Open-world mobile manipulation requires a robot to find an object, approach it, and move it to a target receptacle from a language instruction. Training vision-language model (VLM) agents for these tasks requires demonstrations of both action selection and active vision. Existing pipelines often convert planned trajectories into high-level action labels, but shortest-path progress provides limited supervision for deciding where to look. We introduce Agent-Interface Data Alignment (AIDA), a data collection pipeline in which a teacher directly selects and executes actions through the deployed agent's skill interface. For mobile manipulation, we design teachers that maintain target visibility, recover lost targets, and approach for picking or placing. We add template-based spatial reasoning supervision and use a shared harness to organize observations, history, and outputs during training and inference. The resulting agent, AIDA-OWMM, achieves 71.76% full-task success on 170 held-out OWMM episodes. Teacher sensitivity analysis shows that active-vision demonstrations improve student success. The simulation-trained agent achieves 38% end-to-end success on a real mobile robot without additional training. Applying AIDA to a navigation subset of EmbodiedBench further demonstrates the pipeline's utility for navigation tasks.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: AIDA-OWMM overview. Left: the teacher generates demonstrations by selecting and executing high-level actions. Right: spatial annotations and a shared agent harness support training and deployment. The real-robot rate shown includes low-level grasp failures among recorded attempts.
Figure 2: OWMM agent interface. The VLM selects search, navigation, turn, pick, and place skills, which fixed controllers execute as robot motions. Scene key frames are provided during search.
Figure 3: AIDA-OWMM pipeline. The teacher collects high-level skill demonstrations, the annotator provides spatial reasoning targets, and the harness constructs training examples and maintains the deployed agent’s context.
Method
Base model
Image Retrieval (Object)
Object Picked
Image Retrieval (Goal)
Robot Close to Goal
Full Task
OWMM-VLM-38B
InternVL-38B
88.56%
38.56%
30.39%
23.53%
21.90%
OWMM-VLM-8B
InternVL-8B
81.43%
17.92%
15.96%
10.42%
9.45%
GPT-4o + PIVOT
GPT-4o
59.15%
0.65%
0.33%
0.00%
0.33%
GPT-4o + RoboPoint
GPT-4o
56.86%
1.31%
0.00%
0.00%
0.33%
AIDA-OWMM (ours)
Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct
90.59%
82.35%
74.12%
72.35%
71.76%
Table 1: OWMM system comparison. Baseline results are reported by OWMM-Agent; AIDA-OWMM is evaluated on 170 held-out episodes. Intermediate columns report stage completion, and Full Task reports complete object transfer.
Demonstrations
Samples
Success
OWMM, relabeled
152,478
38.8%
AIDA: distance-greedy
28,480
46.3%
AIDA: visibility-aware
28,480
65.5%
AIDA: target recovery
28,480
69.6%
Table 2: Teacher sensitivity. All students use four skills without turn . Sample counts denote training examples.
Key frames
History
Reasoning
Success
Every stage
None
No
55.88%
Search only
None
No
60.00%
Search only
Actions
No
65.88%
Search only
Actions
Yes
71.76%
Table 3: Harness ablations. All rows use the same AIDA demonstrations and five skills. Reasoning denotes spatial reasoning supervision.
Figure 4: Real-robot rollout. The simulation-trained agent turns to locate the object, approaches using pixel-coordinate goals, picks it, and searches for the destination receptacle.
Model
Base
Common
Avg.
Zero-shot VLMs
GPT-5.5
0.78
0.77
0.78
GPT-4o
0.43
0.37
0.40
OpenAI o3
0.53
0.50
0.52
Gemini 3 Flash
0.08
0.15
0.12
Claude Sonnet 4.6
0.27
0.33
0.30
Table 4: EmbodiedBench navigation. The EB-trained policy tests the AIDA pipeline on navigation; the OWMM-trained policy is a zero-shot reference.
Table 5: AIDA-OWMM model, training, and evaluation configurations. The shared prompt and output format is defined in Section 3.5 ; evaluation uses the trained LoRA adapter.
