Embodied AI

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Embodied AI asks how agents can connect perception and reasoning to actions that change a physical or simulated world. Common approaches include vision-language-action models, language-model agents with tools and hierarchical plans, reinforcement learning, persistent spatial or episodic memory, and world models trained with robot demonstrations or generated simulation data. Researchers evaluate these systems on navigation, manipulation, household tasks, and multi-agent coordination, using benchmarks as well as real robots. A central challenge is that strong perception or short-task scores do not guarantee reliable long-horizon behavior: agents still struggle with physical constraints, changing conditions, recovery, and safety, while simulated success may not transfer to deployment.

Latest papers

255 papers28 papers in the last four weeks, down 15% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

May 11, 2026

Embodied AI in Action: Insights from SAE World Congress 2026 on Safety, Trust, Robotics, and Real-World Deployment

Embodied artificial intelligence is rapidly moving from research into real-world systems such as autonomous vehicles, mobile robots, and industrial machines. As these systems become more capable of perceiving, deciding, and acting in dynamic environments, they also introduce new challenges in safety, trust, governance, and operational reliability. This white paper summarizes key insights from the SAE World Congress 2026 panel session Embodied AI in Action, which brought together experts from automotive, robotics, artificial intelligence, and safety engineering. The discussion highlighted the need to treat embodied AI as a systems challenge requiring engineering rigor, lifecycle governance, human-centered design, and evolving standards. The paper provides practical perspectives for executives, policymakers, and technical leaders seeking to adopt embodied AI responsibly. The panel reached broad agreement that long-term success will depend not only on advances in AI capability, but equally on safe and trustworthy deployment.

Jan-Mou Li, Paul Schmitt, Wei Tong +4

AI Governance Trust in AI Embodied AI AI Safety Responsible AI

May 11, 2026

EmbodiSkill: Skill-Aware Reflection for Self-Evolving Embodied Agents

Embodied agents can benefit from skills that guide object search, action execution, and state changes across diverse environments. Since embodied environments vary across layouts, object states, and other execution factors, these skills must self-evolve from trajectories generated during task execution. However, existing skill self-evolution methods are mainly developed in digital environments and often convert trajectories into coarse skill updates. Directly applying this paradigm to embodied settings is problematic, because a failed task execution may reflect not only incorrect skill content, but also an execution lapse in which the agent fails to follow valid guidance. We propose EmbodiSkill, a training-free framework for embodied skill self-evolution through skill-aware reflection and targeted revision. EmbodiSkill interprets each trajectory with respect to the current skill, uses skill-changing evidence to update the skill body, and uses execution-lapse evidence to preserve and emphasize valid guidance. Experiments on ALFWorld and EmbodiedBench show that EmbodiSkill consistently improves embodied task success. On ALFWorld, EmbodiSkill enables a frozen Qwen3.5-27B executor to reach 93.28% task success, outperforming GPT-5.2 used as a direct agent without skills by 31.58%. These results show that skill-aware self-evolution helps embodied agents accumulate reusable procedural knowledge from their own trajectories.

Ruofei Ju, Xinrui Wang, Xin Ding +12

Nanjing University · Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University · Huazhong University of Science and Technology +2

LLM Agent Skill Learning Agent Skill Learning Embodied AI Self-Evolving Agents

May 11, 2026

EnactToM: An Evolving Benchmark for Functional Theory of Mind in Embodied Agents

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to track others epistemic state, makes humans efficient collaborators. AI agents need the same capacity in multi agent settings, yet existing benchmarks mostly test literal ToM by asking direct belief questions. The ability act optimally on implicit beliefs in embodied environments, called functional ToM, remains largely untested. We introduce EnactToM, an evolving benchmark of 300 embodied multi-agent tasks set in a 3D household with partial observability, private information, and constrained communication. Each task is formally verified for solvability and required epistemic depth, and new tasks are generated increase difficulty as models improve. On the hard split, all seven evaluated frontier models score 0.0% Pass^3 on functional task completion, while averaging 45.0% on literal belief probes. Manual analysis traces 93% of sampled failures to epistemic coordination breakdowns such as withheld information, ignored partner constraints, and misallocated messages, providing a concrete target for future work.

Gurusha Juneja, Dylan Lu, Saaket Agashe +7

University of California, Santa Barbara · 2King’s College London · 3Cisco Research

Multi-Agent Coordination Theory of Mind AI Agent Benchmarks Embodied AI

May 10, 2026

Kintsugi: Learning Policies by Repairing Executable Knowledge Bases

Modern embodied agents achieve impressive performance, but their task knowledge is often stored in neural weights, latent state, or prompt-bound memory, making individual policy knowledge difficult to inspect, validate, recombine, and reuse. We introduce Kintsugi, a white-box policy-learning framework that treats embodied policy improvement as verifier-gated construction of a typed executable Knowledge Base (KB). Kintsugi represents task-level policy knowledge as composable typed entries -- predicates, operators, policy schemas, monitors, recovery rules, experience records, and goals -- and improves this artifact through localized typed edits induced from rollout evidence, rather than relying on test-time language-model reasoning. Between rollouts, a tool-constrained agentic editing loop diagnoses trajectory failures, localizes them to editable KB layers, and proposes candidate edits. A deterministic verification gate admits an edit only when the candidate type-checks, the resulting KB executes, and focused validation success or trajectory-health metrics improve without violating protected-regression checks. At inference, the accepted KB is executed by a deterministic symbolic executor with zero LLM calls. Across long-horizon text-agent benchmarks and representative object-centric manipulation settings, Kintsugi achieves strong endpoint performance while preserving inspectability, local editability, and verifier-gated deployment. These results suggest that embodied policy improvement can be organized around executable task knowledge.

