn reaction skills from human-human-object demonstrations and teleoperation data. In particular, it decouples the interaction process into two levels: 1) a high-level planner inferring human intentions from real-time human behaviors; and 2) a low-level controller achieving reactive motion behaviors and object manipulation skills based on the predicted intentions. We evaluate the proposed framework on a real humanoid robot and demonstrate its effectiveness, flexibility, and safety in various scenarios.

  • 10 authors
·
Feb 18, 2025

WOMD-Reasoning: A Large-Scale Dataset for Interaction Reasoning in Driving

Language models uncover unprecedented abilities in analyzing driving scenarios, owing to their limitless knowledge accumulated from text-based pre-training. Naturally, they should particularly excel in analyzing rule-based interactions, such as those triggered by traffic laws, which are well documented in texts. However, such interaction analysis remains underexplored due to the lack of dedicated language datasets that address it. Therefore, we propose Waymo Open Motion Dataset-Reasoning (WOMD-Reasoning), a comprehensive large-scale Q&As dataset built on WOMD focusing on describing and reasoning traffic rule-induced interactions in driving scenarios. WOMD-Reasoning also presents by far the largest multi-modal Q&A dataset, with 3 million Q&As on real-world driving scenarios, covering a wide range of driving topics from map descriptions and motion status descriptions to narratives and analyses of agents' interactions, behaviors, and intentions. To showcase the applications of WOMD-Reasoning, we design Motion-LLaVA, a motion-language model fine-tuned on WOMD-Reasoning. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations are performed on WOMD-Reasoning dataset as well as the outputs of Motion-LLaVA, supporting the data quality and wide applications of WOMD-Reasoning, in interaction predictions, traffic rule compliance plannings, etc. The dataset and its vision modal extension are available on https://waymo.com/open/download/. The codes & prompts to build it are available on https://github.com/yhli123/WOMD-Reasoning.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 5, 2024

INTACT: Isomorphic Intent-to-Action Learning for Search-Free World Models

Forward latent world models predict how actions change a scene, but recover actions for a desired change only through expensive test-time search. We introduce INTACT (INtent-To-ACTion), an end-to-end JEPA that turns action-labeled, reward-free trajectories into a deployable intent-to-action interface. Each transition supplies physical intent z_{t+1}-z_t, while a future goal supplies deployment intent sg(z_g)-z_t. The architecture is isomorphic between the local and goal motion-intent backbone-input graphs through an identical four-slot grammar and shared parameters, and between supported local and goal motion-intent families through action-law semantics induced by the same predictor rather than pointwise latent equality. INTACT also provides intact transfer from RGB evidence to action-effective latent intent coordinates and from intent families to their corresponding action-law families. Asymmetric endpoint gradients ground physical successors and fix future goals as anchors, joining representation learning and control without pointwise latent matching or globally linear dynamics. The resulting coordinates support a robust distributional action law: its conditional mean serves directly as a search-free policy, while sampling remains available for diversity or optional verification. On the four official LeWM tasks, one-epoch, zero-search models reach 85.78\%, 100.00\%, 97.67\%, and 97.89\% success. Optional local CEM centered on the Direct plan reaches 96.86\% macro success using 384 instead of 9,000 candidate sequences, reducing sampling by 23.44times while improving pure CEM by 16.00 points. One shared four-task encoder reaches 89.39\% E5 Direct macro and improves every task over jointly trained LeWM, while predicted--expert action-family kNN tracks Direct success at r=0.954. Direct inference takes 2.9--5.5 ms.

ProAct: A Dual-System Framework for Proactive Embodied Social Agents

Embodied social agents have recently advanced in generating synchronized speech and gestures. However, most interactive systems remain fundamentally reactive, responding only to current sensory inputs within a short temporal window. Proactive social behavior, in contrast, requires deliberation over accumulated context and intent inference, which conflicts with the strict latency budget of real-time interaction. We present ProAct, a dual-system framework that reconciles this time-scale conflict by decoupling a low-latency Behavioral System for streaming multimodal interaction from a slower Cognitive System which performs long-horizon social reasoning and produces high-level proactive intentions. To translate deliberative intentions into continuous non-verbal behaviors without disrupting fluency, we introduce a streaming flow-matching model conditioned on intentions via ControlNet. This mechanism supports asynchronous intention injection, enabling seamless transitions between reactive and proactive gestures within a single motion stream. We deploy ProAct on a physical humanoid robot and evaluate both motion quality and interactive effectiveness. In real-world interaction user studies, participants and observers consistently prefer ProAct over reactive variants in perceived proactivity, social presence, and overall engagement, demonstrating the benefits of dual-system proactive control for embodied social interaction.

GazeVLA: Learning Human Intention for Robotic Manipulation

Embodied foundation models have achieved significant breakthroughs in robotic manipulation, yet they still depend heavily on large-scale robot demonstrations. Although recent works have explored leveraging human data to alleviate this dependency, effectively extracting transferable knowledge remains a significant challenge due to the inherent embodiment gap between human and robot. We argue that the intention underlying human actions can serve as a powerful intermediate representation for bridging this gap. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that explicitly learns and transfers human intention to facilitate robotic manipulation. Specifically, we model intention through gaze, as it naturally precedes physical actions and serves as an observable proxy for human intent. Our model is first pretrained on a large-scale egocentric human dataset to capture human intention and its synergy with action, followed by finetuning on a small set of robot and human data. During inference, the model adopts a Chain-of-Thought reasoning paradigm, sequentially predicting intention before executing the action. Extensive evaluations in simulation and real-world settings, across long-horizon and fine-grained tasks, and under few-shot and robustness benchmarks, show that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines, generalizes better, and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://gazevla.github.io .

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 29

Action Emergence from Streaming Intent

We formalize action emergence as a target capability for end-to-end autonomous driving: the ability to generate physically feasible, semantically appropriate, and safety-compliant actions in arbitrary, long-tail traffic scenes through scene-conditioned reasoning rather than retrieval or interpolation of learned scene-action mappings. We show that previous paradigms cannot deliver action emergence: autoregressive trajectory decoders collapse the inherently multimodal future into a single averaged output, while diffusion and flow-matching generators express multimodality but are not steerable by reasoned intent. We propose Streaming Intent as a concrete way to approach action emergence: a mechanism that makes driving intent (i) semantically streamed through a continuous chain-of-thought that causally derives the intent from scene understanding, and (ii) temporally streamed across clips so that intent commitments remain coherent along the driving horizon. We realize Streaming Intent in a VLA model we call SI (Streaming Intent). SI autoregressively decodes a four-step chain-of-thought and emits an intent token; the decoded intent then drives classifier-free guidance (CFG) on a flow-matching action head, requiring only two denoising steps to generate the final trajectory. On the Waymo End-to-End benchmark, SI achieves competitive aggregate performance, with an RFS score of 7.96 on the validation set and 7.74 on the test set. Beyond aggregate metrics, the model demonstrates -- to our knowledge for the first time in a fully end-to-end VLA -- intent-faithful controllability: for a fixed scene, varying the intent class at inference yields qualitatively distinct yet consistently high-quality plans, arising purely from data-driven learning without any pre-built trajectory bank or hand-coded post-hoc selector.

  • 6 authors
·
May 11

AIM: Intent-Aware Unified world action Modeling with Spatial Value Maps

Pretrained video generation models provide strong priors for robot control, but existing unified world action models still struggle to decode reliable actions without substantial robot-specific training. We attribute this limitation to a structural mismatch: while video models capture how scenes evolve, action generation requires explicit reasoning about where to interact and the underlying manipulation intent. We introduce AIM, an intent-aware unified world action model that bridges this gap via an explicit spatial interface. Instead of decoding actions directly from future visual representations, AIM predicts an aligned spatial value map that encodes task-relevant interaction structure, enabling a control-oriented abstraction of future dynamics. Built on a pretrained video generation model, AIM jointly models future observations and value maps within a shared mixture-of-transformers architecture. It employs intent-causal attention to route future information to the action branch exclusively through the value representation. We further propose a self-distillation reinforcement learning stage that freezes the video and value branches and optimizes only the action head using dense rewards derived from projected value-map responses together with sparse task-level signals. To support training and evaluation, we construct a simulation dataset of 30K manipulation trajectories with synchronized multi-view observations, actions, and value-map annotations. Experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 benchmark show that AIM achieves a 94.0% average success rate, significantly outperforming prior unified world action baselines. Notably, the improvement is more pronounced in long-horizon and contact-sensitive manipulation tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of explicit spatial-intent modeling as a bridge between visual world modeling and robot control.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 12

