Robot Foundation Models

Follow this topic Ask about this topic

Momentum

18 papers in the last four weeks, up 350% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 86

Oct 8, 2026cs.RO

ARC: A Reasoning Recipe for Robot Foundation Models

The prevailing approach to improving robot foundation models (RFMs) relies on larger models, more robot demonstrations, and costly training at scale. We show that there exists an effective and efficient complementary approach: the right reasoning recipe can substantially improve the zero-shot task performance of existing state-of-the-art RFMs. We refer to this recipe as ARC. It consists of three key ingredients: a reasoning trace, a scalable automatic labeling pipeline, and a strategy for adapting pretrained RFMs to use these traces for control. First, we find that effective reasoning traces should be grounded in the robot's next action and explain its causal structure: why the action is appropriate and what effect it should produce. Second, we show that these traces can be generated automatically from existing demonstrations, enabling us to construct ARC-Trace-DROID from DROID without collecting new robot data. Third, we show how state-of-the-art VLAs such as

π_{0.5}

and WAMs such as Cosmos3-Nano-Policy can learn to use these traces for control, with fine-tuning and inference tailored to each model's architecture and capabilities. Using ARC, we obtain gains in zero-shot RFM performance that, to our knowledge, are unprecedented without additional robot demonstrations or foundation-scale training. The adapted models establish a new state of the art on RoboLab-120 and MolmoSpaces, with gains of up to 50 percentage points on RoboLab-Reasoning-50. On real robots, ARC improves

π_{0.5}

's task success by 82.2 percentage points. Project website: https://arc-robot-reasoning.github.io/

Gokul Puthumanaillam, Tao Sun, Elie Aljalbout +5

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · NVIDIA · Stanford University +2

Robot Foundation Models Reasoning for VLA Models Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation

Oct 7, 2026cs.RO

Cross-Embodiment Robot Foundation World Models with Latent Actions

The diversity of robot embodiments and action spaces makes it challenging to build robot world models that generalize across different embodiments. We introduce the Latent Action-Conditioned Robot World Model (LAC-WM), which operates within a learned unified latent action space shared across diverse embodiments. This unified action space improves the world model's performance when adapted to previously unseen robot embodiments. We compare LAC-WM with an Explicit Action-Conditioned World Model (EAC-WM), which conditions on explicit motion labels. Our results show that explicit action conditioning leads to disjoint action representations across embodiments, limiting downstream performance when adapting to new robots. We evaluate both models on dexterous manipulation tasks and a modified LIBERO benchmark. LAC-WM improves downstream performance over EAC-WM by up to 46.7% on dexterous manipulation and 11.7% on LIBERO. Crucially, the unified latent action space allows LAC-WM's downstream performance to scale positively with the number of embodiments used during pretraining. In contrast, the disjoint action space in EAC-WM leads to decreased performance as the number of pretraining embodiments increases. These results highlight the importance of a unified action space for efficient cross-embodiment learning, addressing a key challenge in robotics. Project website: https://lacwm.github.io/

Huang Huang, Sriram Yenamandra, Arjun Majumdar +9

Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, US · Work partially done while at Meta FAIR Robotics.

World Models for Robotics Action-Conditioned World Models Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning Robot Foundation Models Latent Action Learning

Oct 7, 2026cs.AI

EmbodiedRSI: Active Continual Robot Learning Through Hypothesis-Guided Co-Evolution

Robot foundation models provide strong visuomotor control, yet their performance can degrade when object positions or task instructions change. Further improvements often require post-training on substantial robot data, which can be costly to collect through methods such as teleoperation. Agentic harnesses can adapt around the model, but current self-evolving harnesses use robot trials inefficiently when deciding which code and skill changes to pursue. We introduce EmbodiedRSI, a self-evolving agentic harness that autonomously decides where to explore next and turns the resulting physical interaction into improved code and skills. EmbodiedRSI realizes this through a Fast-Slow Dual-System Architecture, in which competing code and skill hypotheses are maintained in a Hypothesis Graph. Value-of-Information Experiment Selection chooses physical experiments that can distinguish these hypotheses. Their outcomes guide Code-Skill Co-Evolution. The Slow System builds Hierarchical Memory, and Reward-Grounded Memory Learning selects effective memory according to their value for later Fast-System improvement. On RoboCasa365, EmbodiedRSI reaches 77.0% overall success and 71.3% on Composite-Unseen, compared with 40.1% for the best baseline. EmbodiedRSI also reaches 86.8% overall success on LIBERO-Pro. Beyond benchmark performance, EmbodiedRSI transfers zero-shot to real-world robot, achieving 71.3% overall success across multiple challenging tasks.

