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.

  1. Visually-grounded Humanoid Agents

    Apr 9, 2026Hang Ye, Xiaoxuan Ma, Fan Lu +3Embodied AIHuman Avatar Animation

    Peking University · Carnegie Mellon University · Tongji University +2

  2. Harnessing Embodied Agents: Runtime Governance for Policy-Constrained Execution

    Apr 9, 2026Xue Qin, Simin Luan, John See +3Runtime Enforcement for AI AgentsAI Agent Governance

    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. +2

  3. Infrastructure First: Enabling Embodied AI for Science in the Global South

    Apr 8, 2026Shaoshan Liu, Jie Tang, Marwa S. Hassan +4AI for ScienceEmbodied AI

    Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society (AIRS), China · South China University of Technology, China · National Research Centre (NRC), Egypt +2

  4. The Biggest Risk of Embodied AI is Governance Lag

    Apr 7, 2026Shaoshan LiuAI AccountabilityAI Agent Governance

  5. Towards Next-Generation Healthcare: A Survey of Medical Embodied AI for Perception, Decision-Making, and Action

    Apr 5, 2026Cheng Zhang, Qing Cai, Xingzheng Wu +6Healthcare RoboticsEmbodied AI

    School of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, Shandong 266100, China · Innovation School of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China · School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China +4

  6. Learning Additively Compositional Latent Actions for Embodied AI

    Apr 3, 2026Hangxing Wei, Xiaoyu Chen, Chuheng Zhang +5Latent Action LearningEmbodied AI

    Wuhan University · Tsinghua University · Microsoft Research

  7. SceneTeract: Probing and Improving Agent-Aware Activity Reasoning in 3D Indoor Scenes

    Mar 31, 2026Léopold Maillard, Francis Engelmann, Tom Durand +43D Spatial ReasoningEmbodied AI

    Ecole Polytechnique · Dassault Syst`emes · Stanford University +1

  8. HeteroHub: An Applicable Data Management Framework for Heterogeneous Multi-Embodied Agent System

    Mar 30, 2026Xujia Li, Xin Li, Junquan Huang +3Multi-Agent SystemsEmbodied AI

    HKUST Hong Kong SAR, China · HKUST (GZ) GuangZhou, China · HKUST (GZ) & HKUST GuangZhou, China

  9. Safety in Embodied AI: A Survey of Risks, Attacks, and Defenses

    Mar 28, 2026Xiao Li, Xiang Zheng, Yifeng Gao +35Embodied AIAI Safety

    Fudan University · City University of Hong Kong · Jilin University +10

  10. Multi-AUV Ad-hoc Networks-Based Multi-Target Tracking Based on Scene-Adaptive Embodied Intelligence

    Mar 28, 2026Kai Tian, Jialun Wang, Chuan Lin +4Multi-Object TrackingUnderwater Robotics

    Software College, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China. · Key Laboratory of Maritime Intelligent Network Information Technology, Ministry of Education, Hohai University.

  11. The Limits of Learning from Pictures and Text: Vision-Language Models and Embodied Scene Understanding

    Mar 27, 2026Gillian Rosenberg, Skylar Stadhard, Bruce C. Hansen +1Large Vision-Language ModelsVLM Evaluation

    Barnard College, Columbia University · Colgate University

  12. StreamingClaw Technical Report

    Mar 23, 2026Jiawei Chen, Zhe Chen, Chaoqun Du +21Proactive AgentsMultimodal Agents

    Li Auto Inc.

  13. Active Inference for Physical AI Agents -- An Engineering Perspective

    Mar 21, 2026Bert de VriesActive InferenceEmbodied AI

    Department of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands

  14. Embodied Science: Closing the Discovery Loop with Agentic Embodied AI

    Mar 20, 2026Xiang Zhuang, Chenyi Zhou, Kehua Feng +10AI Agents for Scientific DiscoveryAutonomous Experimentation

    Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Shanghai, China · Tongji University, Shanghai, China

  15. Beyond the Desk: Barriers and Future Opportunities for AI to Assist Scientists in Embodied Physical Tasks

    Mar 19, 2026Irene Hou, Alexander Qin, Lauren Cheng +1AI-Assisted Scientific ResearchHuman-AI Collaboration

    UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

  16. GSMem: 3D Gaussian Splatting as Persistent Spatial Memory for Zero-Shot Embodied Exploration and Reasoning

    Mar 19, 2026Yiren Lu, Yi Du, Disheng Liu +3Long-Term Memory for Embodied AgentsEmbodied AI

    Case Western Reserve University · Spatial AI & Robotics (SAIR) Lab, University at Buffalo

  17. AgentComm-Bench: Stress-Testing Cooperative Embodied AI Under Latency, Packet Loss, and Bandwidth Collapse

    Mar 18, 2026Aayam Bansal, Ishaan GangwaniMulti-Agent CommunicationAI Agent Benchmarks

    Synthetic Sciences

  18. When Should a Robot Think? Resource-Aware Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning for Embodied Robotic Decision-Making

    Mar 17, 2026Jun Liu, Pu Zhao, Zhenglun Kong +12Embodied AIEmbodied Reasoning

    Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University · Northeastern University · Harvard University +9

  19. Resilience Meets Autonomy: Governing Embodied AI in Critical Infrastructure

    Mar 16, 2026Puneet Sharma, Christer Henrik PursiainenAI Agent GovernanceHuman Oversight of AI

    Department of Automation and Process Engineering (IAP), UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway · Department of Technology and Safety (ITS), UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway

  20. Distributed Human Identity: AI-Enabled Multi-Existence Through Cognitive Replication and Robotic Embodiments

    Mar 13, 2026A S M Touhidul Islam, John TookeyEmbodied AI

    Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

  21. Thousand-GPU Large-Scale Training and Optimization Recipe for AI-Native Cloud Embodied Intelligence Infrastructure

    Mar 11, 2026Yongjian Guo, Yunxuan Ma, Haoran Sun +22Distributed TrainingEmbodied AI

  22. PanoAffordanceNet: Towards Holistic Affordance Grounding in 360° Indoor Environments

    Mar 10, 2026Guoliang Zhu, Wanjun Jia, Caoyang Shao +3Embodied AI3D Scene Understanding

    School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University, Changsha 410012, China · National Engineering Research Center of Robot Visual Perception and Control Technology, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China

  23. The Empty Quadrant: AI Teammates for Embodied Field Learning

    Mar 4, 2026Hyein Kim, Sung ParkAI in EducationHuman-AI Collaboration

    School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Taejae University

  24. ACE-Brain-0: Spatial Intelligence as a Shared Scaffold for Universal Embodiments

    Mar 3, 2026Ziyang Gong, Zehang Luo, Anke Tang +21Embodied Spatial ReasoningEmbodied AI

    ACE Robotics · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · The University of Hong Kong +7

  25. Capability Thresholds and Manufacturing Topology: How Embodied Intelligence Triggers Phase Transitions in Economic Geography

    Mar 3, 2026Xinmin Fang, Lingfeng Tao, Zhengxiong LiManufacturingEmbodied AI

    LeTau Robotics · University of Colorado Denver · Kennesaw State University

  26. Jailbreaking Embodied LLMs via Action-level Manipulation

    Mar 2, 2026Xinyu Huang, Qiang Yang, Leming Shen +2AI Agent SecurityLLM Security

    The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China · University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

  27. Artificial Agency Program: Curiosity, compression, and communication in agents

    Feb 27, 2026Richard CsakyAgentic AIEmbodied AI

  28. AoE: Always-on Egocentric Human Video Collection for Embodied AI

    Feb 27, 2026Bowen Yang, Zishuo Li, Yang Sun +15Embodied AI

    Ant Digital Technologies, Ant Group · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Zhejiang University +2

  29. EmbodMocap: In-the-Wild 4D Human-Scene Reconstruction for Embodied Agents

    Feb 26, 2026Wenjia Wang, Liang Pan, Huaijin Pi +83D Human ReconstructionEmbodied AI

    The University of Hong Kong · Tampere University · The Chinese University of Hong Kong +1

  30. CWM: Contrastive World Models for Action Feasibility Learning in Embodied Agent Pipelines

    Feb 25, 2026Chayan BanerjeeEmbodied AIContrastive Learning

    School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics, Queensland University of Technology (QUT).