Teng Cao, Yu Deng, Hikaru Shindo +6

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Lab, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany · Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence (hessian.AI), Germany · Department of Computer Science, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany +6

Robot Policy Learning LLM Agent Self-Improvement Agent Skill Learning Embodied AI

May 9, 2026

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Can VLM Agents Tell Who They Are at All?

In the animal kingdom, mirror self-recognition is a canonical probe of higher-order cognition, emerging only in some species. We ask whether an analogous functional capability emerges in embodied vision-language model (VLM) agents: can they recognize themselves in a mirror? We introduce a controlled 3D benchmark where a first-person VLM agent must infer a hidden body attribute from its reflection and select the matching target, while avoiding self-other misattribution. To separate mirror-grounded self-identification from shortcuts, we test mirror removal, misleading cues, and occluded reflections. We also evaluate the decision process through mirror seeking, temporal ordering, self-attribution, and reasoning-action consistency. Our experiments show that mirror-based self-identification emerges mainly in stronger VLMs. These models can use reflected evidence for action, whereas weaker models often inspect the mirror but fail to extract self-relevant information or misattribute their reflection. Language-vision conflict further shows that self-referential language alone is not evidence of grounded self-identification. Overall, mirror-based evaluation provides a diagnostic for whether embodied self-grounding is causally rooted in perception and action rather than priors, prompt compliance, or confabulation.

Filippo Ziliotto, Ciro Beneduce, Bruno Lepri +3

University of Padova · FondazioneLucianoBrunoSerafiniKessler · Fondazione Bruno Kessler

AI Agent Evaluation Vision-Language Grounding Embodied AI Vision-Language Agents

May 9, 2026

Done, But Not Sure: Disentangling World Completion from Self-Termination in Embodied Agents

Standard embodied evaluations do not independently score whether an agent correctly commits to task completion at episode closure, a capacity we call terminal commitment. Behaviorally distinct failures--never completing the task, completing it but failing to stop, and reporting success without sufficient evidence--collapse into the same benchmark failure. We introduce VIGIL, an evaluation framework that makes terminal commitment independently measurable. Under VIGIL's default protocol, agents observe only egocentric RGB, receive no action-success signals, and must end each episode with a semantic report checked deterministically against hidden world state. This yields two separate scores: world-state completion (W) and benchmark success (B), where B additionally requires a correct terminal report. This decoupling makes four outcome categories distinguishable: missed execution, post-attainment drift, unsupported commitment, and verified success. Across 20 models on 1,000 frozen episodes, systems with comparable W differ by up to 19.7 pp in B: one model converts achieved states into correct reports, while another with near-identical execution drifts past the goal without closing. An action-feedback intervention further tests the separation: execution-oriented signals improve W broadly, yet commitment failures persist in models that do not already ground terminal reports in the achieved state. VIGIL provides a protocol that makes terminal commitment independently visible and scorable.

Ying Chen, Lihuang Fang, Rui Jiang +4

XPENG ROBOTICS

AI Agent Evaluation Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks Embodied AI

May 8, 2026

MemCompiler: Compile, Don't Inject -- State-Conditioned Memory for Embodied Agents

Existing memory systems for embodied agents typically inject retrieved memory as static context at episode start, a paradigm we term Ahead-of-time Monolithic Memory Injection (AMMI). However, this static design quickly becomes misaligned with the agent's evolving state and may degrade lightweight executors below the no-memory baseline. To address this, we propose MemCompiler, which reframes memory utilization as State-Conditioned Memory Compilation. A learned Memory Compiler reads a structured Brief State capturing the agent's current execution state and dynamically selects and compiles only relevant memory into executable guidance. This guidance is delivered through a text channel and a latent Soft-Mem channel that preserves perceptual information not expressible in text. Across Alf World, EmbodiedBench, and ScienceWorld, MemCompiler consistently improves over no-memory across open-source backbones (up to +129%), matches or approaches frontier closed-source systems, and reduces per-step latency by 60%, demonstrating that state-aware memory compilation improves both effectiveness and efficiency.

Xin Ding, Xinrui Wang, Yifan Yang +9

University of Science and Technology of China · Huazhong University of Science and Technology · Microsoft Research +2

Embodied AI Memory-Augmented Agents Agent Memory Management

May 7, 2026

RobotEQ: Transitioning from Passive Intelligence to Active Intelligence in Embodied AI

Embodied AI is a prominent research topic in both academia and industry. Current research centers on completing tasks based on explicit user instructions. However, for robots to integrate into human society, they must understand which actions are permissible and which are prohibited, even without explicit commands. We refer to the user-guided AI as passive intelligence and the unguided AI as active intelligence. This paper introduces RobotEQ, the first benchmark for active intelligence, aiming to assess whether existing models can comprehend and adhere to social norms in embodied scenarios. First, we construct RobotEQ-Data, a dataset consisting of 1,894 egocentric images, spanning 10 representative embodied categories and 56 subcategories. Through extensive manual annotation, we provide 4,944 action judgment questions and 1,157 spatial grounding questions, specifying appropriate robot actions across diverse scenarios. Furthermore, we establish RobotEQ-Bench to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art models on this task. Experimental results demonstrate that current models still fall short in achieving reliable active intelligence, particularly in spatial grounding. Meanwhile, leveraging RAG techniques to incorporate external social norm knowledge bases can generally enhance performance. This work can facilitate the transition of robotics from user-guided passive manipulation to active social compliance.