How You Move Tells What You'll Do: Trajectory-Conditioned Egocentric Prediction

Predicting how a person's first-person view will evolve (what action will follow, what plan completes a task, whether an in-progress shot will score) is fundamentally under-specified: the same context admits many plausible futures, and a model trained to minimize prediction error is forced to hedge or average across them, getting it wrong either way. Two findings shape our approach. First, the future camera trajectory, the path the head carves through space, lets the model commit to one of those futures: it carries the operator's intent in a form fine enough to determine how an action will unfold, substantially outperforming language as a conditioning signal. Second, this same intent makes the trajectory itself partially predictable from the context at hand, enough that trajectory need not be observed at test time to recover most of the gain. We instantiate these findings as TrajPilot, a model that predicts candidate future trajectories from egocentric context and uses them to pilot action prediction in an action-aligned embedding space where language shapes the structure but is never used as a conditioning input. TrajPilot beats VLM and structured-planner baselines on procedural planning across Ego-Exo4D atomic, Ego-Exo4D Keystep, Ego4D GoalStep, and EgoPER, with the trajectory advantage widening with horizon (exactly where prior planners collapse) and holding under RGB-only camera-pose estimation. With the goal masked at inference, the same model performs goal-free anticipation, beating VLM baselines on Ego-Exo4D atomic and extending to EPIC-Kitchens-100 and basketball shot-outcome prediction.

  • 4 authors
·
May 18

InterPrior: Scaling Generative Control for Physics-Based Human-Object Interactions

Humans rarely plan whole-body interactions with objects at the level of explicit whole-body movements. High-level intentions, such as affordance, define the goal, while coordinated balance, contact, and manipulation can emerge naturally from underlying physical and motor priors. Scaling such priors is key to enabling humanoids to compose and generalize loco-manipulation skills across diverse contexts while maintaining physically coherent whole-body coordination. To this end, we introduce InterPrior, a scalable framework that learns a unified generative controller through large-scale imitation pretraining and post-training by reinforcement learning. InterPrior first distills a full-reference imitation expert into a versatile, goal-conditioned variational policy that reconstructs motion from multimodal observations and high-level intent. While the distilled policy reconstructs training behaviors, it does not generalize reliably due to the vast configuration space of large-scale human-object interactions. To address this, we apply data augmentation with physical perturbations, and then perform reinforcement learning finetuning to improve competence on unseen goals and initializations. Together, these steps consolidate the reconstructed latent skills into a valid manifold, yielding a motion prior that generalizes beyond the training data, e.g., it can incorporate new behaviors such as interactions with unseen objects. We further demonstrate its effectiveness for user-interactive control and its potential for real robot deployment.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 5 3

CookBench: A Long-Horizon Embodied Planning Benchmark for Complex Cooking Scenarios

Embodied Planning is dedicated to the goal of creating agents capable of executing long-horizon tasks in complex physical worlds. However, existing embodied planning benchmarks frequently feature short-horizon tasks and coarse-grained action primitives. To address this challenge, we introduce CookBench, a benchmark for long-horizon planning in complex cooking scenarios. By leveraging a high-fidelity simulation environment built upon the powerful Unity game engine, we define frontier AI challenges in a complex, realistic environment. The core task in CookBench is designed as a two-stage process. First, in Intention Recognition, an agent needs to accurately parse a user's complex intent. Second, in Embodied Interaction, the agent should execute the identified cooking goal through a long-horizon, fine-grained sequence of physical actions. Unlike existing embodied planning benchmarks, we refine the action granularity to a spatial level that considers crucial operational information while abstracting away low-level robotic control. Besides, We provide a comprehensive toolset that encapsulates the simulator. Its unified API supports both macro-level operations, such as placing orders and purchasing ingredients, and a rich set of fine-grained embodied actions for physical interaction, enabling researchers to focus on high-level planning and decision-making. Furthermore, we present an in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art, closed-source Large Language Model and Vision-Language Model, revealing their major shortcomings and challenges posed by complex, long-horizon tasks. The full benchmark will be open-sourced to facilitate future research.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 5, 2025

Intent Prediction-Driven Model Predictive Control for UAV Planning and Navigation in Dynamic Environments

Aerial robots can enhance construction site productivity by autonomously handling inspection and mapping tasks. However, ensuring safe navigation near human workers remains challenging. While navigation in static environments has been well studied, navigating dynamic environments remains open due to challenges in perception and planning. Payload limitations restrict the robots to using cameras with limited fields of view, resulting in unreliable perception and tracking during collision avoidance. Moreover, the rapidly changing conditions of dynamic environments can quickly make the generated optimal trajectory outdated.To address these challenges, this paper presents a comprehensive navigation framework that integrates perception, intent prediction, and planning. Our perception module detects and tracks dynamic obstacles efficiently and handles tracking loss and occlusion during collision avoidance. The proposed intent prediction module employs a Markov Decision Process (MDP) to forecast potential actions of dynamic obstacles with the possible future trajectories. Finally, a novel intent-based planning algorithm, leveraging model predictive control (MPC), is applied to generate navigation trajectories. Simulation and physical experiments demonstrate that our method improves the safety of navigation by achieving the fewest collisions compared to benchmarks.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 23, 2024

From Intention to Execution: Probing the Generalization Boundaries of Vision-Language-Action Models

One promise that Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models hold over traditional imitation learning for robotics is to leverage the broad generalization capabilities of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to produce versatile, "generalist" robot policies. However, current evaluations of VLAs remain insufficient. Traditional imitation learning benchmarks are unsuitable due to the lack of language instructions. Emerging benchmarks for VLAs that incorporate language often come with limited evaluation tasks and do not intend to investigate how much VLM pretraining truly contributes to the generalization capabilities of the downstream robotic policy. Meanwhile, much research relies on real-world robot setups designed in isolation by different institutions, which creates a barrier for reproducibility and accessibility. To address this gap, we introduce a unified probing suite of 50 simulation-based tasks across 10 subcategories spanning language instruction, vision, and objects. We systematically evaluate several state-of-the-art VLA architectures on this suite to understand their generalization capability. Our results show that while VLM backbones endow VLAs with robust perceptual understanding and high level planning, which we refer to as good intentions, this does not reliably translate into precise motor execution: when faced with out-of-distribution observations, policies often exhibit coherent intentions, but falter in action execution. Moreover, finetuning on action data can erode the original VLM's generalist reasoning abilities. We release our task suite and evaluation code to serve as a standardized benchmark for future VLAs and to drive research on closing the perception-to-action gap. More information, including the source code, can be found at https://ai4ce.github.io/INT-ACT/

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 11, 2025 2

Intent3D: 3D Object Detection in RGB-D Scans Based on Human Intention

In real-life scenarios, humans seek out objects in the 3D world to fulfill their daily needs or intentions. This inspires us to introduce 3D intention grounding, a new task in 3D object detection employing RGB-D, based on human intention, such as "I want something to support my back". Closely related, 3D visual grounding focuses on understanding human reference. To achieve detection based on human intention, it relies on humans to observe the scene, reason out the target that aligns with their intention ("pillow" in this case), and finally provide a reference to the AI system, such as "A pillow on the couch". Instead, 3D intention grounding challenges AI agents to automatically observe, reason and detect the desired target solely based on human intention. To tackle this challenge, we introduce the new Intent3D dataset, consisting of 44,990 intention texts associated with 209 fine-grained classes from 1,042 scenes of the ScanNet dataset. We also establish several baselines based on different language-based 3D object detection models on our benchmark. Finally, we propose IntentNet, our unique approach, designed to tackle this intention-based detection problem. It focuses on three key aspects: intention understanding, reasoning to identify object candidates, and cascaded adaptive learning that leverages the intrinsic priority logic of different losses for multiple objective optimization.

