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Jul 20, 2026cs.RO

UniETP: Unifying Environments for Generalizable Embodied Task Planning

This paper focuses on the problem of Embodied Task Planning, where an agent is required to execute a sequence of atomic actions within an interactive environment to complete a user-specified task. Though a variety of simulators and datasets have previously been built for this task, these efforts are largely isolated, with each using its own observation format, action type, and task domain. This fragmentation complicates comprehensive model evaluation and hinders the scalability of training data. As an effort towards generalizable embodied planning, we propose UniETP, a unified interface integrating four commonly-used simulators (AI2-THOR, VirtualHome, Habitat, BEHAVIOR). UniETP is characterized by both standardization and diversity. On one hand, it formalizes all the simulators into a consistent observation and action space, and builds an evaluation system to support complicated task goal. On the other hand, it enhances task diversity and complexity across dimensions like task logic, instance grounding, and instruction understanding, constructing a new dataset with varied levels of difficulty in an automatic manner. Extensive experiments on the proposed benchmark are conducted to evaluate the embodied planning capabilities of recent models and analyze the performance bottlenecks. Codes and data will be available at https://github.com/woyut/UniETP .
Peiran Xu, Jiaqi Zheng, Ziyou Wang +1
Jul 20, 2026cs.AI

PGN: Design and Implementation of a Vision-Language Navigation System Based on Pangu Multimodal Foundation Model

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an embodied agent to interpret a natural-language instruction and predict actions from temporally ordered visual observations. Adapting a multimodal large language model to VLN requires visual-language alignment, compact temporal inputs, action-space grounding, and stable training on the target hardware. This technical report presents PGN (Pangu Navigator), an offline VLN action-prediction system built on OpenPangu-7B. Training proceeds in two stages. First, PGMM aligns a frozen EVA-ViT-G/14 vision encoder with the frozen language backbone by training a Q-Former and a two-layer MLP projector. Second, PGN adapts the aligned model to expert navigation trajectories using five-observation windows, epoch-dependent temporal sampling, and a reasoning-then-action output format; this stage freezes the aligned visual pathway and updates three structural-token embeddings and LoRA adapters. The implementation combines mixed-precision computation, selective FP32 computation, and DeepSpeed ZeRO-2 on eight Ascend 910B NPUs. Under teacher-forced, open-loop evaluation on 500 held-out expert trajectories, V9 reports a 62.29% Normalized Action Match (NAM) and a 100.00% Non-empty Rate (NER). These metrics quantify offline expert-action alignment rather than closed-loop navigation success; evaluating error accumulation, path efficiency, and goal completion remains future work.
Li Xian, Mingxi Li, Yizheng Wang +3
Jul 20, 2026cs.AI

Artificial Intelligence for Understanding and Managing Transportation Behavior in Sustainable Smart Cities

Urban transportation systems generate heterogeneous data, yet these data do not automatically become actionable management intelligence. This chapter adopts a behavior-centered perspective on artificial intelligence (AI), treating mobility records and passenger-generated text as behavioral evidence rather than behavioral truth. It examines four directions: bus arrival prediction for service reliability, taxi mobility pattern discovery for demand analysis and planning, abnormal behavior detection for accountable regulatory support, and passenger-perceived risk mining for service improvement. These directions are integrated through a closed-loop framework linking data input, behavior representation, AI inference, decision support, public value, and governance feedback. The chapter identifies data quality, privacy, fairness, interpretability, uncertainty, transferability, and human accountability as essential conditions for deployment. It thereby establishes a unified pathway from behavioral evidence to operational, planning, regulatory, and passenger-service decisions.
Junbiao Pang, Muhammad Ayub Sabir, Fatima Ashraf
Jul 20, 2026cs.HC

Human-in-the-Loop User Feedback Affects Perceived Accuracy and Trust, but Task Subjectivity Matters

While ML can produce complex models beyond those that a human could produce manually, incorporating human input can often improve performance beyond purely data-driven models. While this feedback could come from system designers or domain experts, in many cases, the end users who regularly use the system will naturally develop an understanding of its flaws and desire the ability to change the system's behavior based on their knowledge. While soliciting feedback from end users can result in significant model improvement over time, introducing these feedback techniques can also affect several human factors-such as trust or perception of system accuracy-that are not yet fully understood and have different effects reported in the existing literature. Therefore, we sought to build on the existing research to further explore how the act of providing feedback can affect user understanding of an intelligent system and its accuracy in different contexts. We present three controlled experiments that study the effects of interactive feedback collections on user impressions in domains with objective and subjective feedback. The results show that in a context where there is an objectively correct answer, providing HITL feedback lowered both participants' trust in the system and their perception of system accuracy, regardless of whether the system accuracy improved in response to their feedback. However, when the feedback being provided involved subjective opinion, no such negative bias was observed. Furthermore, in the objective context, participants distrusted the system over time, whereas participants in the subjective context mistrusted the system over time. These results highlight the importance of considering the effects of allowing different types of end-user feedback on user trust when designing intelligent systems.
Donald R. Honeycutt, Mahsan Nourani, Eric D. Ragan
Jul 18, 2026cs.RO

PhyAgentOS: A Self-Evolving Operating System for Embodied Agents with Decoupled Cognitive Planning and Physical Execution

Vision-language-action models, world models, and agentic planners each advance physical intelligence, yet their composition lacks a common execution abstraction, shared state, semantic verification, and persistent experience across heterogeneous embodiments. We present PhyAgentOS, a runtime foundation delivering scheduling, verification, memory, benchmarking, and safety as system-level services. Its Session-Centered Runtime treats a session, not an action, as the minimum unit of scheduling, compatibility preflight, supervised execution, evidence collection, and acceptance. To decouple cognition from physical execution, the cognition-physics boundary is a file system: the State-as-a-File protocol materializes cross-layer state as Markdown with YAML, yielding inspectable, versionable records without code dependencies between Agent and Runtime layers. These views form a unified cognitive state space aligning intent, capabilities, environment, execution, and experience. The SessionVerifier distinguishes execution termination from semantic task completion via evidence-grounded verdicts of success, failure, or replan. Verified outcomes are consolidated through epistemic memory into reusable knowledge and corrective lessons, closing a trial-and-error loop without retraining. Benchmarking reuses the deployment session and verification path, so results trace to real execution. Layered safety constrains both policy-driven and agent-driven execution: preflight, action bridges, SafetyGuard, heartbeat monitoring, and target-local constraints. Validation is progressive: games test cognitive planning, simulation adds dynamics and control, real robots add hardware noise, with the cognitive layer held constant. PhyAgentOS is benchmarked on Optimus-67, StarDojo, and DST-Dojo, validated on 19+ simulated and physical embodiments, and gains on LIBERO, Calvin, and RoboCasa365 across multiple VLA models.
Yang Liu, Weixing Chen, Xinshuai Song +8
Jul 17, 2026cs.AI

Berkeley and Heiserman as an Unexhausted Architecture for Embodied Machine Intelligence

Edmund C. Berkeley is usually remembered as a mediator between symbolic logic and early computing, yet that standard description understates the scope of his work. This paper argues for a stronger reading: Berkeley should also be understood as an early theorist of embodied machine intelligence. Across Berkeley's major writings on symbolic logic, machine intelligence, living robots, and Squee, intelligence appears not as disembodied symbol manipulation alone but as the organized coordination of sensing, storage, calculation, control, state, and action in physically realized machines. The paper's first contribution is interpretive: it reconstructs Berkeley as a thinker of machine architecture, temporally extended behavior, and environment-coupled control. Its second contribution is comparative: it reads Berkeley alongside David L. Heiserman to recover a shared descriptive scheme centered on sensing, state or memory, control, action, and adaptation. Its third contribution is critical: it uses that scheme to assess current embodied-AI discourse. The broader claim is that contemporary LLM-centered robotics often demonstrates impressive capability without an equally explicit account of persistence, recoverability, maintenance, and structured modification of conduct through experience.
Christopher A. Tucker
Jul 17, 2026cs.CV

MotionForesight: Re-purposing Video Models for Future 3D Scene-Flow Prediction

Humans can infer how objects are likely to move from passive observation: a cup may be lifted, a drawer may slide, and a lid may rotate shut. Such predictions expose the physical consequences of interaction needed to act in the real world. We study how to learn this anticipation from ordinary monocular videos of human-object interaction. Given a short observed video context, MotionForesight predicts future 3D trajectories for points on the manipulated object. This casts interaction prediction as object-centered 3D motion forecasting without any assumptions on the object properties. Our key insight is that video prediction models already encode rich priors about how objects move during human interactions. We redirect these priors from pixel prediction toward future 3D scene flow. We start from a dense 3D tracker built on a pretrained video model, generate pseudo-ground-truth tracks from complete clips, and train the forecaster using only the observed frames. We replace future RGB and geometry with learned mask latents and train a lightweight adapter to turn the retrospective tracking representation into a forward predictor, while freezing the large video and tracking components. Using just 40k human videos and no auxiliary inputs such as language, MotionForesight generalizes across diverse out-of-distribution objects, environments, viewpoints, and interactions. It also outperforms substantially larger models that use over a million training videos. These results show that we can efficiently re-purpose video priors into explicit geometric forecasts for embodied intelligence. https://motionforesight.github.io/
Homanga Bharadhwaj, Yash Jangir
Jul 16, 2026econ.GN