Kuofei Fang, Xinyi Che, Haomin Ouyang +12

State Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, Tongji University · Tsinghua University · The Chinese University of Hong Kong +1

Human-Robot Interaction Embodied AI Visual Grounding for Robotics

May 6, 2026

Position: Embodied AI Requires a Privacy-Utility Trade-off

Embodied AI (EAI) systems are rapidly transitioning from simulations into real-world domestic and other sensitive environments. However, recent EAI solutions have largely demonstrated advancements within isolated stages such as instruction, perception, planning and interaction, without considering their coupled privacy implications in high-frequency deployments where privacy leakage is often irreversible. This position paper argues that optimizing these components independently creates a systemic privacy crisis when deployed in sensitive settings, thereby advancing the position that privacy in EAI is a life cycle-level architectural constraint rather than a stage-local feature. To address these challenges, we propose Secure Privacy Integration in Next-generation Embodied AI (SPINE), a unified privacy-aware framework that treats privacy as a dynamic control signal governing cross-stage coupling throughout the entire EAI life cycle. SPINE decomposes the EAI pipeline into various stages and establishes a multi-criterion privacy classification matrix to orchestrate contextual sensitivity across stage boundaries. We conduct preliminary simulation and real-world case studies to conceptually validate how privacy constraints propagate downstream to reshape system behavior, illustrating the insufficiency of fragmented privacy patches and motivating future research directions into secure yet functional embodied AI systems. We detail the SPINE framework and case studies at https://github.com/rminshen03/EAI_Privacy_Position.

Xiaoliang Fan, Jiarui Chen, Zhuodong Liu +6

Fujian Key Laboratory of Urban Intelligent Sensing and Computing, Xiamen University, China Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, Xiamen University, China · School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Australia

Privacy-Preserving ML Embodied AI Privacy-Utility Tradeoff

May 5, 2026

Evaluating Generative Models as Interactive Emergent Representations of Human-Like Collaborative Behavior

Human-AI collaboration requires AI agents to understand human behavior for effective coordination. While advances in foundation models show promising capabilities in understanding and showing human-like behavior, their application in embodied collaborative settings needs further investigation. This work examines whether embodied foundation model agents exhibit emergent collaborative behaviors indicating underlying mental models of their collaborators, which is an important aspect of effective coordination. This paper develops a 2D collaborative game environment where large language model agents and humans complete color-matching tasks requiring coordination. We define five collaborative behaviors as indicators of emergent mental model representation: perspective-taking, collaborator-aware planning, introspection, theory of mind, and clarification. An automated behavior detection system using LLM-based judges identifies these behaviors, achieving fair to substantial agreement with human annotations. Results from the automated behavior detection system show that foundation models consistently exhibit emergent collaborative behaviors without being explicitly trained to do so. These behaviors occur at varying frequencies during collaboration stages, with distinct patterns across different LLMs. A user study was also conducted to evaluate human satisfaction and perceived collaboration effectiveness, with the results indicating positive collaboration experiences. Participants appreciated the agents' task focus, plan verbalization, and initiative, while suggesting improvements in response times and human-like interactions. This work provides an experimental framework for human-AI collaboration, empirical evidence of collaborative behaviors in embodied LLM agents, a validated behavioral analysis methodology, and an assessment of collaboration effectiveness.

Shinas Shaji, Teena Chakkalayil Hassan, Sebastian Houben +1

Institute of AI and Autonomous Systems (A2S), Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Grantham-Allee 20, Sankt Augustin, 53757, Germany. · 3Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information SystemsMay (IAIS), Schloss Birlinghoven, Sankt Augustin, 53757, Germany. · 2Division for Systems and Control, Chalmers University of Technology, Chalmersplatsen 1, Gothenburg, 41296, Sweden.

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Theory of Mind LLM Agent Evaluation Embodied AI Human-AI Collaboration

May 4, 2026

MolmoAct2: Action Reasoning Models for Real-world Deployment

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models aim to provide a single generalist controller for robots, but today's systems fall short on the criteria that matter for real-world deployment. Frontier models are closed, open-weight alternatives are tied to expensive hardware, reasoning-augmented policies pay prohibitive latency for their grounding, and fine-tuned success rates remain below the threshold for dependable use. We present MolmoAct2, a fully open action reasoning model built for practical deployment, advancing its predecessor along five axes. We introduce MolmoER, a VLM backbone specialized for spatial and embodied reasoning, trained on a 3.3M-sample corpus with a specialize-then-rehearse recipe. We release three new datasets spanning low-to-medium cost platforms, including MolmoAct2-BimanualYAM, 720 hours of teleoperated bimanual trajectories that constitute the largest open bimanual dataset to date, together with quality-filtered Franka (DROID) and SO100/101 subsets. We provide OpenFAST, an open-weight, open-data action tokenizer trained on millions of trajectories across five embodiments. We redesign the architecture to graft a flow-matching continuous-action expert onto a discrete-token VLM via per-layer KV-cache conditioning. Finally, we propose MolmoThink, an adaptive-depth reasoning variant that re-predicts depth tokens only for scene regions that change between timesteps, retaining geometric grounding at a fraction of prior latency. In the most extensive empirical study of any open VLA to date, spanning 7 simulation and real-world benchmarks, MolmoAct2 outperforms strong baselines including Pi-05, while MolmoER surpasses GPT-5 and Gemini Robotics ER-1.5 across 13 embodied-reasoning benchmarks. We release model weights, training code, and complete training data. Project page: https://allenai.org/blog/molmoact2

