Embodied AI

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Overview

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

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

Feb 24, 2026

Body-Reservoir Governance in Repeated Games: Embodied Decision-Making, Dynamic Sentinel Adaptation, and Complexity-Regularized Optimization

Standard game theory explains cooperation in repeated games through conditional strategies such as Tit-for-Tat (TfT), but these require continuous computation that imposes physical costs on embodied agents. We propose a three-layer Body-Reservoir Governance (BRG) architecture: (1) a body reservoir (echo state network) whose dd-dimensional state performs implicit inference over interaction history, serving as both decision-maker and anomaly detector, (2) a cognitive filter providing costly strategic tools activated on demand, and (3) a metacognitive governance layer with receptivity parameter α∈[0,1]α\in [0,1]. At full body governance (α=1α=1), closed-loop dynamics satisfy a self-consistency equation: cooperation is expressed as the reservoir's fixed point, not computed. Strategy complexity cost is defined as the KL divergence between the reservoir's state distribution and its habituated baseline. Body governance reduces this cost, with action variance decreasing up to 1600×1600\times with dimension dd. A dynamic sentinel generates a composite discomfort signal from the reservoir's own state, driving adaptive α(t)α(t): near baseline during cooperation, rapidly dropping upon defection to activate cognitive retaliation. Overriding the body incurs thermodynamic cost proportional to internal state distortion. The sentinel achieves the highest payoff across all conditions, outperforming static body governance, TfT, and EMA baselines. A dimension sweep (d∈{5,…,100}d \in \{5,\ldots,100\}) shows implicit inference scales with bodily richness (23×23\times to 1600×1600\times variance reduction), attributable to reservoir dynamics. A phase diagram in (d,τenv)(d, τ_{\mathrm{env}}) space reveals governance regime transitions near d≈20d \approx 20. The framework reinterprets cooperation as the minimum-dissipation response of an adapted dynamical system -- emergent from embodied dynamics rather than computed.

Yuki Nakamura

The Open University of Japan

Repeated GamesGame TheoryEmbodied AIEmergent Behavior in Multi-Agent Systems
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Feb 24, 2026

How Foundational Skills Influence VLM-based Embodied Agents:A Native Perspective

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise for human-level embodied intelligence. However, existing benchmarks for VLM-driven embodied agents often rely on high-level commands or discretized action spaces, which are non-native settings that differ markedly from real-world control. In addition, current benchmarks focus primarily on high-level tasks and lack joint evaluation and analysis at both low and high levels. To address these limitations, we present NativeEmbodied, a challenging benchmark for VLM-driven embodied agents that uses a unified, native low-level action space. Built on diverse simulated scenes, NativeEmbodied includes three representative high-level tasks in complex scenarios to evaluate overall performance. For more detailed analysis, we further decouple the skills required by complex tasks and construct four types of low-level tasks, each targeting a fundamental embodied skill. This joint evaluation across task and skill granularities enables fine-grained assessment of embodied agents. Experiments with state-of-the-art VLMs reveal clear deficiencies in several fundamental embodied skills, and further analysis shows that these bottlenecks significantly limit performance on high-level tasks. NativeEmbodied highlights key challenges for current VLM-driven embodied agents and provides insights to guide future research.

Bo Peng, Pi Bu, Keyu Pan +7

University of Science and Technology of China · Alibaba Group · Independent Researcher +1

Embodied Agent BenchmarksEmbodied AIVision-Language AgentsVLM EvaluationRobotic Control
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Feb 21, 2026

PEPA: a Persistently Autonomous Embodied Agent with Personalities

Living organisms exhibit persistent autonomy through internally generated goals and self-sustaining behavioral organization, yet current embodied agents remain driven by externally scripted objectives. This dependence on predefined task specifications limits their capacity for long-term deployment in dynamic, unstructured environments where continuous human intervention is impractical. We propose that personality traits provide an intrinsic organizational principle for achieving persistent autonomy. Analogous to genotypic biases shaping biological behavioral tendencies, personalities enable agents to autonomously generate goals and sustain behavioral evolution without external supervision. To realize this, we develop PEPA, a three-layer cognitive architecture that operates through three interacting systems: Sys3 autonomously synthesizes personality-aligned goals and refines them via episodic memory and daily self-reflection; Sys2 performs deliberative reasoning to translate goals into executable action plans; Sys1 grounds the agent in sensorimotor interaction, executing actions and recording experiences. We validate the framework through real-world deployment on a quadruped robot in a multi-floor office building. Operating without reliance on fixed task specifications, the robot autonomously arbitrates between user requests and personality-driven motivations, navigating elevators and exploring environments accordingly. Quantitative analysis across five distinct personality prototypes demonstrates stable, trait-aligned behaviors. The results confirm that personality-driven cognitive architectures enable sustained autonomous operation characteristic of persistent embodied systems. Code and demo videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/pepa-persistent/.