Governing Artificial Intelligence: Public Preferences and Regulatory Options

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming economies, societies, and polities, raising fundamental questions about how it should be regulated. Policymakers face choices over whether to prioritize innovation or safety, rely on public oversight or private self-regulation, and govern nationally or internationally. Yet little is known about how citizens evaluate these competing priorities. Here we report a conjoint survey experiment conducted in seven countries with diverse political and economic profiles. We find that citizens strongly support regulating AI and generally prioritize safety over innovation, public governance over private self-regulation, and international over national approaches. The preference for safety is strongest among those who perceive AI as risky, unpredictable, and personally consequential. These findings reveal a systematic misalignment between dominant regulatory approaches and citizen preferences.
Magnus Lundgren, Jonas Tallberg
Jul 16, 2026cs.CV

HyMobileAgent: Data-Environment Co-Scaling for Efficient GUI Agents

As large multimodal models move from understanding content to operating on digital environments, mobile GUI has emerged as a challenging and consequential testbed for digital embodied intelligence. Mobile agents operate under three coupled constraints: precise perception of complex interfaces, scalable acquisition of high-quality interaction data, and robust long-horizon decision making under compounding execution errors. This report presents HyMobileAgent, a mobile GUI agent built on Hy3.0-VL-A3B, a vision-native foundation model featuring native any-resolution input, an A3B-scale deployment budget, and a 32K context window to model extended interaction histories. Rather than relying solely on model scaling, we develop a joint data and environment centric scaling framework to address the key bottlenecks of mobile interaction. Our framework integrates a GUI perception flywheel combining mock-interface synthesis, rejection sampling, and icon-specific augmentation; a knowledge pipeline that transforms tutorial videos into structured interaction data; a million-scale action data pipeline deployed across more than 2000 sandbox and real-device instances with automated failure attribution; the PhoneWorld Mock App Factory, providing a resettable training environment with 34 mock applications and over 34000 tasks; and a structured Planning-and-Reflection mechanism with explicit dead-loop detection for reliable long-horizon execution. We also introduce a progressive training recipe consisting of mid-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning with task-specific reward designs.
Hy Vision Team, Huawen Shen, Zhengyang Tang +20
Jul 16, 2026cs.RO

SafeRelBench: A Spatial-Relation-Aware Benchmark for Process-Level Safety in VLM-Driven Embodied Agents

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as the reasoning backbone of embodied agents, enabling robots to interpret visual scenes, follow language instructions, and plan multi-step actions. In household environments, however, safety depends not only on recognizing objects, but also on how actions change the physical scene over time. Existing embodied safety evaluations largely focus on static risk recognition, unsafe instruction refusal, or final-state task completion. As a result, process-level safety failures induced by spatial relations such as support, containment, and proximity remain insufficiently studied. To address this gap, we introduce SAFERELBENCH, a spatial-relation-aware safety benchmark with 507 executable evaluation samples, including 248 spatial-relation samples and 259 non-spatial control samples. Using SAFERELBENCH to evaluate seven open- and closed-source VLM-driven embodied agents, we find a substantial gap between task success and process-level safety compliance: models often complete the requested task while violating process-level safety constraints. Unlike prior benchmarks, SAFERELBENCH explicitly tests whether agents satisfy safety conditions before risk-prone actions, making spatial relations a core dimension in embodied safety assessment. More broadly, our results show that safe embodied intelligence requires not only stronger perception and planning, but also reliable reasoning about how object relations shape risk during interaction.
Huaigang Yang, Ya Li, Min Ren +3
Jul 16, 2026cs.CV

VTM-Nav: Hierarchical Visual-Topological Memory for Cross-Episode Object-Goal Navigation

Object-goal navigation requires an embodied agent to locate and reach an instance of a specified object category in an indoor environment. Recent training-free approaches leverage vision-language models (VLMs) for open-vocabulary semantic reasoning, but are typically evaluated under an episodic protocol that resets all scene-specific state after each episode. We introduce Cross-Episode Object-Goal Navigation, in which an agent repeatedly operates in the same scene, retains only self-acquired experience, and keeps its model parameters fixed. To support experience reuse, we present \method, a training-free VLM navigation framework with a persistent hierarchical Visual-Topological Memory (VTM). The VTM organizes scene knowledge at room and object levels and retrieves relevant experience through coarse-to-fine matching, providing memory as soft guidance only when it agrees with current observations. A conservative execution guard further mitigates oscillations, blocked motions, and premature stopping. Under a controlled same-scene protocol, we evaluate \method{} on three benchmarks, HM3D v0.1, HM3D v0.2, and MP3D, and compare it with a strengthened WMNav baseline augmented with cross-episode textual memory, while keeping the VLM backbone and action pipeline identical. \method{} achieves the best performance across all three benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of structured visual-topological experience reuse across datasets.
Xiaoran Xu, Yupeng Wu, Tianyu Xue +4
Jul 15, 2026cs.RO

Open-AoE: An Open Egocentric Manipulation Dataset and Toolchain for Embodied Learning

Egocentric videos of human manipulation provide scalable supervision for embodied intelligence, yet existing resources rarely combine low-cost continuous capture, manipulation-level structured annotations, and reusable tools for robot learning. We present Open-AoE, an open, community-oriented egocentric manipulation dataset and toolchain spanning the full pipeline from smartphone capture to model training. Its first release contains approximately 2,000 hours of manipulation video collected in natural environments by 500+ contributors using 400+ smartphones. The dataset provides text annotations, MANO-based hand poses, camera trajectories, and temporally localized atomic actions. Open-AoE further includes a data processing pipeline that transforms raw recordings into structured samples through temporal action segmentation, semantic annotation, hand reconstruction, and camera trajectory reconstruction. Meanwhile, we provide a separate downstream toolchain supports visualization, cross-embodiment retargeting, model-specific data conversion, and training recipes for VLA policies, WAMs, and World Models. By integrating scalable capture, structured processing, and downstream adaptation, Open-AoE reduces the barriers to both data contribution and reuse, providing practical open infrastructure for embodied model training, human-to-robot transfer, and world modeling.
Zishuo Li, Bowen Yang, Changtao Miao +29
Jul 15, 2026cs.CV

Exploratory, Communicative, and Deployable: Vision-Driven Embodied Agents for Open-World Mobile Manipulation

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
Jul 15, 2026cs.AI

UESF-Bench: Benchmarking and Probing for Unified Embodied Seeking and Following

Language-guided human following is an important capability for embodied agents, but existing benchmarks typically assume that the target person is visible at the start of an episode. This setting simplifies the problem and overlooks a more realistic requirement: an agent often needs to first find a language-described target and then persistently follow that target in a dynamic environment. While recent work has started to study human search, existing settings are typically evaluated in task-specific scenarios and often rely on stronger prior knowledge of the environment. Moreover, they usually treat searching and following as separate tasks and still lack a unified benchmark for systematic evaluation. To address these limitations, we introduce the Unified Embodied Seeking and Following Benchmark (UESF-Bench), a large-scale and diverse benchmark for embodied human seeking and following. The benchmark requires agents to handle semantic-guided exploration, reliable behavior switching and recovery, and delayed identity grounding. To this end, we propose SeekFollow-VLA, a vision-language-action framework with a task-driven routing mechanism for latent phase inference and transition modeling between seeking and following. Experimental results show that SeekFollow-VLA achieves clear improvements over both single-head and dual-head baselines across single-person and multi-person environments, establishing a baseline for unified embodied seek-and-follow.
Kun Yu, Jianhua Yang, Yixiang Chen +7
Jul 15, 2026cs.CV

UniPhysGen: Unified Physical Grounding for Simulation-Ready 3D Assets

Physically grounded 3D assets are increasingly important for embodied AI and robotic simulation. However, most existing 3D assets lack unified physical semantics, including articulation semantics and intrinsic physical properties, required for realistic interaction. Current approaches either treat these semantics independently or rely on canonicalized object structures, limiting robustness across heterogeneous 3D assets. We present UniPhys, a scalable framework for automatically transforming raw 3D assets into simulation-ready assets with unified physical semantics. Based on UniPhys, we construct UniPhys-40K, a large-scale physically grounded dataset, together with UniPhys-Bench, a carefully verified benchmark for unified physical grounding evaluation. We further introduce UniPhysGen, a unified physical grounding model that jointly reasons over articulation semantics and intrinsic physical properties. UniPhysGen incorporates geometry-robust articulation grounding to mitigate geometric shortcut bias under heterogeneous part decompositions. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across articulation grounding and intrinsic physical property estimation tasks, while the resulting assets can be directly deployed in robotic simulation environments for realistic physical interaction. Our code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/breezexian/UniPhysGen.
Xian Li, Rong Wei, Lujie Yang +6
Jul 15, 2026q-bio.NC

Grounded world models in biological organisms and future embodied AI

Recent advances in generative and embodied AI have been driven by large-scale predictive learning over multimodal data. However, the resulting systems remain largely based on passive training regimes where linguistic regularities create the scaffold onto which information from other modalities is attached. Conversely, neuroscience and cognitive science suggest that biological intelligence is organized in the opposite way, where grounded world models acquired through interaction with the environment provide the semantic scaffold to which language is attached. Here, we illustrate five examples of neural circuits supporting grounded world modelling, which underlie navigation in physical and conceptual spaces, affordance-based perception and interaction with objects, active perception and exploratory learning, allostatic control and emotion, and the distinction between self- and world-generated outcomes. These examples highlight several features largely missing from current embodied AI, including the role of intrinsic dynamics as a foundation for learning, the centrality of action in aligning these dynamics with the external world, the prominence of autonomous experience and open-ended learning over passive assimilation of externally provided data, and the fact that early predictive and control mechanisms scaffold higher cognitive abilities such as reasoning, conceptual navigation, planning, imagination, understanding others' minds, and communication. Finally, we discuss whether and how principles derived from biological systems may inform future embodied AI, including training regimes based on social interaction to construct world models that are not only grounded but also socially shared and aligned with human norms and values.
Giovanni Pezzulo, Davide Nuzzi, Marco D'Alessandro +3
Jul 15, 2026cs.RO