Haoquan Fang, Jiafei Duan, Donovan Clay +26

1Allen Institute for AI · University of Washington · 3National University of Singapore +6

Embodied Reasoning Efficient VLA Models AI Control Robotic Manipulation Robotics Vision-Language-Action Models+5

May 2, 2026

ESARBench: A Benchmark for Agentic UAV Embodied Search and Rescue

The rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has empowered Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with exceptional capabilities in spatial reasoning, semantic understanding, and complex decision-making, making them inherently suited for UAV Search and Rescue (SAR). However, existing UAV SAR research is dominated by traditional vision and path-planning methods and lacks a comprehensive and unified benchmark for embodied agents. To bridge this gap, we first propose the novel task of Embodied Search and Rescue (ESAR), which requires aerial agents to autonomously explore complex environments, identify rescue clues, and reason about victim locations to execute informed decision-making. Additionally, we present ESARBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate MLLM-driven UAV agents in highly realistic SAR scenarios. Leveraging Unreal Engine 5 and AirSim, we construct four high-fidelity, large-scale open environments mapped directly from real-world Geographic Information System (GIS) data to ensure photorealistic landscapes. To rigorously simulate actual rescue operations, our benchmark incorporates dynamic variables including weather conditions, time of day, and stochastic clue placement. Furthermore, we create a dataset of 600 tasks modeled after real-world rescue cases and propose a robust set of evaluation metrics. We evaluate diverse baselines, ranging from traditional heuristics to advanced ground and aerial MLLM-based ObjectNav agents. Experimental results highlight the challenges in ESAR, revealing critical bottlenecks in spatial memory, aerial adaptation, and the trade-off between search efficiency and flight safety. We hope ESARBench serves as a valuable resource to advance research on Embodied Search and Rescue domain. Source code and project page: https://4amgodvzx.github.io/ESAR.github.io.

Daoxuan Zhang, Ping Chen, Jianyi Zhou +1

Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen

Aerial Robotics Robotics Simulation AI Agent Benchmarks Search-and-Rescue Robotics Embodied AI VLMs for Robotics+1

Apr 30, 2026

Bridging Values and Behavior: A Hierarchical Framework for Proactive Embodied Agents

Current embodied agents are often limited to passive instruction-following or reactive need-satisfaction, lacking a stable, high-order value framework essential for long-term, self-directed behavior and resolving motivational conflicts. We introduce ValuePlanner, a hierarchical cognitive architecture that decouples high-level value scheduling from low-level action execution. ValuePlanner employs an LLM-based cognitive module to generate symbolic subgoals by reasoning through abstract value trade-offs, which are then translated into executable action plans by a classical PDDL planner. This process is refined via a closed-loop feedback mechanism. Evaluating such autonomy requires methods beyond task-success rates, and we therefore propose a value-centric evaluation suite measuring cumulative value gain, preference alignment, and behavioral diversity. Experiments in the TongSim household environment demonstrate that ValuePlanner arbitrates competing values to generate coherent, long-horizon, self-directed behavior absent from instruction-following and needs-driven baselines. Our work offers a structured approach to bridging intrinsic values and grounded behavior for autonomous agents.

Chunhui Zhang, Yuxuan Wang, Aoyang Qin +4

State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, BIGAI · School of Computer Science, Peking University · Tsinghua University +3

Hierarchical Planning Agent Evaluation Embodied AI Long-Horizon LLM Agents LLM Agent Planning

Apr 29, 2026

3D Generation for Embodied AI and Robotic Simulation: A Survey

Embodied AI and robotic systems increasingly depend on scalable, diverse, and physically grounded 3D content for simulation-based training and real-world deployment. While 3D generative modeling has advanced rapidly, embodied applications impose requirements far beyond visual realism: generated objects must carry kinematic structure and material properties, scenes must support interaction and task execution, and the resulting content must bridge the gap between simulation and reality. This survey reviews 3D generation for embodied AI and organizes the literature around three roles that 3D generation plays in embodied systems. In Data Generator, 3D generation produces simulation-ready objects and assets, including articulated, physically grounded, and deformable content for downstream interaction; in Simulation Environments, it constructs interactive and task-oriented worlds, spanning structure-aware, controllable, and agentic scene generation; and in Sim2Real Bridge, it supports digital twin reconstruction, data augmentation, and synthetic demonstrations for downstream robot learning and real-world transfer. We also show that the field is shifting from visual realism toward interaction readiness, and we identify the main bottlenecks, including limited physical annotations, the gap between geometric quality and physical validity, fragmented evaluation, and the persistent sim-to-real divide, that must be addressed for 3D generation to become a dependable foundation for embodied intelligence. Our project page is at https://3dgen4robot.github.io.