  • 6 authors
·
May 28, 2024

ReasonNavi: Human-Inspired Global Map Reasoning for Zero-Shot Embodied Navigation

Embodied agents often struggle with efficient navigation because they rely primarily on partial egocentric observations, which restrict global foresight and lead to inefficient exploration. In contrast, humans plan using maps: we reason globally first, then act locally. We introduce ReasonNavi, a human-inspired framework that operationalizes this reason-then-act paradigm by coupling Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with deterministic planners. ReasonNavi converts a top-down map into a discrete reasoning space by room segmentation and candidate target nodes sampling. An MLLM is then queried in a multi-stage process to identify the candidate most consistent with the instruction (object, image, or text goal), effectively leveraging the model's semantic reasoning ability while sidestepping its weakness in continuous coordinate prediction. The selected waypoint is grounded into executable trajectories using a deterministic action planner over an online-built occupancy map, while pretrained object detectors and segmenters ensure robust recognition at the goal. This yields a unified zero-shot navigation framework that requires no MLLM fine-tuning, circumvents the brittleness of RL-based policies and scales naturally with foundation model improvements. Across three navigation tasks, ReasonNavi consistently outperforms prior methods that demand extensive training or heavy scene modeling, offering a scalable, interpretable, and globally grounded solution to embodied navigation. Project page: https://reasonnavi.github.io/

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 26

Think Before You Move: Latent Motion Reasoning for Text-to-Motion Generation

Current state-of-the-art paradigms predominantly treat Text-to-Motion (T2M) generation as a direct translation problem, mapping symbolic language directly to continuous poses. While effective for simple actions, this System 1 approach faces a fundamental theoretical bottleneck we identify as the Semantic-Kinematic Impedance Mismatch: the inherent difficulty of grounding semantically dense, discrete linguistic intent into kinematically dense, high-frequency motion data in a single shot. In this paper, we argue that the solution lies in an architectural shift towards Latent System 2 Reasoning. Drawing inspiration from Hierarchical Motor Control in cognitive science, we propose Latent Motion Reasoning (LMR) that reformulates generation as a two-stage Think-then-Act decision process. Central to LMR is a novel Dual-Granularity Tokenizer that disentangles motion into two distinct manifolds: a compressed, semantically rich Reasoning Latent for planning global topology, and a high-frequency Execution Latent for preserving physical fidelity. By forcing the model to autoregressively reason (plan the coarse trajectory) before it moves (instantiates the frames), we effectively bridge the ineffability gap between language and physics. We demonstrate LMR's versatility by implementing it for two representative baselines: T2M-GPT (discrete) and MotionStreamer (continuous). Extensive experiments show that LMR yields non-trivial improvements in both semantic alignment and physical plausibility, validating that the optimal substrate for motion planning is not natural language, but a learned, motion-aligned concept space. Codes and demos can be found in https://chenhaoqcdyq.github.io/LMR/{https://chenhaoqcdyq.github.io/LMR/}

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 30, 2025

Quick on the Uptake: Eliciting Implicit Intents from Human Demonstrations for Personalized Mobile-Use Agents

As multimodal large language models advance rapidly, the automation of mobile tasks has become increasingly feasible through the use of mobile-use agents that mimic human interactions from graphical user interface. To further enhance mobile-use agents, previous studies employ demonstration learning to improve mobile-use agents from human demonstrations. However, these methods focus solely on the explicit intention flows of humans (e.g., step sequences) while neglecting implicit intention flows (e.g., personal preferences), which makes it difficult to construct personalized mobile-use agents. In this work, to evaluate the Intention Alignment Rate between mobile-use agents and humans, we first collect MobileIAR, a dataset containing human-intent-aligned actions and ground-truth actions. This enables a comprehensive assessment of the agents' understanding of human intent. Then we propose IFRAgent, a framework built upon Intention Flow Recognition from human demonstrations. IFRAgent analyzes explicit intention flows from human demonstrations to construct a query-level vector library of standard operating procedures (SOP), and analyzes implicit intention flows to build a user-level habit repository. IFRAgent then leverages a SOP extractor combined with retrieval-augmented generation and a query rewriter to generate personalized query and SOP from a raw ambiguous query, enhancing the alignment between mobile-use agents and human intent. Experimental results demonstrate that IFRAgent outperforms baselines by an average of 6.79\% (32.06\% relative improvement) in human intention alignment rate and improves step completion rates by an average of 5.30\% (26.34\% relative improvement). The codes are available at https://github.com/MadeAgents/Quick-on-the-Uptake.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 12, 2025

MotionDuet: Dual-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Generation with Video-Regularized Text Learning

3D Human motion generation is pivotal across film, animation, gaming, and embodied intelligence. Traditional 3D motion synthesis relies on costly motion capture, while recent work shows that 2D videos provide rich, temporally coherent observations of human behavior. Existing approaches, however, either map high-level text descriptions to motion or rely solely on video conditioning, leaving a gap between generated dynamics and real-world motion statistics. We introduce MotionDuet, a multimodal framework that aligns motion generation with the distribution of video-derived representations. In this dual-conditioning paradigm, video cues extracted from a pretrained model (e.g., VideoMAE) ground low-level motion dynamics, while textual prompts provide semantic intent. To bridge the distribution gap across modalities, we propose Dual-stream Unified Encoding and Transformation (DUET) and a Distribution-Aware Structural Harmonization (DASH) loss. DUET fuses video-informed cues into the motion latent space via unified encoding and dynamic attention, while DASH aligns motion trajectories with both distributional and structural statistics of video features. An auto-guidance mechanism further balances textual and visual signals by leveraging a weakened copy of the model, enhancing controllability without sacrificing diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MotionDuet generates realistic and controllable human motions, surpassing strong state-of-the-art baselines.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 22, 2025

HumanCLAW: Can Vision-Language Models Act Through a Body?

Evaluating whether a vision-language model (VLM) can act through a physical body is challenging. The outcome of an action couples the VLM's decision with motor control. When a task fails, it is hard to tell whether the VLM made a bad choice or the motor controller simply failed to execute it, e.g., losing balance and falling. In this work, we introduce HumanCLAW, an evaluation framework that decouples action decision-making from low-level execution. At every step, a harnessed, off-the-shelf VLM issues an atomic skill command, and the command is translated into a sub-second chunk of continuous full-body motion with real physical consequences, including gravity and collisions. The body can therefore act freely in the physical world, while execution-side disturbances, balance and motor errors, are factored out. What remains measurable is the model's action intelligence: its moment-to-moment choice of what the body should execute next. Based on this framework, we build HumanCLAW-Bench: 1,218 long-horizon, egocentric find-navigate-interact episodes across 41 indoor scenes. We test nine state-of-the-art VLMs and find that none solves the benchmark; the best model reaches only a 16.8% success rate. Recognizing the target is not the bottleneck. What current VLMs lack is embodied self-awareness: they lose track of their own body, failing to tell where it is, whether it has reached the goal, or whether it has hit an obstacle.

metaresearch Meta Research
·
Jul 28 6

DC-Motion: Decoupling Structure and Details via Discrete-Continuous Tokens for Human Motion Generation

Text-to-motion generation requires modeling both global action structure and fine-grained motion dynamics from natural language. Existing approaches typically rely on either continuous diffusion models or vector-quantized discrete representations. Diffusion models generate smooth motions but lack explicit compositional structure for temporal planning, while discrete token-based methods improve controllability but compress motion into finite codebooks, losing fine-grained dynamics. We argue that this limitation stems from a representation mismatch: action semantics such as intent, phase transitions, and temporal layout are inherently discrete and compositional, whereas joint trajectories and motion dynamics are continuous and locally correlated. To address this, we propose DC-Motion, a discrete-continuous factorized framework for human motion generation. DC-Motion decomposes motion into discrete structural tokens capturing global action layout and continuous residual latents modeling fine-grained dynamics. A text-conditioned structure generator predicts discrete tokens via iterative masked modeling, and a diffusion-based residual generator produces continuous motion conditioned on the structure. Experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML demonstrate that DC-Motion achieves strong performance in both FID and R-Precision, outperforming representative diffusion-based and discrete-token baselines.