Joint On-and-Off Policy Learning for Vision-and-Language Navigation

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) necessitates an embodied agent to navigate in the physical world by adhering to natural language instructions. Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLM) have propelled the development of VLM-based VLN methods with two predominant paradigms: (1) imitation learning (IL) on expert demonstrations, followed by the Dataset Aggregation (DAgger) algorithm to bolster error recovery capabilities; (2) reinforcement learning (RL) driven by verifiable rewards to enhance reasoning and exploration. A notable gap is the absence of integration between these two distinct paradigms. This paper introduces JOP-VLN, a novel VLN framework that synergistically combines off-policy imitation learning and on-policy exploration within a three-stage training pipeline. Initially, IL is employed on expert demonstrations to acquire basic navigation skills. Subsequently, the DAgger algorithm is utilized to generate heuristic exploration trajectories, which are then used for imitation learning to improve error recovery capabilities. Finally, a joint on-and-off policy learning framework is implemented, featuring high-entropy trajectory sampling to enhance RL training efficiency and an error-correction-prioritized trajectory sorting strategy for effective error correction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of JOP-VLN, achieving success rates of 69.9% and 68.0% on the VLN-CE R2R and RxR benchmarks, respectively, setting a new state-of-the-art on R2R. Project page: https://qingrongh.github.io/JOP-VLN.
Qingrong He, Lin Zhao, Kevin Zheng +1
Jul 14, 2026cs.CV

Hy-Embodied-VLM-1.0: Efficient Physical-World Agents

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
Jul 14, 2026cs.AI

Atomic Units of X: The Compression Layer of Intelligence

This paper proposes a theoretical framework for understanding intelligence as a process of atomic compression and compositional reuse. We argue that cognitive, biological, computational, and organizational systems achieve scalable intelligence by decomposing complex phenomena into reusable atomic units that can be recombined into higher-order structures. Drawing on evidence from cognitive science, information theory, evolutionary biology, software engineering, medicine, legal reasoning, education, music, and artificial intelligence, the paper develops the concept of atomic units as fundamental compression layers that support efficiency, transfer, interpretability, and evolvability. The central contribution is the Compression Calculus, a formal framework for comparing surface-level representations with atomic representations and for describing how compression gains compound across abstraction layers. We introduce the Compounding Cascade thesis, according to which each additional layer of abstraction multiplicatively increases representational efficiency rather than merely adding incremental savings. The paper further argues that contemporary AI systems often operate at suboptimal levels of representation, relying on token-level processing or document-level retrieval rather than stable, concept-level atomic structures. In this view, large language models are best understood not as complete knowledge architectures, but as dynamic fusion engines capable of navigating, sequencing, and recombining atomic units. The framework provides a foundation for designing self-evolving knowledge systems that can discover, refine, and compose new primitives over time. By reframing intelligence as compression through compositional abstraction, the paper offers a unifying perspective on expertise, knowledge representation, explainable AI, and the future architecture of adaptive intelligent systems.
Sachin Dev Duggal, Pradyumna Swarnalatha Ramanna, Alexandros Vassiliades
Jul 14, 2026cs.CV

MobileSAM2: Lightweight Segment Anything for Spatial Intelligence

The recent large video foundation model, SAM2, enables segment anything in both images and videos, serving as a powerful base model for various applications. However, many of such use cases require to operate on resource-constrained devices like mobile phones and laptops. In this work, we aim to make SAM2 more mobile-friendly by distilling the heavyweight SAM2 into a lightweight model, facilitating segment anything in both images and videos on mobile devices. To this end, we propose Hypergraphical Knowledge Distill (HyperKD), which introduces the idea of hypergraph into knowledge distillation, aiming to effectively model and transfer SAM2's generalizable and comprehensive knowledge. HyperKD consists of Temporal HyperKD and Granularity HyperKD that construct hypergraphs to explicitly model and extract the generalizable temporal knowledge and the comprehensive multi-granularity knowledge from SAM2 respectively, which are then distilled into the lightweight student model by aligning it with the constructed hypergraphs. Besides, we present MobileSAM2, a new family of lightweight SAM2 that balances efficiency and effectiveness via searching the best model architectures with HyperKD during model size reduction. Extensive experiments validate MobileSAM2 across multiple benchmarks and show promising generalization performance on embodied AI tasks.
Kai Jiang, Jiaxing Huang, Jingyi Zhang +5
Jul 13, 2026cs.LG

Transformer-Guided Swarm Intelligence for Frugal Neural Architecture Search

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has automated the design of deep learning models but traditionally requires massive computational resources, often measured in thousands of GPU-days. In this paper, we propose a frugal and memetic NAS framework designed to democratize architecture design on consumer-grade hardware. Our approach combines the global macro-search capabilities of an autoregressive Transformer controller, trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL), with the local micro-exploitation of an Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. To prevent premature convergence during the RL phase, we introduce a dynamic entropy mechanism that forces topological exploration upon detection of performance stagnation. Evaluated on a standard GPU (NVIDIA RTX 3060), our hybrid method effectively resolves the "cold-start" problem inherent in metaheuristics. By algorithmically penalizing network depth, our framework actively mitigates model bloat: on the CIFAR-10 dataset, it discovers an efficient architecture reaching 84.85% accuracy with only ∼\sim174,000 parameters (significantly smaller than standard baselines like ResNet-20) in 3 hours of search time. Furthermore, we demonstrate the framework's flexibility by applying it to credit card fraud detection, directly optimizing the F1-Score on highly imbalanced tabular data to reach a F1-Score of 0.71 with a compact network of ∼\sim4,600 parameters. These results suggest that our approach can yield tailored, accessible, and highly parameter-efficient deep learning models suitable for edge deployment.
Romain Amigon
Jul 13, 2026cs.RO

From World Action Models to Embodied Brains: A Roadmap for Open-World Physical Intelligence

Artificial general intelligence ultimately requires agents that can reason and act in the physical world. Action models, vision-language-action policies, and world models have advanced this goal, while World Action Models (WAMs) are particularly promising because they connect candidate interventions with predicted consequences. However, progress remains fragmented: models use incompatible action spaces and prediction targets, datasets and tasks follow different conventions, and runtime systems expose limited interfaces for reuse and evaluation. We review the evolution toward WAMs and organize these limitations into three coupled gaps: model roles and representations, objectives and standardization, and system composition. Building on this analysis, we propose a co-evolution roadmap for physical intelligence centered on the \emph{embodied brain}, a long-term model target for integrating multimodal context, comparing candidate interventions, and issuing state-transition or capability requests rather than direct actuator commands. WAMs provide promising prototypes for its predictive functions, while a physical harness grounds model outputs through tools, controllers, verification, and trace logging. Shared contracts align heterogeneous models, data, tasks, and embodiments, and closed-loop post-training converts verified interaction into reusable experience. Together, these components define a modular physical-intelligence stack for adaptive and self-improving embodied agents.
Yuanzhi Liang, Xufeng Zhan, Haibin Huang +2
Jul 13, 2026cs.RO

A Glimpse into Long-term Physical Coexistence with Intelligent Robots

Long-term physical coexistence with intelligent robots requires more than capable robot policies. A persistent robotic assistant must support diverse user-facing interfaces, maintain long-horizon memory of people and preferences, coordinate across robot embodiments, and translate human intent into safe physical execution. We introduce PHILIA, a multi-robot agent built around a robot gateway abstraction. PHILIA retains the rich interaction and tool ecosystem of OpenClaw while exposing robot-local runtimes, onboard perception, navigation, speaker, and robot policies through a unified capability interface. This design decouples low-frequency, high-semantic agent reasoning from high-frequency, low-level robot execution, enabling plug-and-play integration of user interfaces, robot embodiments, and policy backends. As a result, the user experience becomes compositional: advances in user interfaces, robot embodiments, robot policies, navigation, or interaction algorithms can improve the overall experience without redesigning the system. We validate the architecture on Astribot S1 robots while designing the robot gateway contract to support future heterogeneous robot platforms through a shared capability interface for observation, task execution, navigation, speech playback, status monitoring, and task cancellation. We present representative use cases in which agent memory and scene understanding are grounded in robot actions. These span interactive household scenarios, ranging from simple organization to challenging long-horizon and dexterous service tasks, such as packing a backpack and lifting a garbage bag. We highlight the human-robot interaction flow, where contextual understanding of user intent and preferences, together with human-in-the-loop confirmation or adjustment during execution, is essential for effective assistance.
Weiqi Jin, Peijun Tang, Kuncheng Luo +5
Jul 13, 2026cs.RO

Towards Predictive, Aligned, and Scalable Robot Learning

Learning, at its core, extends beyond memorization to the ability to reason and solve novel problems by navigating a space of possibilities. We introduce Lumo-2, a latent world-action model that generates actions by reasoning over world dynamics in latent space. The learned latent world dynamics capture physically grounded visual transitions, naturally encoding future possibilities and providing a unified substrate for cross-modal alignment. This formulation enables predictive reasoning akin to world modelling while remaining lightweight and focused on physical dynamics relevant to control. Central to our approach is the hypothesis that action generation quality is governed by the geometry of the latent space. We observe that standard reconstruction-based action tokenization objectives induce representations biased toward low-level signal fidelity, leading to misalignment between reconstruction quality and downstream control performance. To address this limitation, we propose a multi-stage modality pre-alignment strategy in which action representations are progressively aligned with latent world dynamics, vision, and language. This process enforces cross-modal consistency, promotes abstraction, and induces a structured latent space for predictive reasoning. We provide a systematic empirical study of latent world modelling and modality alignment, analyzing their roles in scaling laws and out-of-distribution generalization. Results show that Lumo-2 consistently outperforms strong vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action model (WAM) baselines, with gains on challenging real-world tasks requiring temporal reasoning, physical understanding, or high control complexity, including long-horizon and dexterous manipulation. These findings suggest that structured multimodal alignment and predictive reasoning are fundamental principles for advancing embodied intelligence.
Peijun Tang, Shangjin Xie, Baifu Huang +6
Jul 13, 2026cs.AI