Tianwei Ye, Yifan Mao, Minwen Liao +6

the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Wuhan University · Harbin Institute of Technology +2

3D Asset Generation Robotics Simulation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics 3D Scene Generation Embodied AI

Apr 27, 2026

Interoceptive machine framework: Toward interoception-inspired regulatory architectures in artificial intelligence

This review proposes an integrative framework grounded on interoception and embodied AI-termed the interoceptive machine framework-that translates biologically inspired principles of internal-state regulation into computational architectures for adaptive autonomy. Interoception, conceived as the monitoring, integration, and regulation of internal signals, has proven relevant for understanding adaptive behavior in biological systems. The proposed framework organizes interoceptive contributions into three functional principles: homeostatic, allostatic, and enactive, each associated with distinct computational roles: internal viability regulation, anticipatory uncertainty-based re-evaluation, and active data generation through interaction. These principles are not intended as direct neurophysiological mappings, but as abstractions that inform the design of artificial agents with improved self-regulation and context-sensitive behavior. By embedding internal state variables and regulatory loops within these principles, AI systems can achieve more robust decision-making, calibrated uncertainty handling, and adaptive interaction strategies, particularly in uncertain and dynamic environments. This approach provides a concrete and testable pathway toward agents capable of functionally grounded self-regulation, with direct implications for human-computer interaction and assistive technologies. Ultimately, the interoceptive machine framework offers a unifying perspective on how internal-state regulation can enhance autonomy, adaptivity, and robustness in embodied AI systems

Diego Candia-Rivera

NERV · Sorbonne Université, Paris Brain Institute (ICM), CNRS, INSERM, AP-HP, Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris 75013, France

Embodied AI Adaptive Control

Apr 27, 2026

AgenticCache: Cache-Driven Asynchronous Planning for Embodied AI Agents

Embodied AI agents increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs) for planning, yet per-step LLM calls impose severe latency and cost. In this paper, we show that embodied tasks exhibit strong plan locality, where the next plan is largely predictable from the current one. Building on this, we introduce AgenticCache, a planning framework that reuses cached plans to avoid per-step LLM calls. In AgenticCache, each agent queries a runtime cache of frequent plan transitions, while a background Cache Updater asynchronously calls the LLM to validate and refine cached entries. Across four multi-agent embodied benchmarks, AgenticCache improves task success rate by 22% on average across 12 configurations (4 benchmarks x 3 models), reduces simulation latency by 65%, and lowers token usage by 50%. Cache-based plan reuse thus offers a practical path to low-latency, low-cost embodied agents. Code is available at https://github.com/hojoonleokim/MLSys26_AgenticCache.

Hojoon Kim, Yuheng Wu, Thierry Tambe

Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea · Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

LLM Planning LLM Inference Acceleration Embodied AI LLM Agent Planning

Apr 24, 2026

AmaraSpatial-10K: A Spatially and Semantically Aligned 3D Dataset for Spatial Computing and Embodied AI

Web-scale 3D asset collections are abundant but rarely ready to ingest without cleanup, suffering from arbitrary metric scaling, incorrect pivots, brittle geometry, and incomplete textures, defects that limit their use in embodied AI, robotics, and spatial computing. We present AmaraSpatial-10K, a dataset of 10,071 synthetic 3D assets standardised for direct ingestion. Each asset ships as a metric-scaled, deterministically anchored .glb with separated PBR maps, a convex collision hull, a paired reference image, and multi-sentence text metadata. Alongside the dataset we introduce a reusable evaluation suite for 3D asset banks, a continuous Scale Plausibility Score (SPS), a keyword-based Concept Density metric, anchor-error auditing, and a cross-modal CLIP coherence protocol, and apply it to AmaraSpatial-10K alongside matched subsets of Objaverse, HSSD, ABO, and GSO. We check the annotations independently of the LLM/VLM pipeline that produced them: measured ABO object heights fall inside our scale intervals 88.7-90.7% of the time, and three non-author raters auditing a stratified sample of 314 assets judge 95.5% plausibly scaled and 99.7% correctly anchored. AmaraSpatial-10K improves CLIP Recall@5 by 3.4x over Objaverse (0.612 vs. 0.181, median rank 267 -> 3), achieves a 99.1% settling-stability rate under Habitat-Sim in static placement and collision tests, with ~20x lower per-load wall time, and as a drop-in Holodeck asset bank improves planned-scale matching and is preferred by blinded human raters in 27 of 40 paired scenes. Controlled ablations on the same asset bank attribute the retrieval gain to description richness.

Mohammad Sadegh Salehi, Alexander J. P. Perkins, Igor Pardo Maurell +2

Zero One Creative

Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Automated Evaluation Embodied AI

Apr 23, 2026

ReCAPA: Hierarchical Predictive Correction to Mitigate Cascading Failures

Vision-Language-Action systems follow instructions to execute multi-step tasks in multimodal environments. Recent VLA approaches typically rely on post-hoc correction mechanisms or operate under fixed task decompositions and alignment schemes. However, once an intermediate step is mis-specified, local errors propagate through subsequent steps and eventually accumulate into cascading failures. To mitigate this compounding effect, we propose Predictive Alignment and Planning Architecture, a framework that uses prediction and contrast to adjust deviations across three levels: actions, subgoals, and trajectories. Semantic alignment is enforced at all levels using a Sinkhorn-based module and a Score-field module. The predictive correction and alignment jointly update the action generator during training, enabling it to adjust fine-grained steps to remain aligned with the overall intent. We further introduce two new metrics to quantify error propagation and recovery processes in tasks, capturing how mistakes spread and fade over long-horizon execution. Experiments show that ReCAPA achieves competitive results on embodied agent benchmarks such as VisualAgentBench, MineDojo, and AI2-THOR, outperforming strong proprietary and open-source Large Language Model baselines.