Python Song, Zhixuan Liang, Kelsey Fu +3

Columbia University · Princeton University

Continual Robot Learning Robot Skill Learning Self-Evolving Agents Active Learning Robot Foundation Models

Oct 7, 2026cs.RO

RoboQuest: Generalist Physical Agents that Search, Inspect and Test

Recent advances in multimodal foundation models have made them capable generalist physical agents for a range of manipulation tasks. However, successful operation in an unfamiliar environment may require an agent to seek task-relevant information through interaction when it is absent from the observations: it may need to determine where a relevant object is, inspect an unobserved property, or discover the effect of an unfamiliar tool. We thus introduce RoboQuest, a benchmark for goal-directed embodied exploration, where agents must actively acquire task-relevant information through physical interaction, use the resulting evidence to adapt subsequent actions, and autonomously decide when to commit to task completion. RoboQuest comprises ten mobile manipulation tasks centered on three forms of uncertainty: search, manipulation-based inspection, and interactive testing. We evaluate five frontier multimodal agents through a common visuomotor interface, as well as a

π_{0.5}

policy fine-tuned on the full-episode demonstrations we release. The best agent succeeds in only 23% of the episodes, and the fine-tuned policy almost never succeeds. Isolated tests of the execution skills the tasks are built from, with the hidden information supplied, show that the agents can carry out most of the required actions, and our failure analysis attributes only a minority of the failures to execution. Our failure analysis further finds that the agents often stop exploring too early as they make decisions before observing the required evidence for task completion. We also find that agents rarely prevent or repair the disturbances caused by their exploration. Moreover, learning by trial and error remains difficult for most models.

Liu Renhang, Navonil Majumder, Tej Deep Pala +1

Nanyang Technological University

Robot Manipulation Benchmarks Multimodal Agents Mobile Manipulation Robot Foundation Models

Oct 6, 2026cs.CV

EmbodiedSmith: Scaling Embodied Data through Recursive Self-Improvement Flywheel in Simulation

Scaling robotic foundation models requires diverse training data and reliable evaluation environments. Simulation offers a scalable solution, yet existing generation pipelines remain constrained by predefined assets and skills, a disconnect between scene generation and task generation, and limited support for complex embodiments and physics. We introduce EmbodiedSmith, a framework for scalable embodied data generation through recursive self-improvement (RSI). EmbodiedSmith unifies asset, scene, and task generation in a pipeline that supports autonomous creation and language-driven customization. Its core is an agentic refinement loop: scene generation anticipates downstream task requirements, while task generation guides targeted scene edits, allowing scenes and tasks to iteratively improve one another. This joint refinement improves task generation success, including for long-horizon tasks. The framework further supports mobile manipulators, humanoids, and dexterous hands, as well as interactions involving deformable objects and fluids, broadening the range of behaviors and physical phenomena represented in generated data. Together, these capabilities provide a flexible simulation engine for both robot pretraining and evaluation. Extensive experiments validate the quality, diversity, and generation efficiency of the resulting data, while downstream policy experiments demonstrate that increased data diversity improves generalization.

Yikai Qin, Yifei Deng, Mingjian Liang +13

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Xiaomi Robotics · Southeastern University +7

Robot Foundation Models Robotics Simulation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Functional 3D Scene Generation

Oct 4, 2026cs.RO

Vela: Scaling Vision-Language-Action Models with Adaptive Action Curve Parametrization

Most vision-language-action models represent future motion as fixed-rate action chunks, tying temporal resolution and prediction horizon to a fixed output budget. This pointwise representation wastes capacity on highly correlated neighboring actions, leaves temporal continuity and smoothness to be learned implicitly, and forces a tradeoff between long-horizon coverage and the local precision required for contact-rich manipulation. To address these limitations, we introduce Vela, a vision-language-action foundation model that represents future robot behavior as continuous trajectories. Vela combines a compact spline-based action representation with motion-dependent temporal support and a shared action interface for heterogeneous embodiments, allowing a fixed output budget to adapt its temporal resolution across motions. We pretrain Vela on large-scale multi-embodiment robot data and evaluate it on LIBERO-X, EBench, and two real-world long-horizon tasks, egg-cake cooking and potato shredding, obtaining promising results across simulation and physical manipulation. These results highlight the potential of continuous action representations as a foundation for future embodied foundation models. Project page and more results: https://clementine24.github.io/Vela/ .