Bringing Back Rule Induction to Fluid Intelligence Research? An Initial Validation of the ARC-AGI Benchmark in Humans

Two competing perspectives on fluid intelligence (gf) measures propose that performance is primarily constrained either by working memory capacity or by the ability to induce novel relations. The first perspective is currently dominant in measurement, as evident from the use of a limited set of recurring rules, whereas the second perspective is reflected in many definitions but rarely present in measurement. The ARC-AGI benchmark predominantly requires rule induction and was proposed as a measure of gf for both humans and artificial systems. However, its psychometric properties have not yet been examined in human samples. We therefore investigated the psychometric characteristics and nomological network of ARC-AGI in a first study with 100 participants. A compilation of ARC-AGI items showed good psychometric properties and correlated substantially with figural fluid intelligence as measured by a figural reasoning test (ρρ = .63). Associations with figural originality were weak. These findings provide initial support for the validity of ARC-AGI as a measure of human fluid intelligence. Future research should include more rule induction tasks as well as additional multivariate covariates. This study is unusual by studying a task in humans that was initially designed for machines. We suggest systematically embedding AI benchmarks into the nomological network of human cognitive abilities to enable more systematic evaluation and interdisciplinary cooperation.
Jasmin Thelen, Oliver Wilhelm
Jul 12, 2026cs.CV

Traj-VLN: Learning Pixel-Space Interaction via Autoregressive Trajectory Generation

Benefiting from the powerful priors embedded in large-scale pre-training data and the emerging commonsense reasoning ability, large language models (LLMs) have shown unprecedented generalization capabilities in many research fields. Recently, projecting visual embeddings into the language space via vision-language models (VLMs) to achieve sim-toreal and cross-scene generalization has become a prevailing paradigm in the field of Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE). VLN requires an embodied agent to navigate through unseen environments following natural linguistic instructions. We emphasize that a VLN task can be decomposed into a sequence of sub-tasks, each corresponding to a process of 3D spatial interaction with the environments described by instructions such as "walk to the end of the sofa and turn left." However, such spatial interactions involving moving into the image along the direction of depth sensing are puzzling for VLMs as they were predominantly trained on conversations with RGB images. Rather than incorporating depth or 3D geometric information-which VLMs rarely encounter during pretrainingwe propose an alternative approach: fine-tuning VLMs to learn navigation interactions directly in 2D pixel space through autoregressive trajectory generation. Given a linguistic instruction and historical observations, our model sequentially predicts a series of pixel coordinates, drawing a trajectory from the bottom center of the current observation. While prior work has proved that pixel-goal supervision outperforms learning of discrete actions, our experiments further verify that the supervision of pixel-space trajectory significantly enhances VLN performance. Moreover, we demonstrate that our flagship model achieves state-of-the-art level performance with relatively limited computational resources and training data.
Changfei Fu, Guangcheng Chen, Wenjun Xu +1
Jul 11, 2026cs.AI

ABot-AgentOS: A General Robotic Agent OS with Lifelong Multi-modal Memory

Recent VLM and VLA systems have improved robotic perception and action prediction, yet long-horizon embodied agents still require a general runtime layer for reasoning, memory, tool use, verification, and cross-embodiment execution. We present ABot-AgentOS, a general robotic Agent Operating System that sits above low-level controllers and provides a deliberative agent layer for scene-conditioned planning, context-isolated skill execution, multi-stage verification, multi-modal memory, and edge-cloud collaboration. To evaluate such systems, we introduce EmbodiedWorldBench, an executable benchmark with 16 indoor, outdoor, and hybrid scenes, four difficulty levels, and over 200 tasks involving navigation, object search, NPC dialogue, dynamic events, and trace-grounded scoring. ABot-AgentOS further introduces Universal Multi-modal Graph Memory, a persistent source-grounded substrate that converts dialogue, visual observations, spatial context, temporal relations, and task traces into typed nodes and edges. A failure-driven self-evolution loop converts diagnosed memory failures into gated runtime evo-assets that are promoted only to later evaluation splits, preventing current-split ground-truth leakage while enabling continual improvement. On an initial EmbodiedWorldBench subset, ABot-AgentOS improves over a single-controller baseline in both task success and goal completion. Across memory benchmarks, ABot-AgentOS Static achieves 87.5 on LoCoMo, 59.9 on OpenEQA EM-EQA, 88.6 on Mem-Gallery, and 76.5 Acc@All on NExT-QA; self-evolution further improves LoCoMo to 88.7, OpenEQA to 60.4, and Mem-Gallery to 89.0. These results suggest that a general Agent OS layer can improve long-horizon embodied execution while providing persistent, auditable memory for continual interaction.
Jiayi Tian, Shiao Liu, Yuting Xu +30
Jul 11, 2026cs.AI

Can Agentic Trading Systems Pay for Their Own Intelligence?

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used in trading systems, where model reasoning, tool use, and continual decisions incur costs that are expected to produce trading value. Existing evaluations typically report performance metrics, but rarely examine agentic viability: whether dynamic LLM-mediated decisions convert their induced costs into measurable incremental profit. To apply this criterion, we introduce TradeLens, a trace-grounded diagnostic toolkit for evaluating agentic trading systems from their trading records, runtime traces, and deployment configurations. It reconstructs trading trajectories, attributes profit and cost to interpretable evidence, and diagnoses whether and why an agent pays for its own intelligence. We conduct extensive analysis across backbone models, capital scales, trading frequencies, and system architectures, together with deployment discussion. Our results show that viability hinges on intelligence-to-profit conversion: models exhibit different failure patterns, such as poor asset selection in DeepSeek-V3.2 and negative timing in GLM-4.7, while capital scale, trading frequency, and architecture matter only by amplifying or degrading decision-attributed timing value. These findings reframe the evaluation of LLM-based trading agents from capability-centric performance ranking to trace-grounded diagnosis of intelligence-to-profit conversion. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TradeLens.
Qiqi Duan, Changlun Li, Chen Wang +10
Jul 11, 2026cs.CL

PTEI: Integrating Personality Traits to Enhance Emotional Intelligence in Large Language Models

Despite advances in Emotional Intelligence (EI), Large Language Models (LLMs) still significantly underperform humans in complex emotional reasoning. This gap originates partly from the limited incorporation of individual differences, particularly personality traits, which are fundamental to human emotional inference. To address this, we propose PTEI, a novel framework for integrating Personality Traits into Emotional Intelligence tasks using LLMs. In PTEI, MBTI and OCEAN personality traits are first extracted directly from the given emotional scenarios and then utilized as contextual knowledge within personality-aware prompts, guiding LLMs to accurately infer emotions and their underlying causes. To ensure optimal contextual grounding, we employ Contrastive Learning to construct an optimized retrieval system that surfaces emotionally and personally aligned scenarios, enhancing reasoning quality. Extensive experiments on established EI benchmarks show that PTEI enhances the Emotional Understanding (EU) capabilities of various LLMs, with the strongest improvement observed in GPT models. Combining PTEI with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning yields an additional 4 percent increase in accuracy. These findings underscore PTEI's contribution toward advancing AI systems with more sophisticated social and psychological grounding.
Amir Reza Jafari, Praboda Rajapaksha, Reza Farahbakhsh +1
Jul 11, 2026cs.RO

ActiveFly-Bench: Aligning Embodied Question Answering with Vision-Language-Action for Aerial Embodied Perception

We introduce ActiveFly-Bench, the first benchmark to bridge cyberspace reasoning and physical-world interaction for UAV embodied perception. The benchmark decomposes active perception into three hierarchical tasks: Aerial Embodied Question Answering (Air-EQA), Observation Behavior Planning (OBP), and Fine-grained Language-guided UAV Control (FLUC), explicitly connecting high-level task understanding, behavior planning, and low-level control. The datasets are collected from both real-world and simulated outdoor environments for training and evaluation. We further develop ActiveFly, a closed-loop UAV agent that integrates visual-language reasoning with fine-grained control, and deploy it on a physical UAV platform. Experiments with representative VLMs and VLA models show that current UAV agents still struggle with behavior planning, viewpoint adjustment, and robust task completion in active perception. These results establish ActiveFly-Bench as a new testbed for embodied aerial intelligence.
Weichen Zhang, Shiquan Yu, Yinan Zhu +9
Jul 10, 2026cs.CV

Scalable Visual Pretraining for Language Intelligence

The rapid progress of large foundation models has been driven predominantly by pretraining on large-scale text corpora. However, many forms of knowledge are conveyed through visual representations, where figures, typeset equations, and page layouts carry rich information that cannot be faithfully or completely captured by text alone. Yet current pretraining approaches discard these visual cues by converting visually rich sources, such as documents and web pages, into plain text for learning language intelligence. This paper challenges the default assumption that language models must be trained on text-only representations and shows that Visual Pretraining is a scalable learner for foundation model intelligence. To this end, we conduct a systematic study of unsupervised visual pretraining paradigms that directly leverage visual documents without text extraction. Across multiple backbones and benchmarks, visual pretraining on the same underlying corpora consistently outperforms text-only pretraining, offering an efficient pathway to scalable language intelligence.
Yiming Zhang, Zhonghan Zhao, Wenwei Zhang +13
Jul 10, 2026cs.MA