Xiyin Zeng, Yuyu Sun, Haoyang Li +2

1Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · 2South China Normal University

Vision-Language-Action Models Vision-Language Alignment Embodied AI VLMs for Robotics

Apr 21, 2026

Environmental Understanding Vision-Language Model for Embodied Agent

Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong perception and reasoning abilities for instruction-following embodied agents. However, despite these abilities and their generalization performance, they still face limitations in environmental understanding, often failing on interactions or relying on environment metadata during execution. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework named Environmental Understanding Embodied Agent (EUEA), which fine-tunes four core skills: 1) object perception for identifying relevant objects, 2) task planning for generating interaction subgoals, 3) action understanding for judging success likelihood, and 4) goal recognition for determining goal completion. By fine-tuning VLMs with EUEA skills, our framework enables more reliable task execution for instruction-following. We further introduce a recovery step that leverages these core skills and a group relative policy optimization (GRPO) stage that refines inconsistent skill predictions. The recovery step samples alternative actions to correct failure cases, and the GRPO stage refines inconsistent skill predictions. Across ALFRED tasks, our VLM significantly outperforms a behavior-cloning baseline, achieving an 8.86% improvement in average success rate. The recovery and GRPO stages provide an additional 3.03% gain, further enhancing overall performance. Finally, our skill-level analyses reveal key limitations in the environmental understanding of closed- and open-source VLMs and identify the capabilities necessary for effective agent-environment interaction.

Jinsik Bang, Jaeyeon Bae, Donggyu Lee +2

UNIST

Embodied AI VLMs for Robotics Vision-Language Agents

Apr 20, 2026

Unmasking the Illusion of Embodied Reasoning in Vision-Language-Action Models

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models report impressive success rates on standard robotic benchmarks, fueling optimism about general-purpose physical intelligence. However, recent evidence suggests a systematic misalignment between standard benchmark success and true embodied reasoning, raising the question of whether these high scores reflect genuine cognitive capability. To address this gap, we introduce BeTTER, a diagnostic Benchmark for Testing True Embodied Reasoning in robotic policies. BeTTER applies targeted causal interventions (e.g., spatial layout shifts, temporal extrapolation) while enforcing kinematic isolation to explicitly decouple high-level reasoning failures from low-level execution limits. Through systematic evaluation, we reveal that state-of-the-art VLAs catastrophically fail in dynamic scenarios, exhibiting severe lexical-kinematic shortcuts, behavioral inertia, and semantic feature collapse. Crucially, our mechanistic analysis traces these symptoms to fundamental architectural bottlenecks - such as capacity compression and myopic downsampling - which systematically degrade the model's foundational semantic representation. We demonstrate that highly static evaluation protocols effectively mask this degradation by allowing optimization to overfit to sensorimotor priors. Supported by real-world robotic validation, our findings confirm that this representational breakdown is not a simulation artifact, highlighting the critical need for future VLA paradigms to resolve the structural tension between high-frequency control and high-level reasoning.

Haiweng Xu, Sipeng Zheng, Hao Luo +3

1Peking University · 3BeingBeyond · 2Tsinghua University

VLM Evaluation VLM Reasoning Vision-Language-Action Models Robot Manipulation Benchmarks Embodied AI Shortcut Learning+2

Apr 20, 2026

StableIDM: Stabilizing Inverse Dynamics Model against Manipulator Truncation via Spatio-Temporal Refinement

Inverse Dynamics Models (IDMs) map visual observations to low-level action commands, serving as central components for data labeling and policy execution in embodied AI. However, their performance degrades severely under manipulator truncation, a common failure mode that makes state recovery ill-posed and leads to unstable control. We present StableIDM, a spatio-temporal framework that refines features from visual inputs to stabilize action predictions under such partial observability. StableIDM integrates three complementary components: (1) auxiliary robot-centric masking to suppress background clutter, (2) Directional Feature Aggregation (DFA) for geometry-aware spatial reasoning, which extracts anisotropic features along directions inferred from the visible arm and (3) Temporal Dynamics Refinement (TDR) to smooth and correct predictions via motion continuity. Extensive evaluations validate our approach: StableIDM improves strict action accuracy by 12.1% under severe truncation on the AgiBot benchmark, and increases average task success by 9.7% in real-robot replay. Moreover, it boosts end-to-end grasp success by 11.5% when decoding video-generated plans, and improves downstream VLA real-robot success by 17.6% when functioning as an automatic annotator. These results demonstrate that StableIDM provides a robust and scalable backbone for both policy execution and data generation in embodied artificial intelligence.

Kerui Li, Zhe Jing, Xiaofeng Wang +6

1GigaAI · 3Beijing Institute of Technology · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Robot Policy Learning Embodied AI Inverse Dynamics

Apr 19, 2026

Seeing Isn't Believing: Mitigating Belief Inertia via Active Intervention in Embodied Agents

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have enabled agents to tackle complex embodied tasks through environmental interaction. However, these agents still make suboptimal decisions and perform ineffective actions, as they often overlook critical environmental feedback that differs from their internal beliefs. Through a formal probing analysis, we characterize this as belief inertia, a phenomenon where agents stubbornly adhere to prior beliefs despite explicit observations. To address this, we advocate active belief intervention, moving from passive understanding to active management. We introduce the Estimate-Verify-Update (EVU) mechanism, which empowers agents to predict expected outcomes, verify them against observations through explicit reasoning, and actively update prior beliefs based on the verification evidence. EVU is designed as a unified intervention mechanism that generates textual belief states explicitly, and can be integrated into both prompting-based and training-based agent reasoning methods. Extensive experiments across three embodied benchmarks demonstrate that EVU consistently yields substantial gains in task success rates. Further analyses validate that our approach effectively mitigates belief inertia, advancing the development of more robust embodied agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/WangHanLinHenry/EVU.