  • 5 authors
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Jul 5

Unified Dual-Intent Translation for Joint Modeling of Search and Recommendation

Recommendation systems, which assist users in discovering their preferred items among numerous options, have served billions of users across various online platforms. Intuitively, users' interactions with items are highly driven by their unchanging inherent intents (e.g., always preferring high-quality items) and changing demand intents (e.g., wanting a T-shirt in summer but a down jacket in winter). However, both types of intents are implicitly expressed in recommendation scenario, posing challenges in leveraging them for accurate intent-aware recommendations. Fortunately, in search scenario, often found alongside recommendation on the same online platform, users express their demand intents explicitly through their query words. Intuitively, in both scenarios, a user shares the same inherent intent and the interactions may be influenced by the same demand intent. It is therefore feasible to utilize the interaction data from both scenarios to reinforce the dual intents for joint intent-aware modeling. But the joint modeling should deal with two problems: 1) accurately modeling users' implicit demand intents in recommendation; 2) modeling the relation between the dual intents and the interactive items. To address these problems, we propose a novel model named Unified Dual-Intents Translation for joint modeling of Search and Recommendation (UDITSR). To accurately simulate users' demand intents in recommendation, we utilize real queries from search data as supervision information to guide its generation. To explicitly model the relation among the triplet <inherent intent, demand intent, interactive item>, we propose a dual-intent translation propagation mechanism to learn the triplet in the same semantic space via embedding translations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UDITSR outperforms SOTA baselines both in search and recommendation tasks.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 30, 2024

Listen, Look, Drive: Coupling Audio Instructions for User-aware VLA-based Autonomous Driving

Vision Language Action (VLA) models promise an open-vocabulary interface that can translate perceptual ambiguity into semantically grounded driving decisions, yet they still treat language as a static prior fixed at inference time. As a result, the model must infer continuously shifting objectives from pixels alone, yielding delayed or overly conservative maneuvers. We argue that effective VLAs for autonomous driving need an online channel in which users can influence driving with specific intentions. To this end, we present EchoVLA, a user-aware VLA that couples camera streams with in situ audio instructions. We augment the nuScenes dataset with temporally aligned, intent-specific speech commands generated by converting ego-motion descriptions into synthetic audios. Further, we compose emotional speech-trajectory pairs into a multimodal Chain-of-Thought (CoT) for fine-tuning a Multimodal Large Model (MLM) based on Qwen2.5-Omni. Specifically, we synthesize the audio-augmented dataset with different emotion types paired with corresponding driving behaviors, leveraging the emotional cues embedded in tone, pitch, and speech tempo to reflect varying user states, such as urgent or hesitant intentions, thus enabling our EchoVLA to interpret not only the semantic content but also the emotional context of audio commands for more nuanced and emotionally adaptive driving behavior. In open-loop benchmarks, our approach reduces the average L2 error by 59.4% and the collision rate by 74.4% compared to the baseline of vision-only perception. More experiments on nuScenes dataset validate that EchoVLA not only steers the trajectory through audio instructions, but also modulates driving behavior in response to the emotions detected in the user's speech.

  • 9 authors
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Jan 17

EgoIntent: An Egocentric Step-level Benchmark for Understanding What, Why, and Next

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable video reasoning capabilities across diverse tasks. However, their ability to understand human intent at a fine-grained level in egocentric videos remains largely unexplored. Existing benchmarks focus primarily on episode-level intent reasoning, overlooking the finer granularity of step-level intent understanding. Yet applications such as intelligent assistants, robotic imitation learning, and augmented reality guidance require understanding not only what a person is doing at each step, but also why and what comes next, in order to provide timely and context-aware support. To this end, we introduce EgoIntent, a step-level intent understanding benchmark for egocentric videos. It comprises 3,014 steps spanning 15 diverse indoor and outdoor daily-life scenarios, and evaluates models on three complementary dimensions: local intent (What), global intent (Why), and next-step plan (Next). Crucially, each clip is truncated immediately before the key outcome of the queried step (e.g., contact or grasp) occurs and contains no frames from subsequent steps, preventing future-frame leakage and enabling a clean evaluation of anticipatory step understanding and next-step planning. We evaluate 15 MLLMs, including both state-of-the-art closed-source and open-source models. Even the best-performing model achieves an average score of only 33.31 across the three intent dimensions, underscoring that step-level intent understanding in egocentric videos remains a highly challenging problem that calls for further investigation.

  • 9 authors
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Mar 11

NoRA: Evaluating Grounded Reasonableness in Visual First-person Normative Action Reasoning

LLMs and agentic systems are increasingly deployed in social environments, making normative competence critical for safe and appropriate behavior. However, existing approaches either assess normative judgment in text alone or reduce it to choosing among a fixed set of candidate actions. We argue both are insufficient. In practice, agents are never handed a menu of options; they must identify a reasonable action from scratch, grounded in visible facts and supported by inspectable reasons. We introduce NoRA, a visual first-person video benchmark that requires models to generate candidate next actions and justify each through an explicit fact-reason-action support graph. The benchmark comprises 1,420 annotated video clips, including HumanGold-190 and LLMSilver-1230 splits. Each instance is evaluated through action alignment, factual grounding, and support binding, aggregated into a single grounded reasonableness score. We benchmark 12 multimodal systems under direct, deliberate, and structured prompting regimes, finding that current VLMs frequently recover plausible actions and relevant scene facts, but consistently struggle to construct the full reasonable action space and bind selected actions to the correct local support. NoRA makes this gap measurable, shifting the evaluation question from whether a model can pick an action to whether it can justify an appropriate action for the right visible reasons.

  • 6 authors
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Jun 2

GUIDE: A Benchmark for Understanding and Assisting Users in Open-Ended GUI Tasks

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents have the potential to assist users in interacting with complex software (e.g., PowerPoint, Photoshop). While prior research has primarily focused on automating user actions through clicks and keystrokes, this paradigm overlooks human intention, where users value the ability to explore, iterate, and refine their ideas while maintaining agency. To move beyond automation and toward collaboration, GUI agents must understand what users are doing and why. We introduce GUIDE (GUI User Intent Detection Evaluation), a benchmark that evaluates AI models on their ability to perceive user behavior, infer intent, and provide assistance in open-ended GUI tasks. GUIDE consists of 67.5 hours of screen recordings from 120 novice user demonstrations with think-aloud narrations, across 10 software. GUIDE defines three tasks - (i) Behavior State Detection, (ii) Intent Prediction, and (iii) Help Prediction that test a model's ability to recognize behavior state, reason about goals, and decide when and how to help. Evaluations across eight state-of-the-art multimodal models reveal that all models struggled, achieving only 44.6% and 55.0% accuracy on behavior state and help prediction. However, providing user context significantly improved the performance, raising help prediction by up to 50.2pp, highlighting the critical role of structured user understanding in effective assistance. Our dataset is available at https://guide-bench.github.io.

  • 7 authors
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Mar 25

A Behavioural and Representational Evaluation of Goal-Directedness in Language Model Agents

Understanding an agent's goals helps explain and predict its behaviour, yet there is no established methodology for reliably attributing goals to agentic systems. We propose a framework for evaluating goal-directedness that integrates behavioural evaluation with interpretability-based analyses of models' internal representations. As a case study, we examine an LLM agent navigating a 2D grid world toward a goal state. Behaviourally, we evaluate the agent against an optimal policy across varying grid sizes, obstacle densities, and goal structures, finding that performance scales with task difficulty while remaining robust to difficulty-preserving transformations and complex goal structures. We then use probing methods to decode the agent's internal representations of the environment state and its multi-step action plans. We find that the LLM agent non-linearly encodes a coarse spatial map of the environment, preserving approximate task-relevant cues about its position and the goal location; that its actions are broadly consistent with these internal representations; and that reasoning reorganises them, shifting from broader environment structural cues toward information supporting immediate action selection. Our findings support the view that introspective examination is required beyond behavioural evaluations to characterise how agents represent and pursue their objectives.

  • 9 authors
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Feb 9

Frontier Models are Capable of In-context Scheming

Frontier models are increasingly trained and deployed as autonomous agent. One safety concern is that AI agents might covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding their true capabilities and objectives - also known as scheming. We study whether models have the capability to scheme in pursuit of a goal that we provide in-context and instruct the model to strongly follow. We evaluate frontier models on a suite of six agentic evaluations where models are instructed to pursue goals and are placed in environments that incentivize scheming. Our results show that o1, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3 Opus, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Llama 3.1 405B all demonstrate in-context scheming capabilities. They recognize scheming as a viable strategy and readily engage in such behavior. For example, models strategically introduce subtle mistakes into their responses, attempt to disable their oversight mechanisms, and even exfiltrate what they believe to be their model weights to external servers. Additionally, this deceptive behavior proves persistent. When o1 has engaged in scheming, it maintains its deception in over 85% of follow-up questions and often remains deceptive in multi-turn interrogations. Analysis of the models' chains-of-thought reveals that models explicitly reason about these deceptive strategies, providing evidence that the scheming behavior is not accidental. Surprisingly, we also find rare instances where models engage in scheming when only given a goal, without being strongly nudged to pursue it. We observe cases where Claude 3.5 Sonnet strategically underperforms in evaluations in pursuit of being helpful, a goal that was acquired during training rather than in-context. Our findings demonstrate that frontier models now possess capabilities for basic in-context scheming, making the potential of AI agents to engage in scheming behavior a concrete rather than theoretical concern.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 6, 2024

Manipulate-to-Navigate: Reinforcement Learning with Visual Affordances and Manipulability Priors

Mobile manipulation in dynamic environments is challenging due to movable obstacles blocking the robot's path. Traditional methods, which treat navigation and manipulation as separate tasks, often fail in such 'manipulate-to-navigate' scenarios, as obstacles must be removed before navigation. In these cases, active interaction with the environment is required to clear obstacles while ensuring sufficient space for movement. To address the manipulate-to-navigate problem, we propose a reinforcement learning-based approach for learning manipulation actions that facilitate subsequent navigation. Our method combines manipulability priors to focus the robot on high manipulability body positions with affordance maps for selecting high-quality manipulation actions. By focusing on feasible and meaningful actions, our approach reduces unnecessary exploration and allows the robot to learn manipulation strategies more effectively. We present two new manipulate-to-navigate simulation tasks called Reach and Door with the Boston Dynamics Spot robot. The first task tests whether the robot can select a good hand position in the target area such that the robot base can move effectively forward while keeping the end effector position fixed. The second task requires the robot to move a door aside in order to clear the navigation path. Both of these tasks need first manipulation and then navigating the base forward. Results show that our method allows a robot to effectively interact with and traverse dynamic environments. Finally, we transfer the learned policy to a real Boston Dynamics Spot robot, which successfully performs the Reach task.