Kaige Liu, Yang Li, Lijun Zhu +1

School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China, and also with Shanghai Innovation Institute, Shanghai 200231, China · School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China · School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China, and also with the State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China +1

Cognitive Architectures for AI AgentsEmbodied AISelf-Evolving Agents
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Feb 19, 2026

What Breaks Embodied AI Security:LLM Vulnerabilities, CPS Flaws,or Something Else?

Embodied AI systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles, service robots, and LLM-driven interactive agents) are rapidly transitioning from controlled environments to safety critical real-world deployments. Unlike disembodied AI, failures in embodied intelligence lead to irreversible physical consequences, raising fundamental questions about security, safety, and reliability. While existing research predominantly analyzes embodied AI through the lenses of Large Language Model (LLM) vulnerabilities or classical Cyber-Physical System (CPS) failures, this survey argues that these perspectives are individually insufficient to explain many observed breakdowns in modern embodied systems. We posit that a significant class of failures arises from embodiment-induced system-level mismatches, rather than from isolated model flaws or traditional CPS attacks. Specifically, we identify four core insights that explain why embodied AI is fundamentally harder to secure: (i) semantic correctness does not imply physical safety, as language-level reasoning abstracts away geometry, dynamics, and contact constraints; (ii) identical actions can lead to drastically different outcomes across physical states due to nonlinear dynamics and state uncertainty; (iii) small errors propagate and amplify across tightly coupled perception-decision-action loops; and (iv) safety is not compositional across time or system layers, enabling locally safe decisions to accumulate into globally unsafe behavior. These insights suggest that securing embodied AI requires moving beyond component-level defenses toward system-level reasoning about physical risk, uncertainty, and failure propagation.

Boyang Ma, Hechuan Guo, Peizhuo Lv +5

Shandong University, 72 Binhai Road, Jimo, Qingdao, Shandong, 250100, China

Embodied AIAI SafetyAI Agent Reliability
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Feb 17, 2026

HIMM: Human-Inspired Long-Term Memory Modeling for Embodied Exploration and Question Answering

Deploying Multimodal Large Language Models as the brain of embodied agents remains challenging, particularly under long-horizon observations and limited context budgets. Existing memory assisted methods often rely on textual summaries, which discard rich visual and spatial details and remain brittle in non-stationary environments. In this work, we propose a non-parametric memory framework that explicitly disentangles episodic and semantic memory for embodied exploration and question answering. Our retrieval-first, reasoning-assisted paradigm recalls episodic experiences via semantic similarity and verifies them through visual reasoning, enabling robust reuse of past observations without rigid geometric alignment. In parallel, we introduce a program-style rule extraction mechanism that converts experiences into structured, reusable semantic memory, facilitating cross-environment generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on embodied question answering and exploration benchmarks, yielding a 7.3% gain in LLM-Match and an 11.4% gain in LLM MatchXSPL on A-EQA, as well as +7.7% success rate and +6.8% SPL on GOAT-Bench. Analyses reveal that our episodic memory primarily improves exploration efficiency, while semantic memory strengthens complex reasoning of embodied agents.

Ji Li, Bo Wang, Jing Xia +2

The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR. · Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China.

Long-Term Memory for Embodied AgentsMemory-Augmented AgentsEmbodied AIEmbodied QAMultimodal Large Language Models
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Feb 16, 2026

DM0: An Embodied-Native Vision-Language-Action Model towards Physical AI

Moving beyond the traditional paradigm of adapting internet-pretrained models to physical tasks, we present DM0, an Embodied-Native Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework designed for Physical AI. Unlike approaches that treat physical grounding as a fine-tuning afterthought, DM0 unifies embodied manipulation and navigation by learning from heterogeneous data sources from the onset. Our methodology follows a comprehensive three-stage pipeline: Pretraining, Mid-Training, and Post-Training. First, we conduct large-scale unified pretraining on the Vision-Language Model (VLM) using diverse corpora--seamlessly integrating web text, autonomous driving scenarios, and embodied interaction logs-to jointly acquire semantic knowledge and physical priors. Subsequently, we build a flow-matching action expert atop the VLM. To reconcile high-level reasoning with low-level control, DM0 employs a hybrid training strategy: for embodied data, gradients from the action expert are not backpropagated to the VLM to preserve generalized representations, while the VLM remains trainable on non-embodied data. Furthermore, we introduce an Embodied Spatial Scaffolding strategy to construct spatial Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, effectively constraining the action solution space. Experiments on the RoboChallenge benchmark demonstrate that DM0 achieves state-of-the-art performance in both Specialist and Generalist settings on Table30.

