cs.ROJun 18, 2026

Vesta: A Generalist Embodied Reasoning Model

Authors: Johan Bjorck, Zhiqi Li, Yunze Man, Jing Wang, An-Chieh Cheng, Sifei Liu, Shihao Wang, Zhiding Yu, +24 more

Organizations: Co-first authors (alphabetical order). · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Core authors (alphabetical order). · University of California, San Diego · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · © 2026 NVIDIA. All rights reserved. · University of Michigan · Nanyang Technological University · Johns Hopkins University · University of Tübingen · Joint advising.

Abstract

Robots operating in open-world environments must seamlessly integrate localization, spatial reasoning, navigation, and long-horizon planning. While specialist models excel at individual tasks, deploying a multi-model stack is computationally expensive and prone to cascading errors. We present Vesta, a unified embodied generalist that consolidates these capabilities into a single foundation model. Our approach combines a diverse and massive curated corpus designed to induce spatial grounding and a simple multimodal memory harness that enables reasoning over extended time horizons. Across diverse benchmarks, Vesta on average beats individual SOTA baselines by >20%20\% and beats an ensemble of per-category-best baselines by >10%>10\% -- thus demonstrating that a generalist model can match or exceed specialists. On real-world robotic tasks requiring memory and reasoning, Vesta improves task success by >35%. Our work thus demonstrates that a single generalist is a feasible, scalable, and arguably preferable alternative to combining specialists.

Explore similar work

Jul 20, 2026cs.RO

RynnBrain 1.1: Towards More Capable and Generalizable Embodied Foundation Model

We present RynnBrain 1.1, a family of embodied foundation models spanning 2B, 9B, and 122B-A10B scales. Trained with a unified spatio-temporal and physically grounded framework, RynnBrain 1.1 supports embodied perception, spatial reasoning, localization, and planning. Compared with RynnBrain 1.0, it further introduces contact-point prediction across the model family and native 3D grounding for the 2B and 9B models, yielding representations and outputs that are more directly aligned with robot manipulation. We also develop RynnBrain-VLA with a unified cross-embodiment action space and embodiment-specific masking, and deploy it on Unitree G1, Astribot-S1, and Tianji-Wuji. RynnBrain 1.1 achieves strong results on embodied cognition, localization, and 3D grounding, with the 122B-A10B model outperforming all evaluated proprietary and open-source models on VSI-Bench, MMSI, and RefSpatial-Bench. Real-robot experiments show that RynnBrain-initialized policies outperform Qwen-based and representative generalist VLAs, while joint multi-task and multi-embodiment training improves process scores and success rates over per-task training.
Kehan Li, Bohan Hou, Minghao Zhu +28
Jun 30, 2026cs.CV

Technical Report of RoboSpatial Challenge at CVPR 2026: Selective Reasoning Activation and Reference-Frame Disambiguation for Embodied Spatial Reasoning

Vision-language models achieve strong general perception but often struggle with the spatial reasoning required for embodied tasks. We present RoboSpatialBrain, our submission to the RoboSpatial Challenge at the Embodied Reasoning in Action Workshop, CVPR 2026, built on RoboBrain2.5-8B-NV. RoboSpatialBrain combines two training-free, inference-time mechanisms: a forced <think> prefix activation strategy paired with a task-specific post-prompt that elicits deliberate reasoning on context and compatibility tasks, and an explicit reference-frame redirection pipeline that resolves camera-centric and object-centric ambiguity for context tasks. We additionally explore fine-tuning RoboBrain2.5 on compatibility data and present a detailed analysis of its interaction with prompting. RoboSpatialBrain achieved first place in the RoboSpatial Challenge, with an overall success rate of 80.9% on RoboSpatial-Home. Code is available at https://github.com/YuxiangXie2003/RoboSpatialBrain.
Yuxiang Xie, Qi Lv, Jianming Xing +4
Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

World Action Planner: Generalizable Decision-Making with Action-Conditioned World Models

Building generalizable agents for diverse applications remains a fundamental challenge. While imitation learning-based policies succeed in specific training environments, they often fail to generalize to novel scenes and tasks. In this work, we propose World Action Planner, a robot planning system that leverages the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and the physical grounding of a multi-task pose-image conditioned world model. Our system enables an agent to propose initial action plans and iteratively refine them via optimization and search, reasoning over imagined world model rollouts. We demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance across compositional tasks, new layouts, and zero-shot generalization scenarios, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art end-to-end policy models such as VLAs and WAMs. Project website at worldactionplanner.github.io
Xiangcheng Zhang, Yilun Du