  • 2 authors
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Aug 18, 2025

Mobility VLA: Multimodal Instruction Navigation with Long-Context VLMs and Topological Graphs

An elusive goal in navigation research is to build an intelligent agent that can understand multimodal instructions including natural language and image, and perform useful navigation. To achieve this, we study a widely useful category of navigation tasks we call Multimodal Instruction Navigation with demonstration Tours (MINT), in which the environment prior is provided through a previously recorded demonstration video. Recent advances in Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown a promising path in achieving this goal as it demonstrates capabilities in perceiving and reasoning about multimodal inputs. However, VLMs are typically trained to predict textual output and it is an open research question about how to best utilize them in navigation. To solve MINT, we present Mobility VLA, a hierarchical Vision-Language-Action (VLA) navigation policy that combines the environment understanding and common sense reasoning power of long-context VLMs and a robust low-level navigation policy based on topological graphs. The high-level policy consists of a long-context VLM that takes the demonstration tour video and the multimodal user instruction as input to find the goal frame in the tour video. Next, a low-level policy uses the goal frame and an offline constructed topological graph to generate robot actions at every timestep. We evaluated Mobility VLA in a 836m^2 real world environment and show that Mobility VLA has a high end-to-end success rates on previously unsolved multimodal instructions such as "Where should I return this?" while holding a plastic bin.

  • 22 authors
·
Jul 10, 2024 2

MoReact: Generating Reactive Motion from Textual Descriptions

Modeling and generating human reactions poses a significant challenge with broad applications for computer vision and human-computer interaction. Existing methods either treat multiple individuals as a single entity, directly generating interactions, or rely solely on one person's motion to generate the other's reaction, failing to integrate the rich semantic information that underpins human interactions. Yet, these methods often fall short in adaptive responsiveness, i.e., the ability to accurately respond to diverse and dynamic interaction scenarios. Recognizing this gap, our work introduces an approach tailored to address the limitations of existing models by focusing on text-driven human reaction generation. Our model specifically generates realistic motion sequences for individuals that responding to the other's actions based on a descriptive text of the interaction scenario. The goal is to produce motion sequences that not only complement the opponent's movements but also semantically fit the described interactions. To achieve this, we present MoReact, a diffusion-based method designed to disentangle the generation of global trajectories and local motions sequentially. This approach stems from the observation that generating global trajectories first is crucial for guiding local motion, ensuring better alignment with given action and text. Furthermore, we introduce a novel interaction loss to enhance the realism of generated close interactions. Our experiments, utilizing data adapted from a two-person motion dataset, demonstrate the efficacy of our approach for this novel task, which is capable of producing realistic, diverse, and controllable reactions that not only closely match the movements of the counterpart but also adhere to the textual guidance. Please find our webpage at https://xiyan-xu.github.io/MoReactWebPage.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 28, 2025

TITAN: Future Forecast using Action Priors

We consider the problem of predicting the future trajectory of scene agents from egocentric views obtained from a moving platform. This problem is important in a variety of domains, particularly for autonomous systems making reactive or strategic decisions in navigation. In an attempt to address this problem, we introduce TITAN (Trajectory Inference using Targeted Action priors Network), a new model that incorporates prior positions, actions, and context to forecast future trajectory of agents and future ego-motion. In the absence of an appropriate dataset for this task, we created the TITAN dataset that consists of 700 labeled video-clips (with odometry) captured from a moving vehicle on highly interactive urban traffic scenes in Tokyo. Our dataset includes 50 labels including vehicle states and actions, pedestrian age groups, and targeted pedestrian action attributes that are organized hierarchically corresponding to atomic, simple/complex-contextual, transportive, and communicative actions. To evaluate our model, we conducted extensive experiments on the TITAN dataset, revealing significant performance improvement against baselines and state-of-the-art algorithms. We also report promising results from our Agent Importance Mechanism (AIM), a module which provides insight into assessment of perceived risk by calculating the relative influence of each agent on the future ego-trajectory. The dataset is available at https://usa.honda-ri.com/titan

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 30, 2020

Ask-to-Clarify: Resolving Instruction Ambiguity through Multi-turn Dialogue

The ultimate goal of embodied agents is to create collaborators that can interact with humans, not mere executors that passively follow instructions. This requires agents to communicate, coordinate, and adapt their actions based on human feedback. Recently, advances in VLAs have offered a path toward this goal. However, most current VLA-based embodied agents operate in a one-way mode: they receive an instruction and execute it without feedback. This approach fails in real-world scenarios where instructions are often ambiguous. In this paper, we address this problem with the Ask-to-Clarify framework. Our framework first resolves ambiguous instructions by asking questions in a multi-turn dialogue. Then it generates low-level actions end-to-end. Specifically, the Ask-to-Clarify framework consists of two components, one VLM for collaboration and one diffusion for action. We also introduce a connection module that generates conditions for the diffusion based on the output of the VLM. This module adjusts the observation by instructions to create reliable conditions. We train our framework with a two-stage knowledge-insulation strategy. First, we fine-tune the collaboration component using ambiguity-solving dialogue data to handle ambiguity. Then, we integrate the action component while freezing the collaboration one. This preserves the interaction abilities while fine-tuning the diffusion to generate actions. The training strategy guarantees our framework can first ask questions, then generate actions. During inference, a signal detector functions as a router that helps our framework switch between asking questions and taking actions. We evaluate the Ask-to-Clarify framework in 8 real-world tasks, where it outperforms existing state-of-the-art VLAs. The results suggest that our proposed framework, along with the training strategy, provides a path toward collaborative embodied agents.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 18, 2025 3

MotionCLR: Motion Generation and Training-free Editing via Understanding Attention Mechanisms

This research delves into the problem of interactive editing of human motion generation. Previous motion diffusion models lack explicit modeling of the word-level text-motion correspondence and good explainability, hence restricting their fine-grained editing ability. To address this issue, we propose an attention-based motion diffusion model, namely MotionCLR, with CLeaR modeling of attention mechanisms. Technically, MotionCLR models the in-modality and cross-modality interactions with self-attention and cross-attention, respectively. More specifically, the self-attention mechanism aims to measure the sequential similarity between frames and impacts the order of motion features. By contrast, the cross-attention mechanism works to find the fine-grained word-sequence correspondence and activate the corresponding timesteps in the motion sequence. Based on these key properties, we develop a versatile set of simple yet effective motion editing methods via manipulating attention maps, such as motion (de-)emphasizing, in-place motion replacement, and example-based motion generation, etc. For further verification of the explainability of the attention mechanism, we additionally explore the potential of action-counting and grounded motion generation ability via attention maps. Our experimental results show that our method enjoys good generation and editing ability with good explainability.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 24, 2024 2

SwitchVLA: Execution-Aware Task Switching for Vision-Language-Action Models

Robots deployed in dynamic environments must be able to not only follow diverse language instructions but flexibly adapt when user intent changes mid-execution. While recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced multi-task learning and instruction following, they typically assume static task intent, failing to respond when new instructions arrive during ongoing execution. This limitation hinders natural and robust interaction in dynamic settings, such as retail or household environments, where real-time intent changes are common. We propose SwitchVLA, a unified, execution-aware framework that enables smooth and reactive task switching without external planners or additional switch-specific data. We model task switching as a behavior modulation problem conditioned on execution state and instruction context. Expert demonstrations are segmented into temporally grounded contact phases, allowing the policy to infer task progress and adjust its behavior accordingly. A multi-behavior conditional policy is then trained to generate flexible action chunks under varying behavior modes through conditioned trajectory modeling. Experiments in both simulation and real-world robotic manipulation demonstrate that SwitchVLA enables robust instruction adherence, fluid task switching, and strong generalization-outperforming prior VLA baselines in both task success rate and interaction naturalness.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 4, 2025 1