En Yu, Haoran Lv, Jianjian Sun +46

Flow Matching for Action GenerationVision-Language-Action ModelsEmbodied AIRobotics
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Feb 15, 2026

ProAct: Harnessing Streaming Motion Generation and Agentic Reasoning for Real-Time Embodied Social Interaction

Real-time embodied social interaction places two equally demanding requirements on an agent: continuously generating fluent multimodal interaction behavior, and proactively reasoning over accumulated dialogue and visual context to decide when to take initiative. These requirements must both be satisfied under a strict latency budget, making them difficult to meet simultaneously. We present ProAct, a dual-system framework that manages these time-critical requirements by integrating a low-latency Behavioral System for streaming multimodal interaction with a slower Cognitive System that performs long-horizon social reasoning and produces high-level proactive intentions. The Cognitive System incorporates an efficient memory mechanism and a user-motivation prediction module to reason over accumulated dialogue and visual context and determine when proactive intervention is appropriate. The Behavioral System further includes an intention-conditioned streaming flow-matching motion generator with a disentangled ControlNet branch, which translates deliberative intentions into continuous non-verbal behavior without disrupting interaction fluency. We deploy ProAct on a physical humanoid robot and validate the framework through comprehensive experiments, including real-world user studies, motion-generation benchmarks, and evaluation on ProActBench, a new, targeted benchmark for evaluating proactive trigger detection and restraint in embodied interaction.

Zeyi Zhang, Zixi Kang, Ruijie Zhao +4

Peking University, China

Human Motion GenerationHuman-Robot InteractionMultimodal AgentsEmbodied AI
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Feb 13, 2026

INHerit-SG: Incremental Hierarchical Semantic Scene Graphs for Complex Embodied Retrieval

Object retrieval in 3D scenes remains difficult when queries combine hierarchical context, attributes, negation, and chained spatial relations. Existing semantic maps, scene graphs, and agentic memory support open-vocabulary retrieval, but jointly resolving these constraints remains challenging. In this work, we propose INHerit-SG, an incremental hierarchical semantic scene graph with an accompanying retrieval method for complex embodied retrieval. Asynchronous geometric and semantic processing and structural event-driven maintenance organize observations into a hierarchy whose node semantics and spatial relations are recorded as natural language text. The same memory supports direct reading and reasoning by more capable language models or query parsing followed by structured retrieval. Controlled comparisons show that direct reading is more accurate with powerful hosted models, while structured retrieval improves the accuracy of smaller local models and lowers per-query API cost for hosted models. We also construct HM3DSem-SQR, containing 6,084 queries from 36 HM3D-Sem scenes, and evaluate on Main-864, a class-balanced subset spanning all 36 scenes, and in three real-world environments. Experiments show that INHerit-SG outperforms the strongest baselines in both simulator and real-world evaluations. The largest gains come on attribute and compositional queries (7.6 and 6.3 strict Top-1 points on Main-864), with a 9.8-point overall success margin on real robots. Project Page: https://fangyuktung.github.io/INHeritSG.github.io/

YukTungSamuel Fang, Zhikang Shi, Jiabin Qiu +5

State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China · Beihang University, Beijing, China

Graph-Based Retrieval3D SGGEmbodied AIScene Graph Generation
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Jan 20, 2026

LogicEnvGen: Task-Logic Driven Generation of Diverse Simulated Environments for Embodied AI

Simulated environments play an essential role in embodied AI, functionally analogous to test cases in software engineering. However, existing environment generation methods often emphasize visual realism (e.g., object diversity and layout coherence), overlooking a crucial aspect: logical diversity from the testing perspective. This limits the comprehensive evaluation of embodied agent adaptability and planning robustness across distinct simulated environments. To bridge this gap, we propose LogicEnvGen, a novel method driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) that adopts a top-down paradigm to generate logically diverse simulated environments as test cases for agents. Given an agent task, LogicEnvGen first analyzes its execution logic to construct decision-tree-structured behavior plans and then synthesizes a set of logical trajectories. Subsequently, it adopts a heuristic algorithm to refine the trajectory set, reducing redundant simulation. For each logical trajectory, which represents a potential task situation, LogicEnvGen correspondingly instantiates a concrete simulated environment. Furthermore, we introduce LogicEnvEval, a novel benchmark for simulated environment generation, with four quantitative metrics. Experimental results verify the lack of logical diversity in baselines and demonstrate that LogicEnvGen achieves 1.08-2.67x greater diversity, significantly improving the performance in revealing agent faults by 3.34%-72.00%.