Yifan Li, Jiaxu Wang, Dongming Wu +4

Fudan University · Shanghai Innovation Institute · The Chinese University of Hong Kong +1

Robot Foundation Models Robotics Robotic Manipulation Vision-Language-Action Models

Oct 1, 2026cs.RO

Kinematic MeanFlow: One-Step Action Generation Policy for Robotic Foundation Models

In this paper, we study how to achieve one-step action generation in Robotic Foundation Models (RFMs), aiming to overcome the high inference latency of multi-step flow matching. MeanFlow provides a promising framework for this goal, yet its direct application leads to performance collapse. We discover that this stems from two distinctive dynamics exhibited in the RFM velocity field: (1) the ``local acceleration" exhibits stability early on, but surges sharply towards the end of the denoising process, and (2) the spread of its magnitudes across samples widens as denoising progresses. To address these issues, we introduce Kinematic MeanFlow (K-MF), a novel one-step action policy tailored for RFMs. Specifically, grounded in a kinematic identity, K-MF decouples the time derivative term in the MeanFlow formulation into two sub-interval terms separated by an intermediate point. This decoupled formulation enables the two terms to capture early-stage and late-stage denoising dynamics, respectively, while mitigating the error amplification across the process. As a result, our K-MF empowers RFMs to achieve one-step action generation in both training from scratch and fine-tuning paradigms across diverse tasks, while outperforming multi-step flow matching in most settings. In terms of inference efficiency, K-MF reduces action-head latency of GR00T-N1.6 by 67.5%~74.4% across L40 and Jetson Orin in eager and compiled modes, yielding end-to-end latency reductions of 30.3%~54.9%. Code will be available at https://github.com/IntelChina-AI/K-MF.

Jiawei Fan, Sifeng Wang, Yuqing Hou +1

Intel Labs China · Midea AI Research

Flow Matching Robot Foundation Models MeanFlow Efficient VLA Model Inference Robot Motion Generation Flow-Based Generative Modeling

Sep 30, 2026cs.RO

Magic-W0: A Structured World-Action Foundation Model for Physical Intelligence

World-action models (WAMs) augment robot policies with action-conditioned environment dynamics, yet existing approaches largely rely on future observation reconstruction or generic latent prediction and lack structured, control-oriented world representations tightly coupled with action generation. We introduce Magic-W0, a world-action foundation model that jointly models structured physical state evolution and continuous actions. Magic-W0 represents interaction as a Structured World Transition consisting of Current State, Transition, and Future State. Current State combines vision-language context with Current 3D Geometry; Transition is represented by 3D Motion capturing action-induced three-dimensional changes; and Future State is represented by Future Semantics describing task-relevant outcomes. To couple prediction and control, we propose a layer-aligned world-action interaction architecture in which evolving action hypotheses condition world-transition prediction, while predicted world representations continuously inform action generation. Magic-W0 is pre-trained on large-scale egocentric human manipulation, UMI, real-robot, and simulation data, with latent supervision for geometry, 3D motion, and future semantics from pre-trained visual models. Inference-time interventions show that structured world representations respond systematically to changes in candidate actions and that action-related information propagates through shared 3D representations into future semantic predictions. On RoboDojo-Sim, Magic-W0 achieves an average Score of 27.10, the highest among the compared WAMs. Across multiple real-robot tasks, it also demonstrates strong downstream performance after fine-tuning with limited downstream data, supporting generalization and rapid adaptation.

Xuhua Chen, Zhenhan Yin, Yuan Zhang +15

Magic-Lab Team, Magiclab Robotics Inc.

Robot Foundation Models Action-Conditioned World Models Robotic Manipulation World Action Models Motion Representation Learning

Sep 29, 2026cs.RO

Systematically Exploring the Capabilities of GPT-6 Astra as Embodied Policies

GPT-6 Astra exhibits a remarkable ability to generate numerical robot actions, extending its role beyond high-level planning. To assess Astra's capabilities as general-purpose embodied policies, we conduct comprehensive evaluations across six domains, examining direct control, cooperation with learned policies, and feedback-driven adaptation. In gripper manipulation, Astra can correct task targets and prepare contact conditions for subsequent policy execution; hybrid control with π0.5 achieves 48% success on the evaluated RoboDojo subset. In dexterous manipulation, hybrid control achieves 50% success in ten experience-guided DexJoCo trials, while direct in-hand control struggles to coordinate finger contacts. In mobile manipulation, hybrid control reaches 38.7% success on the evaluated RoboCasa365. In navigation, Astra leads our local comparisons, reaching 92% success on RxR instruction following and 82% on HM3D object search, although search incurs substantial detours. In locomotion, dense motion-reference generation remains unreliable: none of five sequential attempts on a single obstacle course reaches the goal, despite improvements in stability and forward progress. In humanoid loco-manipulation, Astra exceeds baseline methods on 13 of 30 HumanoidBench tasks with pretrained whole-body controllers. These findings reveal a gap between useful task decisions and reliable physical control. Inference latency further constrains practical control: across 50 RoboDojo instances per condition, policy-assisted and direct control consume 624.8 million and 1.132 billion tokens. A 30-second locomotion run requires 250 model calls averaging 39.86 seconds each, with physics paused during inference.

