Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable general capabilities, yet embodied agents built on them fail at complex tasks, often skipping critical steps, proposing invalid actions, and repeating mistakes. These failures arise from a fundamental gap between the static training data of VLMs and the physical interaction for embodied tasks. VLMs can learn rich semantic knowledge from static data but lack the ability to interact with the world. To address this issue, we introduce ELITE, an embodied agent framework with {E}xperiential {L}earning and {I}ntent-aware {T}ransfer that enables agents to continuously learn from their own environment interaction experiences, and transfer acquired knowledge to procedurally similar tasks. ELITE operates through two synergistic mechanisms, i.e., self-reflective knowledge construction and intent-aware retrieval. Specifically, self-reflective knowledge construction extracts reusable strategies from execution trajectories and maintains an evolving strategy pool through structured refinement operations. Then, intent-aware retrieval identifies relevant strategies from the pool and applies them to current tasks. Experiments on the EB-ALFRED and EB-Habitat benchmarks show that ELITE achieves 9% and 5% performance improvement over base VLMs in the online setting without any supervision. In the supervised setting, ELITE generalizes effectively to unseen task categories, achieving better performance compared to state-of-the-art training-based methods. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of ELITE for bridging the gap between semantic understanding and reliable action execution.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of the ELITE framework. The framework comprises two synergistic mechanisms: (1) Self-reflective Knowledge Construction , which distills reusable knowledge from execution trajectories and maintains the strategy pool through structured refinement operations; and (2) Intent-aware Retrieval , which embeds the coarse plan and retrieves procedurally similar strategies from an evolving strategy pool to augment task planning. This closed-loop architecture enables continuous improvement through physical interaction without supervision.
Model
EB-Alfred
EB-Habitat
Avg
Base
Long
Avg
Base
Long
Open-Source MLLMs
Ovis2-34B
29
34
24
41
68
14
Llama-3.2-90B-Vision-Ins
27
38
16
54
94
14
gemma-3-27b-it
34
42
26
45
68
22
InternVL2_5-78B
40
38
42
54
80
28
Table 1: Results in the online unsupervised setting on EB-ALFRED and EB-Habitat. We report the Success Rate (%) of ELITE compared to zero-shot base VLMs and the scene-graph augmented baseline (ESCA). ELITE consistently improves over the base models without using any ground-truth trajectories. Subscripts indicate the absolute performance improvement relative to the corresponding base model.
Model
Avg
Base
Complex
Visual
Common
Spatial
Proprietary MLLMs
GPT-4o
56.8
64
68
46
54
52
Claude-3.5-Sonnet
66.4
72
76
60
66
58
Gemini-1.5-Pro
63.2
70
72
58
64
52
Gemini-2.0-flash
51.2
62
54
46
48
46
Qwen-VL-Max
43.2
44
44
42
48
38
Table 2: Results in the supervised setting on EB-ALFRED. We evaluate on both seen task categories (Base, Complex, Visual; orange) and unseen categories (Common, Spatial; green) to assess generalization. ELITE consistently improves over the base VLM across all categories and achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared with other training-based methods without requiring gradient updates. Subscripts indicate the absolute performance improvement relative to the corresponding base model.
Figure 2: Ablation study on ELITE components in the online setting on EB-ALFRED. We compare the full ELITE framework against variants without Intent-Aware Retrieval (w/o IAR), without Context Consolidation (w/o CC), and the Base Model (Qwen2.5-VL-72B). The full ELITE achieves the best results across all task categories.
Figure 3: Ablation study on retrieval mechanisms in the online setting on EB-ALFRED long-horizon tasks. Task progress denotes the average completion percentage across all long-horizon tasks. Our intent-aware (CoT) retrieval outperforms TF-IDF-based alternatives (strategy content and instruction similarity), as well as using all strategies in the strategy pool and random selection.
Figure 4: Illustration of learning dynamics of ELITE in the online setting on EB-ALFRED long-horizon tasks. The x -axis indicates the number of tasks processed for online learning, while the y -axis shows the average success rate and task progress across all long-horizon tasks. Both metrics improve consistently as the strategy pool accumulates experience, demonstrating continuous self-improvement through deployment experience.
Figure 5: Qualitative comparison between the base Qwen2.5-VL model and ELITE on the example task: “Put a clean plate on the counter.” Left: The base model generates a flawed plan that attempts to clean the plate without first placing it in the sink, resulting in task failure. Middle: ELITE retrieves procedurally similar strategies from past experiences (sim=0.80 and 0.75) that demonstrate the correct pattern of putting objects in the sink before cleaning. Right: Augmented with retrieved strategies, ELITE produces a corrected plan that properly places the plate in the sink before turning on the faucet, leading to successful task completion.
Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong perception and reasoning abilities for instruction-following embodied agents. However, despite these abilities and their generalization performance, they still face limitations in environmental understanding, often failing on interactions or relying on environment metadata during execution. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework named Environmental Understanding Embodied Agent (EUEA), which fine-tunes four core skills: 1) object perception for identifying relevant objects, 2) task planning for generating interaction subgoals, 3) action understanding for judging success likelihood, and 4) goal recognition for determining goal completion. By fine-tuning VLMs with EUEA skills, our framework enables more reliable task execution for instruction-following. We further introduce a recovery step that leverages these core skills and a group relative policy optimization (GRPO) stage that refines inconsistent skill predictions. The recovery step samples alternative actions to correct failure cases, and the GRPO stage refines inconsistent skill predictions. Across ALFRED tasks, our VLM significantly outperforms a behavior-cloning baseline, achieving an 8.86% improvement in average success rate. The recovery and GRPO stages provide an additional 3.03% gain, further enhancing overall performance. Finally, our skill-level analyses reveal key limitations in the environmental understanding of closed- and open-source VLMs and identify the capabilities necessary for effective agent-environment interaction.
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.
Ziyi Wang, Xumin Yu, Yongming Rao +19
Tencent Robotics X Hy Vision Team Futian Laboratory
Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise for human-level embodied intelligence. However, existing benchmarks for VLM-driven embodied agents often rely on high-level commands or discretized action spaces, which are non-native settings that differ markedly from real-world control. In addition, current benchmarks focus primarily on high-level tasks and lack joint evaluation and analysis at both low and high levels. To address these limitations, we present NativeEmbodied, a challenging benchmark for VLM-driven embodied agents that uses a unified, native low-level action space. Built on diverse simulated scenes, NativeEmbodied includes three representative high-level tasks in complex scenarios to evaluate overall performance. For more detailed analysis, we further decouple the skills required by complex tasks and construct four types of low-level tasks, each targeting a fundamental embodied skill. This joint evaluation across task and skill granularities enables fine-grained assessment of embodied agents. Experiments with state-of-the-art VLMs reveal clear deficiencies in several fundamental embodied skills, and further analysis shows that these bottlenecks significantly limit performance on high-level tasks. NativeEmbodied highlights key challenges for current VLM-driven embodied agents and provides insights to guide future research.
Bo Peng, Pi Bu, Keyu Pan +7
University of Science and Technology of China · Alibaba Group · Independent Researcher +1