Mosaic: Runtime-Efficient Multi-Agent Embodied Planning

LLM-based multi-agent embodied planning remains impractical due to prohibitively high execution latency. We identify failed actions as the dominant bottleneck, stemming from two core challenges: inaccurate state tracking under partial observability and inefficient coordination that produces redundant or conflicting actions. We introduce Mosaic, a runtime-efficient multi-agent planning framework that addresses both challenges. Mosaic maintains accurate yet lightweight state tracking through agent-centric semantic memory that stores objects in relative coordinates, enabling geometric transformations and coordination. It ensures efficient coordination through Integer Linear Programming that allocates actions at every planning step, enforcing physical feasibility and inter-agent coordination constraints. Across AI2-THOR and search-and-rescue benchmarks, Mosaic achieves 27-32% faster execution, 30-33% fewer LLM calls, 25-31% fewer steps, and 4-10% points higher success rates. These results demonstrate that efficient memory and constraint-guided coordination are critical for scalable, low-latency multi-agent planning.
Kunjal Panchal, Saayan Mitra, Sunav Choudhary +3
Jul 10, 2026cs.AI

Beyond Fixed Representations: The Vocabulary and Verifier Gaps in Open-Ended AI

Modern AI systems are increasingly being evaluated for their ability to reason, code, prove theorems, use tools, and long-horizon research tasks. These are powerful capabilities, but they share a structural limitation: the representational frame within which the model operates, including its conceptual vocabulary, the space of admissible solutions it can search, and the criteria by which success is evaluated, is typically fixed and supplied in advance. This paper argues that building stronger intelligent systems capable of open-ended innovation requires additional classes of operations: the creation, stabilization, and reuse of new representational primitives, which alter the space being searched rather than simply searching within it. We characterize the distance between current AI systems and genuinely open-ended intelligence through two gaps. The first is the vocabulary gap, the difficulty of inventing and stabilizing new representational primitives rather than merely recombining existing ones. The second is the verifier gap, the difficulty of judging the value of a new primitive when its full payoff may be visible only after future reuse. We interpret both gaps through a unified framework of intelligence as cognitive discrepancy reduction. By viewing intelligent behaviors as a sequence of cognitive transformations, we distinguish intra-space transformations which operate within a fixed representational frame, from generative transformations which may modify the frame itself. On this basis, we propose a ladder of innovation autonomy and outline several directions for advancing open-ended AI, including objectives that reward useful representational change, persistent memory architectures for invented primitives, and adaptive verification mechanisms capable of evolving alongside the representations they evaluate.
Yuan Cao, Haiqian Yang
Jul 10, 2026cs.CV

Seeing is Free, Speaking is Not: Uncovering the True Energy Bottleneck in Edge VLM Inference

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are the perceptual backbone of embodied AI, but their energy footprint on edge hardware remains poorly understood. Existing efficiency efforts focus predominantly on reducing visual tokens, implicitly treating visual processing as the dominant energy cost. We overturn this implicit assumption through the first systematic energy profiling of on-device VLM inference, spanning five models across three architecture families, four input resolutions, and two hardware platforms (NVIDIA RTX 3070 and Jetson Orin NX). Our analysis yields three findings. First, average inference power is a model-intrinsic constant, invariant to input resolution, image complexity, and prompt type, with less than 5% variation across all conditions. This means that all energy variation across inputs must arise from variation in inference time, not from variation in power draw. Second, each output token costs 11 to 39x more wall-clock time than each input token due to the compute-bound and memory-bound asymmetry between prefill and decode, making output token count the dominant driver of both latency and energy. Third, image complexity, measured by the number of objects in an image, induces up to 4.1x energy differences at identical resolution. This variation arises not from increased visual processing cost, but from differences in output length. These findings expose a fundamental limitation of visual token pruning: even removing all visual tokens saves at most 10% of total energy for fixed-token models. Across models spanning 1 billion to 8 billion parameters, controlling output length saves up to 97% of total energy, with the energy dominance of decoding growing stronger at larger model scale. In short, the true energy bottleneck in edge VLM inference is not what the model sees, but how much it says.
Junfei Zhan, Haoxun Shen, Mingang Guo +2
Jul 8, 2026cs.CV

GIRAF: Towards Generalizable Human Interactions with Articulated Objects

Synthesizing realistic full-body human interactions with articulated objects is a fundamental challenge for embodied AI and graphics, with applications in robotics training and virtual agents. Existing models remain limited: some focus on simple activities with static objects, while others restrict attention to hand-only manipulation. This leaves open the problem of generating coordinated full-body motion that approaches, manipulates, and moves articulated objects in a realistic and generalizable way. The key difficulty lies in reasoning jointly about locomotion, fine-grained contact, and object articulation. Models must capture subtle hand-object correspondences that transfer across object geometries, while also producing seamless transitions from navigation to manipulation. At the same time, the scarcity of large-scale paired motion-scene data makes it difficult to generalize across diverse object positions and shapes. We introduce a text-conditioned diffusion model that addresses these challenges through three core ideas: an object-centric representation that unifies hand-object contact with object surfaces, a mixed-domain training strategy that balances locomotion and interaction, and a contact-based augmentation scheme that expands training diversity. Through experiments, our method demonstrated strong generalization to unseen object configurations, surpassing current state-of-the-art methods.
Xiaohan Zhang, Sebastian Starke, Alexander Winkler +3
Jul 8, 2026cs.CV

Scaling Mixture-of-Experts Video Pretraining for Embodied Intelligence

Despite the recent promise in robot control, video generative models suffer from a domain mismatch due to their primary focus on content creation. For example, their design inherently prioritizes visual fidelity and creativity over computational efficiency and physical realism. In this work, we present LingBot-Video, a DiT-based video pretraining paradigm specifically tailored for embodied intelligence. From the architecture perspective, we adopt the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), instead of dense, framework to achieve a better trade-off between modeling capacity and inference efficiency, and manage to scale it up from scratch. From the data perspective, we construct a data profiling engine that augments standard internet videos with extensive robot-oriented footage, encompassing manipulation, navigation, and egocentric perspectives, to equip the base model with an intrinsic understanding of actions and world dynamics. From the training perspective, we develop a multi-dimensional reward system to enforce the alignment regarding physical rationality and task completion, going beyond standard criteria such as aesthetics, prompt-following, and motion consistency. Comprehensive evaluations validate its performance and efficiency as a video foundation model. We contribute LingBot-Video as the inaugural large-scale, open-source MoE video foundation model to the community, in a pioneering effort to bridge digital creativity and physical actuation.
Shuailei Ma, Jiaqi Liao, Xinyang Wang +24
Jul 8, 2026cs.RO

EmbodiedGen V2: An Agentic, Simulation-Ready 3D World Engine for Embodied AI

We present EmbodiedGen V2, a generative 3D world engine for building executable policy-ready environments for embodied intelligence. Sim-ready 3D asset generation has advanced rapidly, yet assembling such assets into policy-ready task environments remains largely manual, limiting scalable closed-loop learning. EmbodiedGen V2 addresses this gap through a unified sim-ready representation that connects cross-simulator assets, interaction affordances, task-driven worlds, large-scale multi-room scenes, and stateful Vibe Coding into a generative, editable, and reusable simulation pipeline. The generated environments support manipulation, navigation, mobile manipulation, cross-simulator deployment, and embodied policy training. In evaluation, the asset pipeline achieves 96.5% human acceptance and 98.6% collision success, and 83.3% of task-driven worlds are directly usable for downstream simulation without manual modification. Online reinforcement learning with generated environments further improves simulation success from 9.7% to 79.8%, and transfers to real robots with task success increasing from 21.7% to 75.0%. These results establish EmbodiedGen V2 as scalable simulation infrastructure for training, evaluating, and deploying embodied policies.
Xinjie Wang, Liu Liu, Taojun Ding +9
Jul 8, 2026cs.RO

Behavior Foundations for Quadruped Robots: ABot-C0 Technical Report

The motion controller is one of the most fundamental modules in embodied intelligence systems. Driven by large-scale human motion-capture data and the motion-tracking paradigm, humanoid control has achieved remarkable progress in recent years. However, migrating this recipe to the quadrupedal setting is far less straightforward: animal motion data is scarcer and harder to capture at scale than human data, and cross-embodiment retargeting remains fragile. We present ABot-C0, a generalist motion-control system for quadruped robots that establishes three complementary behavior foundations: a scalable multi-source motion-data pipeline, robust policy learning across motion tracking, locomotion, and scene interaction, and a unified deployment stack for reliable real-world operation. Fundamentally, we construct a data pyramid through conditional video-generation synthesis, annotated motion capture, teleoperation, and human design, producing 16,074 physically feasible motion clips as the data foundation for diverse motion-learning demands. With large-scale motion data, a Flow-Matching generalist policy demonstrates, for the first time, a scaling law for quadruped motion tracking: performance improves consistently as training scales up, with zero-shot capability to track unseen motions. We then go a step further toward robust all-terrain locomotion by adopting a three-stage privileged-to-perceptive framework with temporal LiDAR memory and terrain-predictive supervision. Collectively, these components form a motion generalist that coordinates multi-policy execution, smooth behavior transitions, energy-efficient control, and safety mechanisms for real-world deployment. Extensive experiments on urban-terrain autonomous navigation and companion-style multimodal interaction demonstrate that quadruped robots can move beyond functional demos toward product-level behavioral intelligence.
Xufeng Zhao, Fuzhi Yang, Jianhui Chen +17
Jul 8, 2026cs.AI