Galbot Team, Xuchuan Chen, Xiaoqian Cheng +31

Galbot Team

Language Model-Based Control Robot Foundation Models Robot Navigation Robotic Policy Evaluation Robotic Manipulation Robot Locomotion

Sep 29, 2026cs.RO

Rho: A Foundation for Efficiently Adaptable VLA Models

General-purpose physical AI models must combine broad visual and linguistic capabilities with precise control across robot embodiments and efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. We introduce Rho, a family of open-weights VLA models for bimanual manipulation designed for data-light task adaptation on 3 embodiments representative of dual-arm robots across research labs and the industry -- YAM Box, UR AI Trainer, and FR3 Duo. We systematically ablate Rho's action-expert architecture and training recipe, and show in controlled simulation and physical-robot experiments that embodiment midtraining improves downstream adaptation. The resulting Rho variants for YAM Box, UR AI Trainer, and FR3 Duo match or outperform existing open-weights VLAs and achieve the strongest overall performance across the tasks, embodiments, and baselines evaluated in this report. We further demonstrate the Rho model family's built-in capacity for online adaptation: an internal latent policy learns from corrective feedback to select observation-conditioned noise inputs for the frozen flow-matching action expert. With as few as 15 corrected episodes, adapting this lightweight module enables Rho to handle task situations at the fringe of its offline finetuning distribution. Together, these results position Rho as both a strong general-purpose robotic manipulation model and a practical foundation for adaptation. We release the base Rho model and the embodiment-specific checkpoints to facilitate Rho's deployment in research experiments and practical industrial use cases.

Rho Team, Simran Bagaria, Daphne Chen +11

Microsoft Research

Robot Policy Adaptation Bimanual Robotic Manipulation Robot Foundation Models Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning Data-Efficient Robot Learning Vision-Language-Action Models+1

Sep 29, 2026cs.RO

CrossBFM: Distilling a Shared Latent Behavior Space Across Humanoid Embodiments

Behavior Foundation Models (BFMs) give humanoids a promptable policy over a latent behavior space, enabling one single vector to represent a motion to imitate, a pose to reach, or a reward to maximize. Forward-Backward representations successfully produce such spaces, but at the cost of hundreds of GPU-hours for a single robot. Moreover, when the training process is repeated for a second robot, it produces a second space unrelated to the first, resulting in embodiment-specific latents that do not unify or transfer. We address these problems with CrossBFM, treating the latent space as the transferable asset for various embodiments. As retargeting provides frame-level cross-embodiment correspondence, we propose a unified encoder architecture with no robot-specific parameters for distilling the behavior space to address all training embodiments simultaneously in less than a GPU-hour. Following this encoder, latent-conditioned trackers turn the distilled latent into whole-body control in a conventional PPO training manner in just 10 more GPU-hours. On three distilled humanoids, all three prompting modes transfer: motion tracking with latent-conditioned policy losing only

0.025

rad to its joint-conditioned counterpart, smooth goal reaching between poses with no falls, and reward optimization for all

41

reward prompts. Our experiments further reveal that 1) regressing the encoder on a quarter of the motion corpus costs only

5\%

of tracking performance and 2) training the encoder on a subset of robots and evaluating on an unseen one recovers up to

89\%

of the tracking performance of seen robots, demonstrating cross-embodiment generalization to morphologically similar robots. We also verify the pipeline on real robots across all three prompting modes and with flow-based generated latents. Project website: https://dotandung.github.io/crossbfm/

Tan-Dzung Do, Tuan Dat Phuong, Nico Bohlinger +6

VinRobotics · National University of Singapore · TU Darmstadt +3

Robot Foundation Models Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning Motion Representation Learning Knowledge Distillation Cross-Embodiment Transfer

Sep 29, 2026cs.RO

FP2: Equipping Robotic Foundation Models with Force Control

Robotic foundation models (RFMs) are increasingly capable of general-purpose manipulation, yet reliable physical interaction remains challenging in contact-rich settings. We present FP2, a lightweight downstream interface that equips task-adapted RFMs with explicit force control while preserving their action-generation capability. FP2 adopts an action-regulation decomposition: the task-adapted RFM serves as a foundation policy responsible for task-level action generation, while a high-frequency force control policy focuses solely on interaction regulation. To condition force regulation on the ongoing manipulation, FP2 compresses foundation-policy contextual representations and combines them with wrench and proprioceptive histories to predict structured force-control parameters. We evaluate FP2 with four RFM backbones across four real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks. FP2 consistently improves task performance and force regulation quality over the corresponding foundation policies, while comparing favorably with representative force-aware and force-control baselines. Ablations further show that foundation-policy context and physical feedback are complementary for effective force regulation, while preserving foundation-policy action generation improves both efficiency and novel-object generalization. Project website: http://force-policy.github.io/fp2