Jianan Wang, Siyang Zhang, Bin Li +4

College of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology · Intelligent Game and Decision Lab (IGDL), Beijing · School of Artifical Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Robotics SimulationAI Agent EvaluationSynthetic Benchmark GenerationEmbodied AI
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Nov 24, 2025

Beyond Description: Cognitively Benchmarking Fine-Grained Action for Embodied Agents

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show promising results as decision-making engines for embodied agents operating in complex, physical environments. However, existing benchmarks often prioritize high-level planning or spatial reasoning, leaving the fine-grained action intelligence required for embodied physical interaction underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce CFG-Bench, a new benchmark designed to systematically evaluate this crucial capability. CFG-Bench consists of 1,368 curated videos paired with 19,562 question-answer pairs spanning three evaluation paradigms targeting four cognitive abilities: 1) Physical Interaction, 2) Temporal-Causal Relation, 3) Intentional Understanding, and 4) Evaluative Judgment. Together, these dimensions provide a systematic framework for assessing a model's ability to translate visual observations into actionable knowledge, moving beyond mere surface-level recognition. Our comprehensive evaluation on CFG-Bench reveals that leading MLLMs struggle to produce detailed instructions for physical interactions and exhibit profound limitations in the higher-order reasoning of intention and evaluation. Moreover, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on our data demonstrates that teaching an MLLMs to articulate fine-grained actions directly translates to significant performance gains on established embodied benchmarks. Our analysis highlights these limitations and offers insights for developing more capable and grounded embodied agents. Project page: https://cfg-bench.github.io/

Dayong Liu, Chao Xu, Weihong Chen +5

Zhejiang University · IROOTECH TECHNOLOGY · Wolf 1069 b Lab, Sany Group +2

AI Agent EvaluationMultimodal Large Language ModelsAI Agent BenchmarksEmbodied AIEmbodied Agent Benchmarks
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Oct 20, 2025

Robobench: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models as Embodied Brain

Building robots that can perceive, reason, and act in dynamic, unstructured environments remains a central challenge. Recent embodied systems often follow a dual-system paradigm, where System 2 performs high-level reasoning and System 1 handles low-level control. We refer to System 2 as the embodied brain, the cognitive core for decision-making in manipulation. Although evaluating this embodied brain is crucial, existing benchmarks mainly measure execution success or cover only limited aspects of high-level cognition and task realism. We introduce RoboBench, a benchmark for evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as embodied brains. RoboBench covers five dimensions: Instruction Comprehension, Perception Reasoning, Generalized Planning, Affordance Prediction, and Failure Analysis. It spans 14 capabilities, 25 tasks, and 6,092 QA pairs. To improve realism, it draws from large-scale real robotic data and in-house collection across diverse embodiments, attribute-rich objects, multi-view scenes, and memory-driven navigation. For planning, RoboBench introduces an MLLM-as-world-simulator framework that assesses whether predicted plans can achieve critical object-state changes under physical and visual constraints, enabling more faithful evaluation of long-horizon reasoning than symbolic matching. Experiments on 18 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal persistent limitations in implicit instruction understanding, spatiotemporal reasoning, cross-scenario planning, fine-grained affordance understanding, and failure diagnosis. We further analyze how embodied cognitive abilities relate to downstream robotic control. RoboBench offers a comprehensive scaffold for quantifying high-level cognition and guiding next-generation MLLMs toward more robust robotic intelligence.

Yulin Luo, Chun-Kai Fan, Menghang Dong +19

State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer2026 Science, Peking University · Institute for Brain and Intelligence, Fudan University · University of Science andJul Technology Beijing +2

Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationMultimodal Large Language ModelsRobot Manipulation BenchmarksEmbodied AIMultimodal Model EvaluationEmbodied Reasoning
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Oct 7, 2025

BuilderBench: The Building Blocks of Intelligent Agents

Today's AI models learn primarily through mimicry and refining, so it is not surprising that they struggle to solve problems beyond the limits set by existing data. To solve novel problems, agents should acquire skills by exploring and learning through experience. Finding a scalable learning mechanism for developing agents that learn through interaction remains a major open problem. In this work, we introduce BuilderBench, a benchmark to accelerate research into agent training that centers open-ended exploration. BuilderBench requires agents to learn how to build any structure using blocks. BuilderBench is equipped with (1) a simulator of a robot interacting with various physical blocks, and (2) a task-suite with over 50 diverse target structures that are carefully curated to test an understanding of physics, mathematics, and long-horizon planning. Agents are provided with a target structure at the start, and can interact with the environment for multiple episodes to experiment and learn various skills for building the structure. Solving these tasks requires embodied reasoning in a way that is not reflected in words but rather in actions, experimenting with different strategies and piecing them together. Our experiments with multiple state-of-the-art frontier language model based agents and tabula rasa reinforcement learning algorithms show that these agents cannot solve any of the non-trivial tasks in the BuilderBench. Our analysis throws light on the lack of exploration abilities in these models.