Measuring Intelligence Beyond Human Scale

How can we measure intelligence beyond human capability? Human-authored benchmarks saturate, and above human capability, examiners may not know which tasks are both hard and verifiable. We argue that this difficulty is inherent to absolute-scale evaluation and propose a new paradigm based on relative measurement in which models generate public challenges that separate other systems. Aggregating these outcomes yields an adversarial psychometric rating system that can scale with the systems being measured. We describe practical protocols that reduce incentives for private-information attacks, support judge-free adjudication, and naturally scale with agent capabilities. We instantiate the framework across verifiable and open-ended, non-verifiable domains, illustrating how model-generated evaluation can continue to measure systems beyond the human frontier.
Jerry Han, Rafael Moschopoulos, Ella Colby +5
Jul 7, 2026cs.CV

WildCity: A Real-World City-Scale Testbed for Rendering, Simulation, and Spatial Intelligence

Humans can navigate an unfamiliar city and gradually form a coherent spatial mental map spanning tens of square kilometers. Can AI build spatial representations at a comparable scale? Although recent foundation models have advanced scene reconstruction and embodied intelligence, scaling to entire cities remains an open challenge, primarily due to the lack of city-scale data. To bridge the gap, we introduce WildCity, a real-world multimodal dataset collected by autonomous fleets traversing complex urban environments. Our dataset includes 18 trajectories, each averaging 83.7 kilometers in length, and preserves the core challenges of in-the-wild perception, e.g., dynamic objects, lighting variations, and imperfect camera poses. We further establish an urban-tailored reconstruction baseline and convert the reconstructed environments into a closed-loop simulator. Beyond the dataset and baseline, we systematically analyze the key challenges on the path to simulation-ready urban digital twins: scalability, extrapolation, and uncertainty. Ultimately, WildCity aims to catalyze progress not only in city-scale rendering, but more broadly in the pursuit of AI that can perceive, remember, and reason across space at a scale comparable to human cognition. Project page: https://han-xiangyu.github.io/Wild-City/
Xiangyu Han, Mengyu Yang, Jiaqi Li +9
Jul 7, 2026cs.CV

SPEAR: A Simulator for Photorealistic Embodied AI Research

Interactive simulators have become powerful tools for training embodied agents and generating synthetic visual data, but existing photorealistic simulators suffer from limited generality, programmability, and rendering speed. We address these limitations by introducing SPEAR: A Simulator for Photorealistic Embodied AI Research. At its core, SPEAR is a Python library that can connect to, and programmatically control, any Unreal Engine (UE) application via a modular plugin architecture. SPEAR exposes over 14K unique UE functions to Python, representing an order-of-magnitude increase in programmable functionality over existing UE-based simulators. Additionally, a single SPEAR instance can render 1920x1080 photorealistic beauty images directly into a user's NumPy array at 73 frames per second - an order of magnitude faster than existing UE plugins - while also providing ground truth image modalities that are not available in any existing UE-based simulator (e.g., a non-diffuse intrinsic image decomposition, material IDs, and physically based shading parameters). Finally, SPEAR introduces an expressive high-level programming model that enables users to specify complex graphs of UE work with arbitrary data dependencies among work items, and to execute these graphs deterministically within a single UE frame. We demonstrate the utility of SPEAR through a diverse collection of example applications: controlling multiple embodied agents with distinct action spaces (e.g., humans, cars, and robots) across several in-the-wild UE projects; rendering photorealistic city-scale environments; manipulating UE's procedural content generation systems; rendering synchronized multi-view images of detailed human faces; coordinating an interactive co-simulation with the MuJoCo physics simulator; and editing scenes with natural language via an AI coding assistant.
Mike Roberts, Renhan Wang, Rushikesh Zawar +10
Jul 7, 2026cs.RO

Embodied Human-Robot Interaction via Acoustics: A MARL Approach with AcoustoBots for Spatial Data Physicalization

Traditional data physicalization is often static and disconnected from real environments, limiting its ability to convey embodied spatial dynamics and engage users. To address this limitation, we present AcoustoBots, a mobile acoustophoretic data-physicalization platform in which TurtleBot3 robots carry upward-facing 8 x 8 ultrasonic phased arrays. Each array levitates a particle whose height (1-10 cm) encodes a local urban scalar value, such as population density, noise, or traffic. A MARL (Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning) policy based on the Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (MADDPG) algorithm, with centralized training and decentralized execution, selects collision-aware navigation actions, while a high-rate Gerchberg-Saxton-Phased Array of Transducers (GS-PAT) acoustic controller maintains trap stability and updates array phases to achieve the commanded height during motion. This creates a closed perception-display-action loop. We evaluate single-robot city-to-city traversal and dual-robot cooperative coverage on a 4 m x 3 m scaled UK map using PhaseSpace-based localization for repeatable multi-robot trials. Results show stable in-motion levitation and consistent, location-dependent height rendering, with task success rates of 90% and 80% for the single and dual-robot regimes, respectively, over 10 trials per regime, and low collision counts. These findings support acoustophoretic levitation as a simple, glanceable, robot-mediated communication cue for embodied human-robot interaction in spatial analytics.
Shiqi Liu, Narsimlu Kemsaram, Prateek Mittal +2
Jul 7, 2026cs.AI

Bridging Physical Reasoning and Task Generalization via Visual Action Outcome Reasoning Alignment

Vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to generalize in interactive physical reasoning, particularly under unseen tasks and environments. Two key failure modes are prominent: hallucinated chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that contradicts physical reality, and misalignment between the model's reasoning and actions. We present VAORA (Visual Action Outcome Reasoning Alignment), a novel reward design that directly addresses both issues. VAORA introduces two complementary rewards: Visual Alignment Reward, which anchors VLM reasoning to the visual context independent of the agent action itself, and Visual-Action Alignment Reward, which grounds reasoning in the visual outcome induced by the model's action. Together, these rewards suppress hallucinated CoT and reduce the gap between reasoning and behavior. To improve training stability, we further employ smooth, dense rewards by estimating success probabilities using a pre-trained in-domain expert agent. Experiments on PHYRE and Virtual Tool support our performances across novel-task and unseen-environment settings, confirming that grounded and generalizable physical intelligence can be induced through VAORA.
Han-Jun Ko, Jr-Jen Chen, Haobo Yuan +4
Jul 7, 2026cs.AI

A Definition and Roadmap for World Models

World models -- internal simulators that learn the structure and dynamics of an environment -- have become one of the most actively debated concepts in AI. From model-based reinforcement learning and video generation to embodied robotics and ultimately, physical AI, researchers across AI subfields are building systems that they call "world models", yet there is no consensus on what a world model fundamentally is, what it should predict, or how it should be built. This perspective article provides a scientific definition of world models, discussions of their key technical aspects, and a staged roadmap for developing effective world models.
Xinyuan Chen, Haoyu Guo, Shi Guo +10
Jul 7, 2026cs.CV

AlayaWorld: Long-Horizon and Playable Video World Generation

Game worlds have traditionally been built through labor-intensive production pipelines, making them costly to develop, difficult to customization, and expensive to modify after deployment. Recent advances in video world models offer a fundamentally different paradigm. Rather than explicitly authoring every component of a virtual environment, these models autoregressively synthesize future observations conditioned on the current world state and user interactions, enabling playable worlds to be generated online. Trained on both gameplay recordings and real-world videos, they can capture diverse visual appearances and physical dynamics, opening new opportunities for interactive applications beyond gaming, including embodied intelligence. In this paper, we present \textbf{AlayaWorld}, a full-stack open-source framework for building interactive generative worlds. AlayaWorld enables open-ended real-time interaction, allowing users to freely navigate and perform diverse actions such as combat, spell casting, and monster summoning. The framework unifies the complete development-from data preparation model architecture, model training, inference acceleration, and deployment-within a modular and extensible architecture. Alongside the framework, we release reproducible pipelines, reference implementations, evaluation tools, and comprehensive documentation, establishing a practical foundation for future research and real-time applications of generative world models.
AlayaWorld Team, Kaipeng Zhang, Chuanhao Li +14
Jul 6, 2026cs.RO

Cortex: A Bidirectionally Aligned Embodied Agent Framework for Long-horizon Manipulation

While recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show promise toward generalist manipulation policies, they struggle with long-horizon tasks due to their Markovian nature-relying solely on current observations. Hierarchical dual-system methods address this but suffer from a gap between high-level planning semantics and low-level execution kinematics. We introduce Cortex, a bidirectionally aligned embodied agent framework with a customized planning interface that conveys executable and tractable subtask plans from high-level VLM to low-level VLA. Specifically, we standardize manipulation subtasks into 32 canonical skill primitives and inject tractability principles, such as representative object attributes and improved trajectory reachability, into the data generation pipeline. This enables automatic annotation of over 4k hours of open-source video data and generation of 30 hours of simulation data. We further devise an event-balanced sampling strategy to construct training data for fine-tuning the framework to better handle planning ambiguity during subtask transitions, enhanced by carefully designed harness engineering from task contexts to skill constraints during inference. Both open-loop VLM and closed-loop system evaluations demonstrate Cortex's efficacy, e.g., it outperforms monolithic baselines by 3.1% on Libero-long and 4.1% on RoboTwin. Notably, Cortex's generalist VLM enables zero-shot completion of unseen real-world long-horizon tasks, such as multi-stage chemistry experiments, by simply combining with a fine-tuned VLA-a capability infeasible through VLA fine-tuning alone.
Jiaqi Peng, Xiqian Yu, Delin Feng +10
Jul 6, 2026cs.SE