Hongjie Fang, Shirun Tang, Junjian Hu +8

FORTE Lab. · Noematrix. · SJTU. +7

Robotic Control Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Robot Foundation Models Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

Sep 23, 2026cs.RO

CoRe-WAM: Correspondence-Aligned Temporal Residuals for World Action Models

Comparing current and past observations helps robots understand scene changes and select subsequent actions during manipulation. However, comparing visual features at the same image location can mix different scene content when objects or the camera move. We introduce CoRe-WAM, a world-action model that incorporates correspondence-aligned visual changes through a parameter-efficient temporal interface. Its TraceDelta module uses correspondences from a frozen tracking model to transport historical visual features to current locations before computing signed differences in a shared pretrained feature space. Correspondence thus determines which historical content is compared with the present, rather than entering the policy as a separate trajectory representation. A lightweight adapter converts these differences into validity-gated residuals that supplement current visual conditioning, allowing the policy to use recent changes alongside current-scene information. Built on Motus, CoRe-WAM keeps the pretrained backbone weights frozen and optimizes 1.59 million parameters. With a 5,000-update adaptation budget, CoRe-WAM achieves 92.22% clean success across 50 RoboTwin 2.0 tasks, 3.56 percentage points above Motus; on randomized evaluation, it achieves 89.60% success, a 2.58-point gain. Integrating TraceDelta into a StarVLA-based policy improves clean success from 58.10% to 67.62%, supporting transfer of the temporal interface beyond Motus.

Bin Zhou, Jialong Liu, Jianan Wang +2

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China. · Astribot, China. · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.

World Action Models Robotic Manipulation Robot Foundation Models Robotic Perception

Sep 22, 2026cs.RO

Deploying Foundation Models for Embodied Navigation

We present and tackle two problems associated with deploying Foundation Models (FMs) on Embodied Agents performing navigation: 1) Training bias in FMs leading to poor personalization in unseen environments, and 2) Limited FM context length hindering success, especially on long horizon tasks. Our solution for the former involves priming the FM with human-habit data mined from the scene and our solution for the latter involves active memory management via a novel `memory head' augmentation. We first present a taxonomy of existing literature on FM-based Embodied Navigation, and highlight these limitations. We then present our approaches, Transit-Aware Planning (TAP) and MemCtrl to address the limitations. With TAP, we present real-world results in a lab environment with a Turtlebot for personalized target finding that shows an average improvement of 18% over a non-TAP baseline. On MemCtrl, we report a 6% average improvement across various embodied tasks, with 20% on long instruction subsets, all while using nearly half the context used in the baseline model. Motivated by these result, we present our stance the deployability of FM-based embodied agents in real-world environments, and highlight open research directions.

Vishnu Sashank Dorbala, Dinesh Manocha

University of Maryland, College Park

Embodied Navigation Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Robot Foundation Models LLM Context Management Memory-Augmented Agents

Sep 22, 2026cs.RO

MachEmbodied-U0: Unified Understanding and Generation Model for Embodied Intelligence

General-purpose robot control requires models to understand task intent, identify where to interact, capture how the scene evolves, and generate precise actions. Vision-language-action models provide strong semantic priors but typically do not explicitly model scene dynamics, while world-action models couple visual prediction with control without necessarily exposing the task-relevant semantic and spatial structure needed for fine-grained manipulation. We present MachEmbodied-U0 (ME-U0), a unified embodied foundation model connecting understanding and generation experts through a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture. Subtask prediction and affordance grounding guide joint visual-dynamics and action generation via flow matching. Visual dynamics encompass future RGB, depth, surface normals, and optical flow, providing complementary supervision for appearance, geometry, and motion. Multi-rate Rotary Position Encoding (MRPE) aligns visual dynamics with fine-grained control. We pretrain ME-U0 on approximately 4,200 hours of curated demonstrations from robotic datasets and egocentric datasets. Using only the supervision natively available in each downstream benchmark, ME-U0 achieves an average score of 17.66 on the RoboDojo simulation benchmark and average success rates of 99.0% and 82.5% on LIBERO and LIBERO-Plus, respectively. We additionally validate ME-U0 on real-world robotic manipulation tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness beyond simulation. Without corresponding downstream supervision, ME-U0 further demonstrates zero-shot subtask prediction, affordance grounding, and visual dynamics on simulated and real-world observations. Overall, ME-U0 combines competitive downstream control performance with transferable task-grounding and visual-dynamics capabilities across simulation and the real world.