Hanlin Wang, Chak Tou Leong, Jian Wang +1

Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · College of Computer Science, Sichuan University

Embodied AI LLM Agent Reliability

Apr 19, 2026

NeuroAI and Beyond: Bridging Between Advances in Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence

Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have made impressive progress in recent years but remain only loosely interconnected. Based on a workshop convened by the National Science Foundation in August 2025, we identify three fundamental capability gaps in current AI: the inability to interact with the physical world, inadequate learning that produces brittle systems, and unsustainable energy and data inefficiency. We describe the neuroscience principles that address each: co-design of body and controller, prediction through interaction, multi-scale learning with neuromodulatory control, hierarchical distributed architectures, and sparse event-driven computation. We present a research roadmap organized around these principles at near, mid, and long-term horizons. We argue that realizing this program requires a new generation of researchers trained across the boundary between neuroscience and engineering, and describe the institutional conditions: interdisciplinary training, hardware access, community standards, and ethics, needed to support them. We conclude that NeuroAI, neuroscience-informed artificial intelligence, has the potential to overcome limitations of current AI while deepening our understanding of biological neural computation.

Anthony Zador, Jean-Marc Fellous, Terrence Sejnowski +28

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA. · Institute for Neural Computation, UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA. · Mathematics Department, Kalaheo High School, Kailua, HI, USA. +23

Apr 18, 2026

Mini-BEHAVIOR-Gran: Revealing U-Shaped Effects of Instruction Granularity on Language-Guided Embodied Agents

Instruction granularity is an important yet poorly controlled variable in language-guided embodied AI. Existing benchmarks typically pair each task with a single static instruction, making it difficult to study how agent behavior changes when the same task is described at different levels of detail. We introduce Mini-BEHAVIOR-Gran, a new benchmark for controlled studies of instruction granularity that extends Mini-BEHAVIOR with multiple instruction variants per task, ranging from high-level goal descriptions to step-by-step guidance. Using this benchmark, we compare four candidate metrics for cross-task granularity quantification: token count, entity count, action-verb count, and planning-width, and find that width correlates most consistently with agent performance. Using width to organize training and evaluation further reveals a non-monotonic U-shaped relationship between instruction granularity and performance, with peaks at both fine and coarse extremes. Further analysis suggests that the coarse-granularity performance rebound is associated with shallow grounding, where agents learn vision-dominant policies.

Sukai Huang, Chenyuan Zhang, Fucai Ke +4

Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University

AI Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks Instruction Following Embodied AI

Apr 16, 2026

MirrorBench: Evaluating Self-centric Intelligence in MLLMs by Introducing a Mirror

Recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has demonstrated remarkable advances in perception and reasoning, suggesting their potential for embodied intelligence. While recent studies have evaluated embodied MLLMs in interactive settings, current benchmarks mainly target capabilities to perceive, understand, and interact with external objects, lacking a systematic evaluation of self-centric intelligence. To address this, we introduce MirrorBench, a simulation-based benchmark inspired by the classical Mirror Self-Recognition (MSR) test in psychology. MirrorBench extends this paradigm to embodied MLLMs through a tiered framework of progressively challenging tasks, assessing agents from basic visual perception to high-level self-representation. Experiments on leading MLLMs show that even at the lowest level, their performance remains substantially inferior to human performance, revealing fundamental limitations in self-referential understanding. Our study bridges psychological paradigms and embodied intelligence, offering a principled framework for evaluating the emergence of general intelligence in large models. Project page: https://fflahm.github.io/mirror-bench-page/.

Shengyu Guo, Tongrui Ye, Jianbo Zhang +3

Shanghai AI Lab

Multimodal Large Language Models AI Agent Benchmarks Embodied AI Multimodal Model Evaluation

Apr 15, 2026

[Emerging Ideas] Artificial Tripartite Intelligence: A Bio-Inspired, Sensor-First Architecture for Physical AI

As AI moves from data centers to robots and wearables, scaling ever-larger models becomes insufficient. Physical AI operates under tight latency, energy, privacy, and reliability constraints, and its performance depends not only on model capacity but also on how signals are acquired through controllable sensors in dynamic environments. We present Artificial Tripartite Intelligence (ATI), a bio-inspired, sensor-first architectural contract for physical AI. ATI is tripartite at the systems level: a Brainstem (L1) provides reflexive safety and signal-integrity control, a Cerebellum (L2) performs continuous sensor calibration, and a Cerebral Inference Subsystem spanning L3/L4 supports routine skill selection and execution, coordination, and deep reasoning. This modular organization allows sensor control, adaptive sensing, edge-cloud execution, and foundation model reasoning to co-evolve within one closed-loop architecture, while keeping time-critical sensing and control on device and invoking higher-level inference only when needed. We instantiate ATI in a mobile camera prototype under dynamic lighting and motion. In our routed evaluation (L3-L4 split inference), compared to the default auto-exposure setting, ATI (L1/L2 adaptive sensing) improves end-to-end accuracy from 53.8% to 88% while reducing remote L4 invocations by 43.3%. These results show the value of co-designing sensing and inference for embodied AI.

You Rim Choi, Subeom Park, Hyung-Sin Kim

Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea

Adaptive Sensing Embodied AI Cognitive Architectures for AI Agents Active Perception Hardware-Software Co-Design Edge Inference

Apr 15, 2026

EmbodiedClaw: Conversational Workflow Execution for Embodied AI Development

Embodied AI research is increasingly moving beyond single-task, single-environment policy learning toward multi-task, multi-scene, and multi-model settings. This shift substantially increases the engineering overhead and development time required for stages such as evaluation environment construction, trajectory collection, model training, and evaluation. To address this challenge, we propose a new paradigm for embodied AI development in which users express goals and constraints through conversation, and the system automatically plans and executes the development workflow. We instantiate this paradigm with EmbodiedClaw, a conversational agent that turns high-frequency, high-cost embodied research activities, including environment creation and revision, benchmark transformation, trajectory synthesis, model evaluation, and asset expansion, into executable skills. Experiments on end-to-end workflow tasks, capability-specific evaluations, human researcher studies, and ablations show that EmbodiedClaw reduces manual engineering effort while improving executability, consistency, and reproducibility. These results suggest a shift from manual toolchains to conversationally executable workflows for embodied AI development.