TypeGo: An OS Runtime for Embodied Agents

Large language models (LLMs) can plan behavior for embodied agents from natural language, but treating the LLM as a request/response oracle on the critical path is fundamentally at odds with real-time control and concurrent goals. We argue for an operating-system-style runtime for embodied agents, and instantiate this idea in an early prototype, TypeGo. TypeGo structures LLM-based planning as asynchronous loops at multiple timescales that overlap with execution, and manages the agent's physical body like an OS manages hardware: the Skill Kernel arbitrates typed physical subsystems among concurrent per-task processes, a scheduler preempts them and resumes or replaces each by source, and speculative skill streaming hides LLM latency behind ongoing motion, while a fast first-action path yields visible feedback within a second. Users program behavior through natural language prescriptions that TypeGo dispatches to the LLM-based planners or compiles into low-latency interrupt handlers. Our prototype of Kalos, a Unitree Go2 quadruped, provides preliminary evidence for the design: in our current task suite, it cuts per-step delay by 50% over step-by-step planning and time-to-first-action by 73% over monolithic planning, while admitting concurrent tasks at low scheduling overhead.
Guojun Chen, Alex Schott, Lin Zhong
Jul 6, 2026cs.AI

The Changing Role of Symbolic Methods in Artificial Intelligence

Why do intelligent systems need to perform explicit symbolic reasoning? Computer science has traditionally regarded symbolic reasoning as a defining component of intelligence. Yet the remarkable success of modern foundation models raises a fundamental question: if increasingly capable AI systems can operate with little explicit symbolic reasoning, what role do symbolic methods actually play? This article argues that explicit symbolic reasoning is not a fundamental property of intelligence, but a computational consequence of operating on simplified models of reality. We propose the Compression Principle: every computational model is a simplified representation of reality, and explicit symbolic reasoning compensates for information omitted during model construction. From this principle, we derive the Modeling--Reasoning Trade-off: as computational models preserve richer representations of the world, the need for explicit symbolic reasoning correspondingly decreases. This perspective provides a unified explanation for both the historical success of symbolic methods and the remarkable effectiveness of modern foundation models. Paradoxically, the same development makes symbolic methods increasingly important for humans. As intelligent systems become more capable and more opaque, symbolic representations increasingly serve as interfaces through which humans specify requirements, verify behavior, regulate autonomous systems, and establish trust. We therefore argue that the future of symbolic methods lies not primarily as the computational engine of intelligent systems, but as the symbolic interface between increasingly capable AI systems and the humans who build, govern, and depend upon them.
Jun Sun
Jul 5, 2026cs.RO

ACE-Brain-0.5: A Unified Embodied Foundational Model for Physical Agentic AI

Embodied AI is moving from isolated perception or action modules toward physical agents that understand, plan under goals, act through robot bodies, monitor progress, and improve from experience. Existing systems address this loop only in parts: end-to-end policies generate actions but often lack spatial reasoning, planning, and execution assessment, while robot-agent systems orchestrate tools or specialists but do not learn a shared representation. This fragmentation limits general Physical Agentic AI. We present ACE-Brain-0.5, a unified embodied foundation model that organizes robot intelligence into five coupled functions: spatial perception, decision making, embodied interaction, self-monitoring, and self-improvement. Built on ACE-Brain-0, which established spatial intelligence as a shared scaffold across robot platforms, ACE-Brain-0.5 extends an understanding-centric model into a closed-loop foundation model. A single 8B backbone instantiates the first four functions: grounding objects and affordances, reasoning over 3D and egocentric spatial relations, decomposing instructions into subgoals, generating navigation and manipulation actions, and estimating progress for verification and recovery. To unify these capabilities without cross-task interference, we introduce SSR+, which extends Scaffold-Specialize-Reconcile with a Reactivate stage after task-vector merging. The fifth function, self-improvement, is realized by a companion framework that updates external execution state, including task schemas, spatial memory, and failure-recovery cases, from rollouts. Across fifteen benchmarks, ACE-Brain-0.5 improves over ACE-Brain-0 on 14 of 18 spatial perception and grounding benchmarks, achieves competitive navigation and manipulation performance, and provides strong progress estimation in ID and OOD settings. Together, these results mark an early step toward general Physical Agentic AI.
ACE-Brain Team, :, Ziyang Gong +29
Jul 4, 2026cs.RO

Worldscape-MoE: A Unified Mixture-of-Experts World Model for Scalable Heterogeneous Action Control

World models are rapidly becoming a core infrastructure for embodied intelligence and interactive agents: they provide controllable simulators in which agents can perceive, act, forecast, and acquire scalable experience. Yet current video generation world models are still organized around isolated control interfaces, such as camera trajectories, robot actions, or hand-joint signals. This fragmentation is increasingly a scaling bottleneck. The central challenge is not the absence of controllable generators, but the lack of a unified and extensible learning framework that can absorb heterogeneous action supervision while preserving a shared model of world dynamics. In this work, we introduce Worldscape-MoE, a Mixture-of-Experts world model built on Diffusion Transformers for scalable heterogeneous action control. Our key observation is that different controls specify different interfaces to the same underlying world: although their representations differ, they constrain shared physical regularities, scene dynamics, and interaction semantics. Worldscape-MoE operationalizes this observation through modality-aware control injection, shared and control-specific experts, and a progressive MoE tuning strategy that supports continual extension to new action modalities. Experiments across locomotion, robotic manipulation, and egocentric hand control show that heterogeneous supervision improves rather than interferes with individual control capabilities. Worldscape-MoE achieves strong results on WorldArena, improves locomotion and hand-control metrics, exhibits robust out-of-distribution generalization, and demonstrates scaling behavior as additional control data and experts are integrated.
Jianjie Fang, Yongyan Xu, Ziyou Wang +13
Jul 4, 2026cs.RO

WSA1_1: a 3D-Centric World-Spatial-Action Model for Generalizable Robot Control

Recent advances in embodied AI have established robot foundation models (RFMs) as the dominant approach for generalist robotic systems to date. By leveraging imitation learning on extensive robot demonstrations, RFMs have achieved impressive capabilities in mapping visual observations and language instructions to continuous robotic actions. However, current RFMs lack an inherent ability to reason about physical dynamics and the causal effects of robot behaviors on the 3D physical world. This creates a fundamental mismatch between 2D-centric visual perception and 3D-centric embodied interaction, severely limiting the generalization ability of RFMs in real-world tasks.To address this gap, we present WSA1_1, a novel RFM built upon proposed 3D-Centric World-Spatial-Action modeling paradigm. It not only learns 3D world-aware visual thought for future robot behaviors, but also models mutual constraints between 3D world state transitions and robotic actions to enhance behavior generalization. Notably, WSA1_1 achieves highly data-efficient pre-training with 6k hours of expert demonstration data (only 1k hours from real robot), while delivering competitive manipulation performance (93% success rate) on RoboTwin2.0 simulation benchmark and achieving +20% average boosted performance over state-of-the-art RFMs on real-world robot control tasks. These results reveal that generalizable RFM can be attained without large-scale real robot data when paired with 3D-centric world-action joint modeling, which offers a practical and affordable pathway to generalist robotic systems.
Jiahao Jiang, Jianing Zhang, Zhenhan Yin +8
Jul 3, 2026cs.SE

AGL-1: The Enterprise AI Governance Layer as a Control Plane for Trusted Enterprise Intelligence

Enterprise artificial intelligence is moving from isolated experimentation toward operational dependency across copilots, retrieval-augmented generation systems, autonomous agents, and AI-enabled business workflows. As this transition accelerates, the primary enterprise challenge is no longer only model access or inference scale. It is governed intelligence operations: the ability to enforce authorization, preserve contextual lineage, control persistent memory, detect stale or conflicting knowledge, constrain agentic execution, and produce audit-ready evidence across distributed AI estates. This paper introduces AGL-1, the Enterprise AI Governance Layer, as a vendor-neutral reference model for the control plane that should operate across foundation models, retrieval systems, orchestration frameworks, enterprise memory, policy engines, observability systems, tools, APIs, and business applications. Building on governed knowledge-system principles introduced in GKS-5, AGL-1 generalizes the governance problem from retrieval-specific controls to full AI execution-path governance. It identifies recurring failure modes such as unauthorized retrieval, stale grounding, unmanaged memory, weak provenance, policy drift, fragmented observability, and uncontrolled autonomous execution. It then defines seven governance domains: identity-aware retrieval, policy enforcement, provenance management, memory governance, knowledge integrity monitoring, agentic execution control, and trust observability. The central claim is that durable enterprise value from AI will increasingly depend on the ability to govern intelligence at scale. In complex enterprises, trust is not a property of the model alone. It is a property of the system around the model: identity, knowledge, policy, memory, tools, human oversight, and evidence working together as a managed control plane.
Roopam W. Sure
Jul 3, 2026cs.CV

PhysMirror: Physics-Aware Mirror Object Generation

Synthesizing physically accurate mirror reflections remains a fundamental challenge for modern text-to-image diffusion models, which are increasingly critical for generating synthetic training data for embodied AI and robotic perception. These models typically struggle with strict geometric constraints, leading to hallucinations that degrade the utility of the synthetic data. To address this, we introduce a novel, end-to-end physics-aware generation framework namely PhysMirror that natively enforces projective geometry through explicit 3D spatial priors. Our method automatically lifts prompted objects into 3D meshes and constructs a lightweight, mathematically exact mirror scene within a simulated environment. By rendering this explicit 3D scene, we extract precise 2D conditioning elements, such as depth maps and segmentation maps, that serve as robust guiding signals for downstream diffusion models, guiding them to generate images with physically correct mirror reflections. Moreover, we introduce Mirror Consistency Score (MCS), reference-free, fully automated metric that quantifies physical correctness using dense feature matching and vanishing point convergence. Experimental results on our newly constructed MirrOB dataset demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in reflection accuracy and physical realism, while maintaining strong text-to-image semantic alignment, providing a reliable pipeline for embodied AI data generation. The source code is released at https://duyphuc0701.github.io/PhysMirror.
Xuan-Bach Mai, Duy-Phuc Nguyen, Quoc-Van Le +6
Jul 3, 2026cs.RO