Haoran Wen, Wenfu Wang, Kunsong Shi +15

Foundation Model, Li Auto Inc.

World Models for Robotics Robot Foundation Models Robotic Manipulation Vision-Based Robot Control

Sep 21, 2026cs.RO

LIBERO-VPro: Benchmarking Closed-Loop Visual Robustness of Robotic Foundation Models

Robotic foundation models achieve impressive performance on standard manipulation benchmarks, yet these evaluations typically assume clean, timely, and consistent visual observations throughout execution. We introduce LIBERO-VPro, a benchmark for systematically evaluating the closed-loop visual robustness of robotic foundation models by perturbing the visual evidence available during execution. LIBERO-VPro covers four complementary dimensions, including Visual Evidence Degradation, Camera Staleness, Visual Source Consistency, and Task-Relevant Scene Variation, spanning 12 challenge categories, 96 experimental settings, and 3,296 task-condition cases. We evaluate three vision-language-action models and three world-action models over approximately 196,000 simulated episodes, complemented by 200 real-world rollouts on a Franka Research 3. Our results reveal that strong nominal performance can mask substantial weaknesses in visual grounding and adaptation. Models often remain successful despite severe object-level occlusion, yet degrade sharply when local interaction cues are disrupted or familiar spatial priors are violated. They are also highly sensitive to stale or missing observations and struggle when changed task preconditions require behavioral adaptation. Finally, VLAs and WAMs exhibit distinct robustness profiles, showing that visual robustness is multi-dimensional and architecture-dependent. LIBERO-VPro provides a systematic diagnostic framework for developing robotic foundation models that can more reliably ground and adapt their actions under challenging visual conditions.

Huiqiong Li, Zhiting Mei, Anirudha Majumdar +3

Singapore Management University · Princeton University · Fudan University

World Models for Robotics Robot Foundation Models Robot Manipulation Benchmarks Robustness of VLA Models

Sep 20, 2026cs.RO

Grounded Action Model: 3D Grounding as a Foundation for Robotics

Manipulation policies must know which objects matter and where they are, yet the pretrained backbones that current robot foundation models build on, from language in vision-language-action models (VLAs) to video generation in world-action models (WAMs), do not directly require this metric grounding, leaving it to be learned implicitly from robot demonstrations. We propose Grounded Action Models (GAMs), a new paradigm of robot foundation models built with 3D grounding. GAM can be conditioned using language, points, or box prompts, which are first transformed into a shared object-centric representation of the selected objects. This representation captures target-focused visual features and metric object geometry, which is mixed with robot state history through a multi-stream transformer to predict action chunks. Although GAMs can be run autonomously, they can also serve as a low-level controller that a high-level planner controls using its various input modalities, allowing for long-horizon and memory-dependent manipulation. On RoboTwin 2.0, GAM achieves an average success rate of 55.3% across 50 tasks (vs. 52.0% for Spatial Forcing), including 47.6% under scene randomization (vs. 30.4% for Abot-M0), with its action policy trained only on clean-scene demonstrations. On LIBERO-PRO, it achieves a state-of-the-art average success rate of 61% (vs. 53% for

π_{0.5}

) across 16 perturbation settings, with the largest gains when targets are relocated or newly designated. On two real robots, GAM retains 17/20 successes under visual shift on a bimanual YAM versus 4/20 for

π_{0.5}

, while its composition with a Molmo2 planner on a Franka achieves 64.7% ID and 49.8% OOD step completion on long-horizon and memory-dependent tasks.

Gehao Zhang, Weikai Huang, Shailesh Shailesh +3

Northwestern University · University of Washington · National University of Singapore +1

Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation Language-Conditioned Robot Manipulation Robot Foundation Models Generalization in Robotic Manipulation 3D Visual Grounding

Sep 17, 2026cs.RO

EmbodiedMind: Adaptive Data Curation and Prefix-Tree Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Embodied Intelligence