Mobile agents powered by vision-language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in automating mobile tasks, with recent leading models achieving a marked performance leap, e.g., nearly 70% success on AndroidWorld. However, these systems keep their training data closed and remain opaque about their task and trajectory synthesis recipes. We present OpenMobile, an open-source framework that synthesizes high-quality task instructions and agent trajectories, with two key components: (1) The first is a scalable task synthesis pipeline that constructs a global environment memory from exploration, then leverages it to generate diverse and grounded instructions. and (2) a policy-switching strategy for trajectory rollout. By alternating between learner and expert models, it captures essential error-recovery data often missing in standard imitation learning. Agents trained on our data achieve competitive results across three dynamic mobile agent benchmarks: notably, our fine-tuned Qwen2.5-VL and Qwen3-VL reach 51.7% and 64.7% on AndroidWorld, far surpassing existing open-data approaches. Furthermore, we conduct transparent analyses on the overlap between our synthetic instructions and benchmark test sets, and verify that performance gains stem from broad functionality coverage rather than benchmark overfitting. We release data and code at https://njucckevin.github.io/openmobile/ to bridge the data gap and facilitate broader mobile agent research.
Kanzhi Cheng, Zehao Li, Zheng Ma +11
1Nanjing University · 4Shanghai AI Laboratory · 2SenseTime +3
Real-world deployment of embodied agents requires active exploration, visual grounding, and interactive intent disambiguation. However, existing frameworks often rely on privileged simulator states or assume complete instructions, bypassing realistic deployment challenges. To bridge this gap, we present REAL, an agentic framework for open-world mobile manipulation. REAL establishes sim-to-real-consistent environment APIs without oracle perception and integrates a simulated user to enable human-in-the-loop interaction. Within this environment, we design diverse task compositions to drive data collection, supervised fine-tuning, and online reinforcement learning, systematically optimizing agent performance. To comprehensively evaluate this approach, we introduce REAL-Bench, a benchmark spanning 241 tasks across active exploration, visual distraction, articulated manipulation, and interactive disambiguation. Experimental results demonstrate that our trained agent outperforms leading commercial closed-source VLMs on interactive tasks with a 56.9% success rate. Further empirical analysis reveals that our hierarchical training pipeline successfully aligns the model's tool-use capabilities while maintaining robust open-vocabulary reasoning under extended exploration horizons. Finally, we deploy and evaluate our framework on a physical dual-arm mobile robot, where it achieves a 78.3% end-to-end success rate over 60 real-world episodes. These physical trials demonstrate robust zero-shot transferability to unseen household scenarios, validating that our sim-to-real-consistent design successfully bridges the reality gap for long-horizon mobile manipulation. Code is available at https://github.com/InternRobotics/REAL.
Boyu Mi, Mengchen Ma, Yifei Yao +10
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory · Southeast University +4
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have made general-purpose robot manipulation increasingly plausible by conditioning robot actions on natural-language instructions. A key test of such generality is whether policies actually follow language instructions. Yet many manipulation benchmarks leave this ability underdetermined: the intended object or destination is often visually salient or uniquely feasible, allowing policies to succeed without grounding the instruction. We argue that instruction-following evaluation should be text-indispensable: multiple actions should be visually and physically plausible, while only one should be consistent with the language instruction. We introduce InstructMove, a text-indispensable benchmark for instruction-following manipulation. InstructMove instantiates this principle in pick-and-place scenes with semantic distractors, decomposing instruction following into category identification, attribute discrimination, spatial reasoning, and compositional pick-and-place. InstructMove supports a train-eval protocol with InstructMove training data and held-out evaluation tasks, with additional diagnostics for language dependence. Experiments with representative VLA policies show that InstructMove provides a controlled testbed for diagnosing visual shortcuts and that InstructMove simulation data can improve real-world instruction-following manipulation performance. Code: https://github.com/HorizonRobotics/RoboOrchardSim
Mengao Zhao, Ziang Li, Chaodong Huang +15
Horizon Robotics · Southeast University · Huazhong University of Science and Technology +1