How Foundational Skills Influence VLM-based Embodied Agents:A Native Perspective

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

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies generate executable robot actions, but plausible proposals can have different consequences for the task. We present EmbodiedSkills, a skill-based agent framework that augments frozen VLA policies with world action models for consequence-aware action selection. The framework defines reusable skills for scene observation, context encoding, candidate generation, consequence prediction, outcome evaluation, candidate comparison, and action execution. Five stages organize their input-output dependencies in a shared feedback loop, accommodating both continuous action chunks and pick-and-place primitives. At each decision point, independently trained world action models predict the latent consequences of a common set of policy proposals. Selection combines their outcome scores and prediction disagreement with a lightweight comparator that estimates the benefit of an alternative from agreement in its predicted effects. The predictive and comparison modules learn from matched-state candidate branches, while the action policy and pretrained observation encoders remain frozen. On MetaWorld MT50 and CLIPort, EmbodiedSkills improves success rates from 76.28% to 78.64% and from 33.94% to 36.83%, respectively. An additional CALVIN evaluation with the frozen FLOWER policy increases five-task-chain success from 77.10% to 77.90%. These results demonstrate the applicability of consequence-aware selection across different policy backends and action representations.

LLM agents increasingly control robots using VLA policies, perception models, and procedural knowledge. These modules are difficult to reuse because their interfaces, embodiment assumptions, and conditions of use differ, and their benefits on physical tasks remain unclear. We package them as embodied skills that extend agent skills with explicit embodiment assumptions and conditions of use, building 250 action, perception, and experience skills from 1,052 resources. On this basis we introduce EmbodiedSkillBench, which runs an agent in a closed observation-action loop and records success, actions, tokens, and wall-clock time. It supports three modes: native control, skill-only execution, and Agent-Directed Reuse (ADR), a mode we propose in which the agent keeps its native controls and decides for each skill whether to invoke, modify, or ignore it. Across four agents on 100 perturbed LIBERO-Pro tasks, we find that skills help an agent only as far as they exceed what it can already do. Skill-only execution lifts GPT-5.6-Sol from 11% to 63% and Kimi-K3 and Claude-Opus-5 by about 20 points, while cutting their token usage by 58% to 85%. Yet all four agents then end up between 61% and 64%, and GPT-6-Astra falls from 92% under native control to 61%. This suggests that as agents grow stronger, the role of embodied skills shifts from supplying missing capability to reducing cost: GPT-6-Astra already solves most tasks through native control, so restricting it to skills removes more than it adds. Under ADR, which lets it keep native control and call skills selectively, GPT-6-Astra recovers to 85%, within 7 points of native control, while using 14.1% fewer tokens and 11.9% less time. With Jev as a skill choosing motion directions and gripper actions, it reaches 81% with 50% fewer tokens and 57% less time. The code is available at https://github.com/HanZhi306/EmbodiedSkill-Bench.