Training embodied foundation models typically requires massive-scale datasets and extensive computational resources, yet often suffers from three critical limitations: (1) inefficient sample utilization due to low-informative samples; (2) imbalanced gradient contributions across heterogeneous tasks; and (3) severe credit assignment problem in long-horizon planning, where trajectory-level rewards indiscriminately penalize all tokens. To address these issues, we propose an efficient training paradigm that achieves state-of-the-art average performance through strategic data selection and hierarchical policy optimization. Our approach consists of three synergistic stages. First, Rejection Sampling-based Fine-Tuning (RSFT) filters out low-informative samples to establish robust behavioral priors while preventing distributional collapse. Second, Iterative Rejection GRPO (IR-GRPO) employs task-specific queues stratified by difficulty to keep datasets balanced across reinforcement learning iterations, coupled with a hybrid reward mechanism for precise cross-task feedback. Third, to enhance long-horizon task planning, we introduce Trie-GRPO, a novel reinforcement learning algorithm based on action prefix trees, which enables step-level advantage estimation. This resolves the credit assignment problem by isolating intermediate correct decisions from downstream errors, while effectively balancing exploration efficiency and depth compared to conventional search trees. As a result, EmbodiedMind achieves a state-of-the-art average performance of 70.02% across 18 benchmarks, and significantly outperforms other embodied foundation models in long-horizon task planning accuracy. Our project will be released for reproducibility.

Feifan Wang, Zongbing Zhang, Yu Zhang +8

ZTE Corporation, Shenzhen, China

Reinforcement Learning Robot Foundation Models Credit Assignment in RL Robotic RL Robot Task Planning RL Fine-Tuning

Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

A Comprehensive Review of Generative Physical Artificial Intelligence

The integration of large-scale foundation models with physical embodiments has led to significant advancements in robotics known as Generative Physical Artificial Intelligence (GPAI). These agentic AI systems autonomously perceive, reason, and act in complex real-world situations. This survey comprehensively analyzes GPAI systems, focusing on their architectural foundations, current applications, and key limitations. We introduce a taxonomy of five distinct approaches: Robot Foundation Models (RFMs) for cross-platform skill transfer; Vision-Language Action (VLA) models for end-to-end multi-modal perception and control; Large Behavior Models (LBMs) for human-like movement generation; Diffusion Policy Models (DPMs) for diffusion model-based temporally coherent action generation; and World Foundation Models (WFMs) for physics-compliant simulation and data generation. We examine how these approaches complement each other: WFMs generate training data for VLAs and DPMs, RFMs enable cross-platform deployment of learned policies, while LBMs provide motion priors for natural behavior. Through examples across autonomous vehicles, industrial automation, healthcare robotics, and humanoid systems, we identify significant performance improvements and summarize promising research directions in data-efficient learning, sim-to-real transfer, edge-compatible architectures, and safety frameworks. These insights advance embodied AI for IoT-connected environments where intelligent agents interact with networked sensors, actuators, and edge devices.

Satyam Gaba, Krutiksinh Rana, Siva Sai +2

Qualcomm Research, San Diego, USA · University of the Cumberlands, KY, USA · Department of Electronics and Instrumentation, BITS-Pilani, Goa Campus, India +3

Robot Foundation Models Diffusion Policy Embodied AI VLMs for Robotics Embodied World Models

Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

X-WBC: A Cross-Embodiment Foundation Model for Humanoid Whole-Body Control

Scaling humanoid whole-body control toward general-purpose deployment requires large human motion corpora and training experience shared across robot bodies. Existing methods usually train one policy per robot, leaving motion experience isolated across embodiments. We introduce X-WBC, a cross-embodiment foundation framework that separates relatively shared human motion semantics from embodiment-specific physical execution. Human-centered command tokens align full human motion, robot reference motion, and sparse VR observations. A causal Transformer learns reusable temporal structure from mixed multi-robot rollouts, while lightweight robot-specific modules map the shared representation to each robot's proprioception and action space. Across nine simulated embodiments, external motions, and four real robots, experiments show that joint training improves tracking, the aligned representation supports consistent control across command sources, and the learned policy remains competitive beyond the training corpus. These results support heterogeneous humanoids as joint data sources and establish cross-embodiment joint training as a practical route toward whole-body control foundation models.

Juntong Zhang, Chun Gu, Li Zhang

Tongji University · Shanghai Innovation Institute · School of Data Science, Fudan University

Robot Foundation Models Humanoid Robot Control Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning Humanoid Motion Tracking Motion Representation Learning

Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

Breaking the Vision-Action Shortcut: Latent Interface Training for Generalizable Robotics Foundation Models