Xueyang Zhou, Yihan Sun, Xijie Gong +4

School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology · School of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology · School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China +2

Embodied AI Autonomous Research Agents Conversational Agents

Apr 14, 2026

Habitat-GS: A High-Fidelity Navigation Simulator with Dynamic Gaussian Splatting

Training embodied AI agents depends critically on the visual fidelity of simulation environments and the ability to model dynamic humans. Current simulators predominantly rely on mesh-based rasterization, for which photorealistic assets are costly to author at scale, and their support for dynamic human avatars is largely constrained to mesh representations, hindering agent generalization to human-populated real-world scenarios. We present Habitat-GS, a navigation-centric embodied AI simulator extended from Habitat-Sim that integrates 3D Gaussian Splatting scene rendering and drivable gaussian avatars while maintaining full compatibility with the Habitat ecosystem. Our system implements a 3DGS renderer for real-time photorealistic rendering and supports scalable 3DGS asset import from diverse sources. For dynamic human modeling, we introduce a gaussian avatar module that enables each avatar to simultaneously serve as a photorealistic visual entity and an effective navigation obstacle, allowing agents to learn human-aware behaviors in realistic settings. Experiments on point-goal navigation demonstrate that agents trained on 3DGS scenes achieve stronger cross-domain generalization. Evaluations on avatar-aware navigation further confirm that gaussian avatars enable effective human-aware navigation, while performance benchmarks validate the system's scalability. Code is available at https://github.com/zju3dv/habitat-gs.

Ziyuan Xia, Jingyi Xu, Chong Cui +9

Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · Peking University, Beijing, China · XGRIDS, Shenzhen, China +2

Robotics Simulation Embodied AI 3D Gaussian Splatting Social Robot Navigation

Apr 13, 2026

EmbodiedGovBench: A Benchmark for Governance, Recovery, and Upgrade Safety in Embodied Agent Systems

Recent progress in embodied AI has produced a growing ecosystem of robot policies, foundation models, and modular runtimes. However, current evaluation remains dominated by task success metrics such as completion rate or manipulation accuracy. These metrics leave a critical gap: they do not measure whether embodied systems are governable -- whether they respect capability boundaries, enforce policies, recover safely, maintain audit trails, and respond to human oversight. We present EmbodiedGovBench, a benchmark for governance-oriented evaluation of embodied agent systems. Rather than asking only whether a robot can complete a task, EmbodiedGovBench evaluates whether the system remains controllable, policy-bounded, recoverable, auditable, and evolution-safe under realistic perturbations. The benchmark covers seven governance dimensions: unauthorized capability invocation, runtime drift robustness, recovery success, policy portability, version upgrade safety, human override responsiveness, and audit completeness. We define a benchmark structure spanning single-robot and fleet settings, with scenario templates, perturbation operators, governance metrics, and baseline evaluation protocols. We describe how the benchmark can be instantiated over embodied capability runtimes with modular interfaces and contract-aware upgrade workflows. Our analysis suggests that embodied governance should become a first-class evaluation target. EmbodiedGovBench provides the initial measurement framework for that shift.

Xue Qin, Simin Luan, John See +2

School of Software, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China · School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China · School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Malaysia Campus, Putrajaya, Malaysia +1

AI Agent Governance AI Agent Safety Benchmarks AI Agent Benchmarks Embodied AI

Apr 10, 2026

ECM Contracts: Contract-Aware, Versioned, and Governable Capability Interfaces for Embodied Agents

Embodied agents increasingly rely on modular capabilities that are installed, upgraded, composed, and governed at runtime, yet the interfaces between these modules are specified only at the level of message types, so integration failures surface only during execution. We present ECM Contracts, a contract-based interface model for embodied capability modules. Unlike conventional interfaces that specify only input and output types, ECM Contracts encode six dimensions of embodied execution: functional signature, behavioral assumptions, resource requirements, permission boundaries, recovery semantics, and version compatibility. On this model we build a compatibility framework that checks installation, composition, and upgrade before deployment, and a release discipline of version-aware compatibility classes and upgrade gates. We evaluate the prototype by predicting real, independently documented integration failures in the ROS ecosystem: contracts are reconstructed blind from each module's published interface, scored by a checker frozen before reconstruction against bugs from third-party datasets, and confirmed in live runtime execution. Contract checking predicts 56% and 72% of these documented failures across two substrates, against at most 17% for the strongest type and quality-of-service baselines, with the advantage statistically significant and zero false positives on matched-good controls. The resource and version dimensions carry most of this margin; the behavioral dimension adds little beyond the middleware's quality-of-service check, and we report the permission and recovery dimensions as forward-looking. Stable embodied software ecosystems require not just modular packaging but explicit contracts connecting composition, governance, and evolution.

Xue Qin, Simin Luan, Cong Yang +1

School of Software, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China. · School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China. · School of Future Science and Engineering, Soochow University, Suzhou,2026 China.

Software Engineering Robotics AI Agent Governance Embodied AI