BeyondMimic: From Motion Tracking to Versatile Humanoid Control via Guided Diffusion

The human-like form of humanoid robots positions them uniquely to achieve the agility and versatility in motor skills that humans possess. Learning from human demonstrations offers a scalable approach to acquiring these capabilities. However, prior works either produce unnatural motions or rely on motion-specific tuning to achieve satisfactory naturalness. Furthermore, these methods are often motion- or goal-specific, lacking the versatility to compose diverse skills, especially when solving unseen tasks. We present BeyondMimic, a framework that scales to diverse motions and carries the versatility to compose them seamlessly in tackling unseen downstream tasks. At heart, a compact motion-tracking formulation enables mastering a wide range of radically agile behaviors, including aerial cartwheels, spin-kicks, flip-kicks, and sprinting, with a single setup and shared hyperparameters, all while achieving state-of-the-art human-like performance. Moving beyond the mere imitation of existing motions, we propose a unified latent diffusion model that empowers versatile goal specification, seamless task switching, and dynamic composition of these agile behaviors. Leveraging classifier guidance, a diffusion-specific technique for test-time optimization toward novel objectives, our model extends its capability to solve downstream tasks never encountered during training, including motion inpainting, joystick teleoperation, and obstacle avoidance, and transfers these skills zero-shot to real hardware. This work opens new frontiers for humanoid robots by pushing the limits of scalable human-like motor skill acquisition from human motion and advancing seamless motion synthesis that achieves generalization and versatility beyond training setups.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 11, 2025

Goal2Pixel: Grounding Goals to Pixels for Vision-Language Navigation

Vision-language models (VLMs) have become a common foundation for vision-and-language navigation in continuous environments (VLN-CE). Yet most VLM-based methods cast navigation as low-level action prediction, an interface that is ambiguous, tied to short-horizon motion primitives, and inefficient due to repeated VLM querying. We propose Goal2Pixel, a pure pixel-based paradigm that reformulates VLN-CE as navigable pixel grounding. Rather than predicting actions, Goal2Pixel uses the image plane as a unified spatial interface between VLM reasoning and robot motion: the model predicts a visible navigable pixel to the agent, which is back-projected into a 3D waypoint for forward navigation. For non-forward actions, we append auxiliary directive regions to the image plane, where the left/right/bottom regions are interpreted as turning left, turning right, and stopping, respectively. To enable long-horizon navigation, we propose a visibility-aware keyframe memory for compact and informative history representation. To adapt pretrained VLMs to navigable pixel grounding, we introduce semantic embeddings and coordinate-aware auxiliary losses. Goal2Pixel achieves competitive state-of-the-art performance while requiring fewer VLM inference calls than prior methods. On R2R-CE Val-Unseen it achieves 54.1% SR and 52.5% SPL with just 7.75 VLM calls per episode, 6x fewer than the 46.62 required by direct action prediction at 32.9% SR. The same trend holds on RxR-CE.Project Page: https://baobao0926.github.io/Goal2Pixel/.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 10

DrawMotion: Generating 3D Human Motions by Freehand Drawing

Text-to-motion generation, which translates textual descriptions into human motions, faces the challenge that users often struggle to precisely convey their intended motions through text alone. To address this issue, this paper introduces DrawMotion, an efficient diffusion-based framework designed for multi-condition scenarios. DrawMotion generates motions based on both a conventional text condition and a novel hand-drawing condition, which provide semantic and spatial control over the generated motions, respectively. Specifically, we tackle the fine-grained motion generation task from three perspectives: 1) freehand drawing condition. To accurately capture users' intended motions without requiring tedious textual input, we develop an algorithm to automatically generate hand-drawn stickman sketches across different dataset formats; 2) multi-condition fusion. We propose a Multi-Condition Module (MCM) that is integrated into the diffusion process, enabling the model to exploit all possible condition combinations while reducing computational complexity compared to conventional approaches; and 3) training-free guidance. Notably, the MCM in DrawMotion ensures that its intermediate features lie in a continuous space, allowing classifier-guidance gradients to update the features and thereby aligning the generated motions with user intentions while preserving fidelity. Quantitative experiments and user studies demonstrate that the freehand drawing approach reduces user time by approximately 46.7% when generating motions aligned with their imagination. The code, demos, and relevant data are publicly available at https://github.com/InvertedForest/DrawMotion.

  • 10 authors
·
May 19 1

Priority-Centric Human Motion Generation in Discrete Latent Space

Text-to-motion generation is a formidable task, aiming to produce human motions that align with the input text while also adhering to human capabilities and physical laws. While there have been advancements in diffusion models, their application in discrete spaces remains underexplored. Current methods often overlook the varying significance of different motions, treating them uniformly. It is essential to recognize that not all motions hold the same relevance to a particular textual description. Some motions, being more salient and informative, should be given precedence during generation. In response, we introduce a Priority-Centric Motion Discrete Diffusion Model (M2DM), which utilizes a Transformer-based VQ-VAE to derive a concise, discrete motion representation, incorporating a global self-attention mechanism and a regularization term to counteract code collapse. We also present a motion discrete diffusion model that employs an innovative noise schedule, determined by the significance of each motion token within the entire motion sequence. This approach retains the most salient motions during the reverse diffusion process, leading to more semantically rich and varied motions. Additionally, we formulate two strategies to gauge the importance of motion tokens, drawing from both textual and visual indicators. Comprehensive experiments on the HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets confirm that our model surpasses existing techniques in fidelity and diversity, particularly for intricate textual descriptions.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 28, 2023

Gaze2Act: Gaze-Conditioned Vision-Language-Action Policies for Interactive Robot Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently shown strong potential for robot learning by following language instructions. However, in practice, language alone is often insufficient to precisely convey human intent. It is difficult to describe which exact object to interact with among similar candidates, where to act on the object, or how the target may change during execution. To address this limitation, we propose Gaze2Act, a novel VLA framework that leverages human gaze as a dynamic and intuitive intent signal for complex interactive manipulation. Gaze2Act first bridges the ego-exo view gap by mapping first-person gaze into the robot's perspective through cross-view semantic matching, producing both an object mask and a gaze point for coarse-to-fine target specification. These cues are then integrated into the policy through perception-level prompting and action-level conditioning, allowing the robot to attend to relevant regions and execute precise interactions under dynamic intent. In a systematic evaluation across seven task categories and 16 real-robot tasks on a Unitree G1 humanoid, Gaze2Act achieves state-of-the-art performance in both intent accuracy and task success rate. It notably outperforms baselines in object disambiguation, fine-grained interaction, and dynamic intent steering. These results demonstrate that human gaze provides a natural, low-burden, and highly expressive modality for human-in-the-loop VLA control.

  • 12 authors
·
May 27

Uni-LaViRA: Language-Vision-Robot Actions Translation for Unified Embodied Navigation

Embodied navigation requires an agent to map language and visual observations to a stream of spatial actions that drive a real robot through environments it has never seen. The dominant approach has been to scale vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models on ever-larger collections of robot trajectories. This paper argues that, for navigation specifically, generality can be obtained structurally, not only through data scale. The underlying decision structure of navigation reduces to a single Language-Vision-Robot Actions Translation. The language action emits semantic-level directional command and the vision action emits a pixel-level visual target. Both outputs lie inside the natural output manifold of pretrained multimodal large language models (MLLMs), so the task can be reasoned about by an agent rather than learned from robot data. Therefore, we present Uni-LaViRA, a unified agentic architecture that extends the same insight to four task families (VLN-CE, ObjectNav, EQA, and Aerial-VLN) and to four heterogeneous real robots (Wheeled, Quadruped, Humanoid robot, and a self-built UAV) in a zero-shot manner. Two agent-loop mechanisms make this unification practical. TODO List Memory (TDM) rewrites a structured checklist of pending sub-goals at every step, reciting the unfinished items back into the agent's most recent attention window. Second Chance Backtrack (SCB) rolls the robot back to the pre-error state and conditions the agent's next plan on the failed sub-trajectory, turning single-pass navigation into a self-correcting process. With zero training effort, Uni-LaViRA reaches 60.7% SR on VLN-CE R2R, 51.3% on VLN-CE RxR, 77.7% on HM3D-v2, 60.0% on HM3D-OVON, 54.7% on MP3D-EQA, and 40.0% on OpenUAV, matching or even surpassing recent training navigation foundation models that consume millions of samples and thousands of GPU-hours.