Raj Ghugare, Roger Creus Castanyer, Catherine Ji +4

Princeton University · Mila – Quebec AI Institute · Université de Montréal

Long-Horizon Agent EvaluationRobot Manipulation BenchmarksLLM Agent TrainingEmbodied AIEmbodied Reasoning
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Aug 9, 2025

P3\mathcal{P}^3: Toward Versatile Embodied Agents

Embodied agents have shown promising generalization capabilities across diverse physical environments, making them essential for a wide range of real-world applications. However, building versatile embodied agents poses critical challenges due to three key issues: dynamic environment perception, open-ended tool usage, and complex multi-task planning. Most previous works rely solely on feedback from tool agents to perceive environmental changes and task status, which limits adaptability to real-time dynamics, causes error accumulation, and restricts tool flexibility. Furthermore, multi-task scheduling has received limited attention, primarily due to the inherent complexity of managing task dependencies and balancing competing priorities in dynamic and complex environments. To overcome these challenges, we introduce P3\mathcal P^3, a unified framework that integrates real-time perception and dynamic scheduling. Specifically, P3\mathcal P^3 enables agents to perceive task-relevant information actively from the environment, plug and utilize tools without feedback requirements, and plan multi-task execution by prioritizing urgent tasks and dynamically adjusting task order based on dependencies. Extensive real-world experiments show that our approach bridges the gap between benchmarks and practical deployment, delivering highly transferable, general-purpose embodied agents. Code and data are available at https://github.com/fz-zsl/P3.

Shengli Zhou, Xiangchen Wang, Jinrui Zhang +4

Southern University of Science and Technology · Spatialtemporal AI · MBZUAI

Robot Task PlanningEmbodied AIRobotic Perception
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Jun 13, 2025

Affogato: Open-Vocabulary Affordance Grounding with Automated Data Generation at Scale

Affordance grounding aims to localize where to interact with an object, a fundamental capability for embodied agents. Yet progress is bottlenecked by data: manual annotation is prohibitively expensive and confines existing datasets to a narrow set of predefined object and affordance categories. We introduce Affogato, a framework for open-vocabulary affordance grounding centered on Affogato-750K, a large-scale dataset of 750K 3D affordance heatmaps paired with natural language queries. We build it with a fully automated pipeline that orchestrates foundation models to generate them at scale without human labeling. It covers significantly more diverse categories than any existing dataset. For reliable evaluation, we further provide 5K human-verified test pairs. We also present Espresso-3D and Espresso-2D, simple yet effective models with a unified architecture across both modalities. Pretraining on Affogato-750K improves both Espresso and prior methods and yields the largest gains on unseen object and affordance categories, showing that it provides broadly transferable supervision across architectures.

Junha Lee, Eunha Park, Chunghyun Park +2

Pohang University of Science and Engineering (POSTECH) · SqueezeBits · RLWLRD

Synthetic Data Generation for RoboticsEmbodied AI3D Visual Grounding3D Affordance Grounding
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Aug 31, 2018

Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents

Developing visual perception models for active agents and sensorimotor control are cumbersome to be done in the physical world, as existing algorithms are too slow to efficiently learn in real-time and robots are fragile and costly. This has given rise to learning-in-simulation which consequently casts a question on whether the results transfer to real-world. In this paper, we are concerned with the problem of developing real-world perception for active agents, propose Gibson Virtual Environment for this purpose, and showcase sample perceptual tasks learned therein. Gibson is based on virtualizing real spaces, rather than using artificially designed ones, and currently includes over 1400 floor spaces from 572 full buildings. The main characteristics of Gibson are: I. being from the real-world and reflecting its semantic complexity, II. having an internal synthesis mechanism, "Goggles", enabling deploying the trained models in real-world without needing further domain adaptation, III. embodiment of agents and making them subject to constraints of physics and space.

Fei Xia, Amir Zamir, Zhi-Yang He +3

Stanford University · University of California, Berkeley

Embodied AIRobotics SimulationRobotic PerceptionSim-to-Real TransferEmbodied Agent Benchmarks
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