Zetta : An Efficient Closed-Loop Embodied Harness for Self-Evolving Physical Intelligence
Organizations: Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University; Z-Trans AI
Abstract
Embodied agents are increasingly used to close the gap left by end-to-end policy models. Yet the agentic path has not realized closed-loop learning in physical execution: existing harnesses remain largely open-loop, following fixed skills during rollout and reflecting only after an episode completes. Such post-hoc reflection cannot govern execution as it unfolds, because physical interaction requires decisions to track rapidly changing robot-environment states at a frequency beyond today's large agentic models. We present Zetta, a closed-loop embodied harness that evolves code-based runtime critics and recovery skills online while keeping the base policy frozen. Through three timescale-separated loops, Zetta provides action-frequency governance, rollout-level critic-recovery proposal, and validation-gated skill updates. Together with Z-Infra, a rollout infrastructure decoupling agent logic from heterogeneous execution resources, Zetta achieves state-of-the-art success on LIBERO-Pro and RoboCasa under our current rollout budget, reaching 90.8% and 93.6%, with an 11.1x inference speedup; success continues to scale with self-exploration experience; learned skills transfer zero-shot, and clear robotic "Aha Moments" emerge. These results show that closed-loop harness self-evolution opens a scaling path for reliable physical intelligence.
Figures & tables
| API Primitive | Functionality |
| Session Management — create once, run many episodes, close when done | |
| create_sessions(requests) | Batch create sessions with env_family, env_config, lease_seconds. Returns SessionHandle with session_id. |
| renew_sessions(session_ids) | Extend lease duration for active sessions. |
| close_sessions(session_ids) | Close sessions and release resources (idempotent). |
| Environment Control — direct interaction for custom control logic | |
| reset(session_ids, reset_spec) | Start new episode with task_id, seed, instruction. Returns episode_id and initial observation. |
| Method | T1 | T2 | T3 | T4 | T5 | T6 | T7 | T8 | T9 | Avg. |
| Pure VLA (GR00T) | 78 | 74 | 78 | 58 | 48 | 62 | 72 | 74 | 70 | 73.56 |
| Zetta | 96 | 92 | 94 | 96 | 86 | 80 | 96 | 96 | 86 | 93.56 |
| Method | T10 | T11 | T12 | T13 | T14 | T15 | T16 | T17 | T18 | Avg. |
| Pure VLA (GR00T) | 62 | 92 | 76 | 88 | 96 | 50 | 90 | 82 | 74 | 73.56 |
| Zetta | 94 | 98 | 94 | 94 | 100 | 100 | 94 | 96 | 92 | 93.56 |
| Setting | Method | Task 0 | Task 1 | Task 2 | Task 3 | Task 4 | Task 5 | Task 6 | Task 7 | Task 8 | Task 9 | Average |
| Goal (T) | 0.0 | 95.0 | 10.0 | 0.0 | 100.0 | 0.0 | 20.0 | 80.0 | 5.0 | 0.0 | 31.0 | |
| Zetta | 80.0 | 100.0 | 95.0 | 80.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 95.0 | 95.0 | 80.0 | 100.0 | 92.5 | |
| Goal (S) | 0.0 | 60.0 | 0.0 | 45.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 75.0 | 38.0 | |
| Zetta | 90.0 | 65.0 | 80.0 | 85.0 | 95.0 | 95.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 80.0 | 89.0 | |
| LIBERO-10 (T) | 5.0 | 95.0 | 95.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 80.0 | 85.0 | 75.0 | 65.0 | 0.0 | 50.0 | |
| Zetta | 35.0 | 95.0 | 100.0 | 0.0 | 25.0 | 100.0 | 95.0 | 80.0 | 100.0 | 0.0 | 63.0 |
Appendix figures & tables2 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| ID | Official task name |
| T1 | NavigateKitchen |
| T2 | TurnOnMicrowave |
| T3 | PickPlaceCounterToStove |
| T4 | PickPlaceSinkToCounter |
| T5 | PickPlaceDrawerToCounter |
| T6 | PickPlaceCounterToCabinet |
| ID | LIBERO-Goal | ID | LIBERO-10 (Long) |
| Task 0 | open the middle drawer of the cabinet | Task 0 | put both the alphabet soup and the tomato sauce in the basket |
| Task 1 | put the bowl on the stove | Task 1 | put both the cream cheese box and the butter in the basket |
| Task 2 | put the wine bottle on top of the cabinet | Task 2 | turn on the stove and put the moka pot on it |
| Task 3 | open the top drawer and put the bowl inside | Task 3 | put the black bowl in the bottom drawer of the cabinet and close it |
| Task 4 | put the bowl on top of the cabinet | Task 4 | put the white mug on the left plate and put the yellow and white mug on the right plate |
| Task 5 | push the plate to the front of the stove | Task 5 | pick up the book and place it in the back compartment of the caddy |