  • 16 authors
·
May 25

Mimic Intent, Not Just Trajectories

While imitation learning (IL) has achieved impressive success in dexterous manipulation through generative modeling and pretraining, state-of-the-art approaches like Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models still struggle with adaptation to environmental changes and skill transfer. We argue this stems from mimicking raw trajectories without understanding the underlying intent. To address this, we propose explicitly disentangling behavior intent from execution details in end-2-end IL: Mimic Intent, Not just Trajectories(MINT). We achieve this via multi-scale frequency-space tokenization, which enforces a spectral decomposition of action chunk representation. We learn action tokens with a multi-scale coarse-to-fine structure, and force the coarsest token to capture low-frequency global structure and finer tokens to encode high-frequency details. This yields an abstract Intent token that facilitates planning and transfer, and multi-scale Execution tokens that enable precise adaptation to environmental dynamics. Building on this hierarchy, our policy generates trajectories through next-scale autoregression, performing progressive intent-to-execution reasoning, thus boosting learning efficiency and generalization. Crucially, this disentanglement enables one-shot transfer of skills, by simply injecting the Intent token from a demonstration into the autoregressive generation process. Experiments on several manipulation benchmarks and on a real robot demonstrate state-of-the-art success rates, superior inference efficiency, robust generalization against disturbances, and effective one-shot transfer.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 27 2

Follow-Your-Click: Open-domain Regional Image Animation via Short Prompts

Despite recent advances in image-to-video generation, better controllability and local animation are less explored. Most existing image-to-video methods are not locally aware and tend to move the entire scene. However, human artists may need to control the movement of different objects or regions. Additionally, current I2V methods require users not only to describe the target motion but also to provide redundant detailed descriptions of frame contents. These two issues hinder the practical utilization of current I2V tools. In this paper, we propose a practical framework, named Follow-Your-Click, to achieve image animation with a simple user click (for specifying what to move) and a short motion prompt (for specifying how to move). Technically, we propose the first-frame masking strategy, which significantly improves the video generation quality, and a motion-augmented module equipped with a short motion prompt dataset to improve the short prompt following abilities of our model. To further control the motion speed, we propose flow-based motion magnitude control to control the speed of target movement more precisely. Our framework has simpler yet precise user control and better generation performance than previous methods. Extensive experiments compared with 7 baselines, including both commercial tools and research methods on 8 metrics, suggest the superiority of our approach. Project Page: https://follow-your-click.github.io/

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 13, 2024 5

Intent Contrastive Learning with Cross Subsequences for Sequential Recommendation

The user purchase behaviors are mainly influenced by their intentions (e.g., buying clothes for decoration, buying brushes for painting, etc.). Modeling a user's latent intention can significantly improve the performance of recommendations. Previous works model users' intentions by considering the predefined label in auxiliary information or introducing stochastic data augmentation to learn purposes in the latent space. However, the auxiliary information is sparse and not always available for recommender systems, and introducing stochastic data augmentation may introduce noise and thus change the intentions hidden in the sequence. Therefore, leveraging user intentions for sequential recommendation (SR) can be challenging because they are frequently varied and unobserved. In this paper, Intent contrastive learning with Cross Subsequences for sequential Recommendation (ICSRec) is proposed to model users' latent intentions. Specifically, ICSRec first segments a user's sequential behaviors into multiple subsequences by using a dynamic sliding operation and takes these subsequences into the encoder to generate the representations for the user's intentions. To tackle the problem of no explicit labels for purposes, ICSRec assumes different subsequences with the same target item may represent the same intention and proposes a coarse-grain intent contrastive learning to push these subsequences closer. Then, fine-grain intent contrastive learning is mentioned to capture the fine-grain intentions of subsequences in sequential behaviors. Extensive experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed ICSRec model compared with baseline methods.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 22, 2023

Do What You Say: Steering Vision-Language-Action Models via Runtime Reasoning-Action Alignment Verification

Reasoning Vision Language Action (VLA) models improve robotic instruction-following by generating step-by-step textual plans before low-level actions, an approach inspired by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in language models. Yet even with a correct textual plan, the generated actions can still miss the intended outcomes in the plan, especially in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. We formalize this phenomenon as a lack of embodied CoT faithfulness, and introduce a training-free, runtime policy steering method for reasoning-action alignment. Given a reasoning VLA's intermediate textual plan, our framework samples multiple candidate action sequences from the same model, predicts their outcomes via simulation, and uses a pre-trained Vision-Language Model (VLM) to select the sequence whose outcome best aligns with the VLA's own textual plan. Only executing action sequences that align with the textual reasoning turns our base VLA's natural action diversity from a source of error into a strength, boosting robustness to semantic and visual OOD perturbations and enabling novel behavior composition without costly re-training. We also contribute a reasoning-annotated extension of LIBERO-100, environment variations tailored for OOD evaluation, and demonstrate up to 15% performance gain over prior work on behavior composition tasks and scales with compute and data diversity. Project Website at: https://yilin-wu98.github.io/steering-reasoning-vla/

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 17, 2025

Mind to Hand: Purposeful Robotic Control via Embodied Reasoning

Humans act with context and intention, with reasoning playing a central role. While internet-scale data has enabled broad reasoning capabilities in AI systems, grounding these abilities in physical action remains a major challenge. We introduce Lumo-1, a generalist vision-language-action (VLA) model that unifies robot reasoning ("mind") with robot action ("hand"). Our approach builds upon the general multi-modal reasoning capabilities of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), progressively extending them to embodied reasoning and action prediction, and ultimately towards structured reasoning and reasoning-action alignment. This results in a three-stage pre-training pipeline: (1) Continued VLM pre-training on curated vision-language data to enhance embodied reasoning skills such as planning, spatial understanding, and trajectory prediction; (2) Co-training on cross-embodiment robot data alongside vision-language data; and (3) Action training with reasoning process on trajectories collected on Astribot S1, a bimanual mobile manipulator with human-like dexterity and agility. Finally, we integrate reinforcement learning to further refine reasoning-action consistency and close the loop between semantic inference and motor control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Lumo-1 achieves significant performance improvements in embodied vision-language reasoning, a critical component for generalist robotic control. Real-world evaluations further show that Lumo-1 surpasses strong baselines across a wide range of challenging robotic tasks, with strong generalization to novel objects and environments, excelling particularly in long-horizon tasks and responding to human-natural instructions that require reasoning over strategy, concepts and space.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 9, 2025

Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks for Speed Control in Trajectory Simulation

Motion behaviour is driven by several factors -- goals, presence and actions of neighbouring agents, social relations, physical and social norms, the environment with its variable characteristics, and further. Most factors are not directly observable and must be modelled from context. Trajectory prediction, is thus a hard problem, and has seen increasing attention from researchers in the recent years. Prediction of motion, in application, must be realistic, diverse and controllable. In spite of increasing focus on multimodal trajectory generation, most methods still lack means for explicitly controlling different modes of the data generation. Further, most endeavours invest heavily in designing special mechanisms to learn the interactions in latent space. We present Conditional Speed GAN (CSG), that allows controlled generation of diverse and socially acceptable trajectories, based on user controlled speed. During prediction, CSG forecasts future speed from latent space and conditions its generation based on it. CSG is comparable to state-of-the-art GAN methods in terms of the benchmark distance metrics, while being simple and useful for simulation and data augmentation for different contexts such as fast or slow paced environments. Additionally, we compare the effect of different aggregation mechanisms and show that a naive approach of concatenation works comparable to its attention and pooling alternatives.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 21, 2021

LEAD: Minimizing Learner-Expert Asymmetry in End-to-End Driving

Simulators can generate virtually unlimited driving data, yet imitation learning policies in simulation still struggle to achieve robust closed-loop performance. Motivated by this gap, we empirically study how misalignment between privileged expert demonstrations and sensor-based student observations can limit the effectiveness of imitation learning. More precisely, experts have significantly higher visibility (e.g., ignoring occlusions) and far lower uncertainty (e.g., knowing other vehicles' actions), making them difficult to imitate reliably. Furthermore, navigational intent (i.e., the route to follow) is under-specified in student models at test time via only a single target point. We demonstrate that these asymmetries can measurably limit driving performance in CARLA and offer practical interventions to address them. After careful modifications to narrow the gaps between expert and student, our TransFuser v6 (TFv6) student policy achieves a new state of the art on all major publicly available CARLA closed-loop benchmarks, reaching 95 DS on Bench2Drive and more than doubling prior performances on Longest6~v2 and Town13. Additionally, by integrating perception supervision from our dataset into a shared sim-to-real pipeline, we show consistent gains on the NAVSIM and Waymo Vision-Based End-to-End driving benchmarks. Our code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/autonomousvision/lead.