HiMe: Hierarchical Embodied Memory for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Control

Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel at robotic manipulation but often struggle with non-Markovian tasks requiring long-term memory and reasoning due to their reliance on immediate observations. Existing solutions face a ''frequency-competence paradox,'' where stronger reasoning models are too slow for real-time control, while faster models lack sufficient reasoning capabilities. To resolve this architectural misalignment, we propose HiMe, a Hierarchical Embodied Memory framework that decouples embodied intelligence into a high-frequency Executor for execution, a Sentry for working memory, and a Planner for long-term strategy. We also introduce a dynamic knowledge system based on cross-modal semantic schemas and active management mechanisms, allowing robots to maintain memory plasticity through ''Add, Update, and Delete'' operations. This hierarchical design effectively balances the conflict between real-time execution and slow thinking planning, significantly improving success rates in long-horizon tasks. Experiments demonstrate that this approach not only outperforms flat memory baselines but also exhibits the novel ability to self-correct its internal knowledge based on human preferences.
Li Ji, Siyin Wang, Pengfang Qian +5
Jul 3, 2026cs.LG

Statistically Meaningful Geometry and Gauge Symmetry Breaking: A Geometric Foundation for Scientific Discovery and Intelligence Emergence

The rapid scaling of over-parameterized machine learning architectures, particularly LLMs, raises a profound crisis: do these systems exhibit genuine intelligence, or are they merely sophisticated statistical pattern matchers? Classical flat Euclidean statistics cannot differentiate continuous interpolation from the autonomous discovery of novel causal laws. To resolve this, we introduce Statistically Meaningful Geometry (SMG), a framework modeling over-parameterized learning systems as infinite-dimensional non-parametric Orlicz fiber bundles. We prove that under persistent out-of-distribution (OOD) stimuli governed by unmodeled causal mechanisms, continuous optimization fails. Unmodeled variance is rejected by the visible horizontal base manifold, leaking into the unobservable vertical fiber space and generating an accumulation of Active Acausal Tension. Driven by the statistical manifold's non-linear curvature, this tension inevitably strikes a conjugate focal boundary (Tcrit=π2/KmaxT_{\text{crit}} = π^2 / K_{\text{max}}), triggering localized volumetric collapse and a catastrophic matrix singularity ([Gf]−1→∞[G_f]^{-1} \to \infty). We demonstrate this geometric breakdown acts as the strict non-equilibrium trigger for a Gauge Symmetry Break (GSB). The system purges hidden tension from unobservable gauge redundancies, spontaneously crystallizing a new, mathematically independent horizontal coordinate axis. This non-parametric phase transition registers as a discrete +1.0+1.0 integer step-jump in observable Structural G-Entropy. By decoupling parameter charts and subjecting emergent axes to a Minimal Energy Path Criterion and a Causal Invariance Filter, we distinguish genuine discovery from malignant hallucinations. Ultimately, SMG provides a parameter-free, falsifiable dashboard to mathematically certify true intelligence, transforming AI for Science into an engine of autonomous paradigm shifts.
Bing Cheng, Yi-Shuai Niu, Howell Tong +1
Jul 3, 2026cs.AI

Embodied Operators and Benchmarking: Toward Reusable and Deployable Embodied Intelligence Systems

Embodied intelligence systems require not only end-to-end policy models, but also reusable functional modules that transform multimodal observations, robot states, human demonstrations, and task contexts into structured representations, decisions, trajectories, control references, and system services. This work defines these modules as embodied operators and studies them as independent yet composable units in embodied intelligence pipelines. We clarify their definition boundary, emphasizing task semantics, standardized input-output contracts, deployability, reusability, and multi-layer optimizability. We further construct a taxonomy covering five categories: detection and segmentation, spatial localization and 3D understanding, hand motion recovery, embodied foundation models and task-decision operators, and planning, control, and system support operators. For each category, we summarize representative functions, technical paradigms, application roles, and practical limitations. Beyond taxonomy, we propose a multi-dimensional benchmark framework that evaluates embodied operators in terms of correctness, end-to-end efficiency, resource usage, temporal stability, portability, interface compatibility, deployment reliability, and downstream task utility. We also discuss workflow-level operator acceleration and open challenges in operator composition, data standardization, world models, VLA safety, edge deployment, and real-world application value. Overall, this work argues that embodied operators should be optimized and evaluated as holistic deployable components, providing a foundation for reusable, scalable, and verifiable embodied intelligence systems.
Junwu Xiong, Jiaxuan Gao, Wei Chai +10
Jul 2, 2026cs.RO

Embodied.cpp: A Portable Inference Runtime of Embodied AI Models on Heterogeneous Robots

Embodied AI models now span vision-language-action (VLA) models and world-action models (WAMs), but practical deployment remains fragmented across model-specific Python stacks, backend assumptions, and robot-side glue code, especially on heterogeneous edge devices. Existing inference runtimes are designed mainly for request-response serving and therefore do not satisfy the runtime contract of embodied deployment: multi-rate execution inside closed-loop control, latency-first batch-1 inference on heterogeneous hardware, and extensible embodied interfaces beyond fixed token I/O. We present Embodied..cpp, a portable C++ inference runtime for embodied models. Based on an architectural analysis of representative VLA models and WAMs, Embodied..cpp captures a shared execution path and organizes it into five layers: input adapters, sequence builders, backbone execution, head plugins, and deployment adapters. The runtime provides modular multi-rate execution, latency-first fused inference, and extensible operator and I/O support, enabling deployment across heterogeneous devices, robots, and simulators through one backend abstraction. We evaluate Embodied..cpp on two VLA models, HY-VLA and pi0.5, and on a preliminary WAM benchmark using a LingBot-VA Transformer block. The VLA deployments achieve successful closed-loop execution with 100.0% and 91.0% task success rates, respectively. The WAM benchmark reduces block memory from 312.2 MiB to 88.1 MiB. These results show that Embodied..cpp improves deployment efficiency while preserving high accuracy across diverse embodied model architectures.
Ling Xu, Chuyu Han, Borui Li +6
Jul 2, 2026cs.RO

Learning to Move Before Learning to Do: Task-Agnostic pretraining for VLAs

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are fundamentally bottlenecked by the scarcity of expert demonstrations -- triplets of observations, instructions, and actions that are costly to collect at scale. We argue that this bottleneck stems from conflating two distinct learning objectives: acquiring physical competence (how to move) and acquiring semantic alignment (what to do). Crucially, only the latter requires language supervision. Building on this Decomposition Hypothesis, we propose Task-Agnostic Pretraining (TAP), a two-stage framework that first learns transferable motor priors from cheap, unlabeled interaction data -- including discarded off-task trajectories and autonomous robot play -- via a self-supervised Inverse Dynamics objective. A lightweight second stage then grounds these priors in language using minimal expert data. On the SIMPLER benchmark, TAP matches models trained on over 1M expert trajectories while using orders of magnitude less labeled data, yielding a 10% absolute gain over standard behavior cloning. On a real-world WidowX platform, TAP retains 25% success under camera perturbations where internet-scale baselines collapse to 0%, demonstrating that task-agnostic pretraining produces robust, transferable physical representations and offers a scalable path forward for Embodied AI.
Junhao Shi, Siyin Wang, Xiaopeng Yu +3
Jul 2, 2026cs.CV

Learning to Evolve Scenes: Reasoning about Human Activities with Scene Graphs

Understanding human behavior while interacting with the surrounding world is crucial for many applications of embodied AI. First-person videos are particularly informative for this problem, as they well capture how activities reshape the scene over time. However, existing approaches often rely on implicit visual or language-aligned representations, disregarding structured reasoning over the scene dynamic. We argue that explicit, compositional and editable representations of human-environment interactions can play a crucial role for rich grounded activity understanding. To this end, we introduce SG-Ego, a large scale annotation set extending Ego4D with spatio-temporal scene graphs, where relations triplets are consolidated over time into explicit time-evolving descriptions of the scene state. To reason over this representation, we propose GLEN, a graph-based model that operates over scene graph sequences to both align them with textual actions and model their temporal evolution. In addition, we formulate the activity-driven graph-edit forecasting (A-GEF) problem, a novel task that casts scene dynamics as a sequence of structured transformations conditioned on ongoing actions, enabling explicit reasoning about how scenes change over time. We validate our approach across multiple downstream tasks, spanning retrieval benchmarks as EgoMCQ and EgoCVR, as well as long-horizon reasoning benchmarks as EXPLORE-Bench and the newly introduced A-GEF. GLEN achieves strong results compared to raw video baselines and it excels in reasoning settings, typically addressed only with MLLMs, while enabling controllable and structured predictions of scene dynamics driven by human activities. We believe our results establish spatio-temporal scene graphs, together with models that reason over them, as strong compositional and interpretable representations for video understanding and potentially beyond.
Francesca Pistilli, Simone Alberto Peirone, Giuseppe Averta
Jul 2, 2026cs.CY

Overview of Risk Assessment and Management for Intelligent Systems under the AI Act and Beyond

The society and emerging risk-based regulatory frameworks for AI underscore the need for rigorous risk assessment to ensure safe and reliable AI systems. In response to this imperative, this paper presents an overview of AI risk assessment (identification and analysis) and management methodologies. It begins by reviewing the worldwide regulatory landscape that drives the need for systematic AI risk assessment. Then we characterize the spectrum of AI-related risks identified in the literature, from technical failures to ethical and social impacts. Subsequently, it reviews key risk assessment methodologies proposed for AI systems, focusing on general frameworks. The paper highlights best practices and illuminates methodological gaps, highlighting areas for further research on AI risk assessment.
Javier Irigoyen, Roberto Daza, Aythami Morales +5