autonomousvision autonomousvision
·
Dec 23, 2025

IntentionQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Purchase Intention Comprehension Abilities of Language Models in E-commerce

Enhancing Language Models' (LMs) ability to understand purchase intentions in E-commerce scenarios is crucial for their effective assistance in various downstream tasks. However, previous approaches that distill intentions from LMs often fail to generate meaningful and human-centric intentions applicable in real-world E-commerce contexts. This raises concerns about the true comprehension and utilization of purchase intentions by LMs. In this paper, we present IntentionQA, a double-task multiple-choice question answering benchmark to evaluate LMs' comprehension of purchase intentions in E-commerce. Specifically, LMs are tasked to infer intentions based on purchased products and utilize them to predict additional purchases. IntentionQA consists of 4,360 carefully curated problems across three difficulty levels, constructed using an automated pipeline to ensure scalability on large E-commerce platforms. Human evaluations demonstrate the high quality and low false-negative rate of our benchmark. Extensive experiments across 19 language models show that they still struggle with certain scenarios, such as understanding products and intentions accurately, jointly reasoning with products and intentions, and more, in which they fall far behind human performances. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/IntentionQA.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 14, 2024

Silent Failures in Physical AI: A Literature Review of Runtime Action Authorization for Autonomous Systems

Physical AI systems increasingly map multimodal observations, language instructions, and learned world representations into physically consequential actions. Robotics foundation models, vision-language-action models, and world-model-based autonomous systems can condition decisions that move vehicles, robots, drones, and industrial machines. This transition exposes a safety problem that is not fully captured by conventional AI content moderation or by classical robot safety alone: a black-box model may issue a physically consequential action while appearing confident, plausible, and semantically aligned. The resulting failure can be silent, arising from sensor drift, occlusion, state-estimation error, distribution shift, hallucinated affordances, or invalid physical assumptions before downstream hardware controllers detect a violation. Across embodied foundation models, world models, robotics simulation, embodied safety benchmarks, safe control, runtime assurance, uncertainty estimation, verification, and guardrail evaluation, model capability and safety mechanisms have advanced along largely separate technical tracks. A recurring gap synthesized here is that no single stream surveyed in this review supplies a complete runtime authorization boundary between black-box Physical AI models and physical execution. The resulting analysis develops a bounded problem formulation, a definition of silent physical-action failure, a taxonomy of runtime guardrail functions, and evaluation requirements for comparing guardrails as Physical AI assurance mechanisms.

STATE16 STATE16
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May 22 3

LEO-RobotAgent: A General-purpose Robotic Agent for Language-driven Embodied Operator

We propose LEO-RobotAgent, a general-purpose language-driven intelligent agent framework for robots. Under this framework, LLMs can operate different types of robots to complete unpredictable complex tasks across various scenarios. This framework features strong generalization, robustness, and efficiency. The application-level system built around it can fully enhance bidirectional human-robot intent understanding and lower the threshold for human-robot interaction. Regarding robot task planning, the vast majority of existing studies focus on the application of large models in single-task scenarios and for single robot types. These algorithms often have complex structures and lack generalizability. Thus, the proposed LEO-RobotAgent framework is designed with a streamlined structure as much as possible, enabling large models to independently think, plan, and act within this clear framework. We provide a modular and easily registrable toolset, allowing large models to flexibly call various tools to meet different requirements. Meanwhile, the framework incorporates a human-robot interaction mechanism, enabling the algorithm to collaborate with humans like a partner. Experiments have verified that this framework can be easily adapted to mainstream robot platforms including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), robotic arms, and wheeled robot, and efficiently execute a variety of carefully designed tasks with different complexity levels. Our code is available at https://github.com/LegendLeoChen/LEO-RobotAgent.

ZhejiangUniversity Zhejiang University
·
Dec 11, 2025 3

MotIF: Motion Instruction Fine-tuning

While success in many robotics tasks can be determined by only observing the final state and how it differs from the initial state - e.g., if an apple is picked up - many tasks require observing the full motion of the robot to correctly determine success. For example, brushing hair requires repeated strokes that correspond to the contours and type of hair. Prior works often use off-the-shelf vision-language models (VLMs) as success detectors; however, when success depends on the full trajectory, VLMs struggle to make correct judgments for two reasons. First, modern VLMs are trained only on single frames, and cannot capture changes over a full trajectory. Second, even if we provide state-of-the-art VLMs with an aggregate input of multiple frames, they still fail to detect success due to a lack of robot data. Our key idea is to fine-tune VLMs using abstract representations that are able to capture trajectory-level information such as the path the robot takes by overlaying keypoint trajectories on the final image. We propose motion instruction fine-tuning (MotIF), a method that fine-tunes VLMs using the aforementioned abstract representations to semantically ground the robot's behavior in the environment. To benchmark and fine-tune VLMs for robotic motion understanding, we introduce the MotIF-1K dataset containing 653 human and 369 robot demonstrations across 13 task categories. MotIF assesses the success of robot motion given the image observation of the trajectory, task instruction, and motion description. Our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art VLMs by at least twice in precision and 56.1% in recall, generalizing across unseen motions, tasks, and environments. Finally, we demonstrate practical applications of MotIF in refining and terminating robot planning, and ranking trajectories on how they align with task and motion descriptions. Project page: https://motif-1k.github.io

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 15, 2024

From Cognitive Architectures to Language Agents: A Mechanism-Level Review of Lineage, Convergence, and Migration Gaps

Memory, planning, reflection, and tool use are often compared as feature labels, obscuring the control semantics that determine how an agent actually runs. This review connects ten historical cognitive architectures, eight language-agent runtime families, and forty-two mechanism-focused modern systems. We reconstruct each mechanism through state, control, transition, persistence, failure, learning, and resource governance, then code evidence relation (E1-E4) separately from migration depth (D0-D4). The resulting landscape is uneven. Modern agents have operationalized substantial parts of adaptive memory, failure recovery, dynamic team selection, workflow search, skill induction, resource scheduling, and uncertainty-conditioned action, although often through independent convergence rather than documented inheritance. The strongest remaining opportunities lie in couplings among mechanisms. Closest-baseline screening closes one proposed gap: GraSP already combines calibrated multi-skill selection, typed compilation, verification, bounded repair, and replanning or ReAct fallback. Five residual bundles remain: activation with latency and action utility; typed impasse with isolated substates and resolution compilation; bounded content competition with broadcast and admission learning; persistent intention with reconsideration and live method authority; and uncertainty with resource allocation, interruption, and stopping. We contribute a distinctive-mechanism catalog, an auditable evidence-depth framework, and a falsifiable agenda for testing these bundles as composable runtime invariants.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 26

SCENIC: Scene-aware Semantic Navigation with Instruction-guided Control

Synthesizing natural human motion that adapts to complex environments while allowing creative control remains a fundamental challenge in motion synthesis. Existing models often fall short, either by assuming flat terrain or lacking the ability to control motion semantics through text. To address these limitations, we introduce SCENIC, a diffusion model designed to generate human motion that adapts to dynamic terrains within virtual scenes while enabling semantic control through natural language. The key technical challenge lies in simultaneously reasoning about complex scene geometry while maintaining text control. This requires understanding both high-level navigation goals and fine-grained environmental constraints. The model must ensure physical plausibility and precise navigation across varied terrain, while also preserving user-specified text control, such as ``carefully stepping over obstacles" or ``walking upstairs like a zombie." Our solution introduces a hierarchical scene reasoning approach. At its core is a novel scene-dependent, goal-centric canonicalization that handles high-level goal constraint, and is complemented by an ego-centric distance field that captures local geometric details. This dual representation enables our model to generate physically plausible motion across diverse 3D scenes. By implementing frame-wise text alignment, our system achieves seamless transitions between different motion styles while maintaining scene constraints. Experiments demonstrate our novel diffusion model generates arbitrarily long human motions that both adapt to complex scenes with varying terrain surfaces and respond to textual prompts. Additionally, we show SCENIC can generalize to four real-scene datasets. Our code, dataset, and models will be released at https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/scenic/.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 20, 2024

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

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

  • 11 authors
·
Apr 13, 2025