Robot foundation models achieve strong in-distribution performance but often degrade under visual distribution shifts. When learning to generate actions from pretrained visual representations, models may exploit task-irrelevant visual cues that correlate with demonstrated actions within the training distribution. Such vision-action shortcuts can undermine generalization when these correlations change under distribution shifts. Mitigating these shortcuts requires constraining how visual information is used for action generation while preserving task-relevant spatial information. We propose Latent Interface Training (LIT), a framework-agnostic two-stage strategy that first establishes a spatial-goal-conditioned action prior without images, then constrains visual conditioning through a pose-supervised latent interface. Stage 1 trains the action expert to generate action chunks conditioned on language, robot state, and each demonstrated chunk's terminal SE(3) end-effector pose, learning goal-directed action generation independently of visual cues. Stage 2 introduces a latent interface that aggregates visual and semantic representations and serves as the pretrained action expert's only visual conditioning pathway. The interface is supervised to reconstruct the terminal pose previously used to condition Stage 1, encouraging it to retain the goal-relevant spatial information needed for action generation. Across four vision-language-action and world-action architectures (Pi0.5, MolmoAct2, FAST-WAM, and ImageWAM), LIT improves overall LIBERO-Plus success by 3.87-10.70 percentage points while preserving or improving average LIBERO success. Real-world evaluations show 13.30-16.70 percentage-point gains in success aggregated across three tasks under unseen camera configurations, lighting variations, and distractors.

Jianman Lin, Shailesh Shailesh, Zhongyi Luo +1

School of Future Technology, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China · National University of Singapore, Singapore · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Robot Foundation Models Vision-Language-Action Models Robustness of VLA Models Robot Learning

Sep 10, 2026cs.RO

ActSafeGuard: Differentiable and Training-Aligned Constraint Enforcement for Flow-Matching Policies

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) and World-Action Models (WAMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in general-purpose robotic manipulation, yet their generated actions may violate hard physical constraints and therefore be unsafe or infeasible for deployment. Existing safety approaches either optimize statistical safety objectives without deterministic per-step guarantees or correct unsafe actions only during inference, creating a mismatch between policy training and execution. We introduce ActSafeGuard, a differentiable and training-aligned safeguard layer for flow-matching based policies. ActSafeGuard integrates hard action feasibility into policy learning, not merely treating safety as an inference-time external component. Through an analytical ray-scaling operator design, ActSafeGuard enables boundary-aware gradients to guide the model to naturally learn constrained manifolds. Extensive experiments on multiple standard foundation backbones (

π_{0.5}

and Fast-WAM) across various tasks demonstrate that ActSafeGuard consistently achieves a

100\%

step safety rate while fully preserving or even boosting task success rates, providing a scalable and minimally invasive solution for safe embodied AI deployment.

Jianming Ma, Rongjun Jin, Xiaxi Si +3

1Shanghai Jiao Tong University · 2Shanghai Innovation Institute

Robotic Control Robot Foundation Models Robot Safety Vision-Language-Action Models

Sep 8, 2026cs.RO

Proxy Policy Steering

Generalist robot policies carry broad manipulation priors from large-scale data, but specializing them to a new task remains the deployment bottleneck. This requires eliciting task-specific behavior from limited demonstrations without degrading their broad capabilities. We introduce Proxy Policy Steering (PPS), an inference-time adaptation method that resolves this challenge by training two lightweight proxy policies whose calibrated velocity-space difference steers the frozen base sampler. A reference proxy models the frozen base's behavior on target-task observations, and a task proxy, initialized from the reference, captures how this behavior changes under task supervision. Their difference forms a calibrated velocity-space residual that steers the frozen base sampler at every denoising step. We identify the conditions under which this residual isolates the change induced by task supervision, and validate them empirically. Because the base is never directly modified, its broad capabilities remain available at inference, including behaviors such as recovery from failure that the demonstrations themselves do not exercise. Adaptation requires only forward velocity predictions from the base, making PPS lightweight to train and applicable even without access to the base's parameters. On 8 real-world and 4 simulation manipulation tasks, PPS lifts the state-of-the-art pi 0.5 base policy by 53% absolute success rate on average, with zero-to-one gains on tasks the base never solves, while preserving the base's broad capabilities. PPS outperforms LoRA fine-tuning, from-scratch specialists, residual policies, and prior inference-time steering methods.

Chuanruo Ning, Tianrui Wang, Wei-Chiu Ma +1

Cornell University

Robot Policy Adaptation Robot Foundation Models Robotic Manipulation Robot Imitation Learning Policy Learning

Sep 1, 2026cs.RO

Facet-0: A Robotic Foundation Model for Contact-Rich Precise Manipulation

Real-world robotic assembly at sub-millimeter tolerances demands spatial precision, compliant interaction, and robustness to contact failures. We present Facet-0, a robotic foundation model that predicts and values the contact consequences of its actions. Facet-0 unifies multimodal representation learning and reinforcement learning (RL) post-training around a joint action-wrench proposal: a causal wrench history is aligned with vision-language semantics and kinematic state, and flow matching generates each action chunk together with the future wrist-wrench profile it is expected to induce. Deployment rollouts train a distributional Action-Wrench Critic to distinguish motions with similar task progress but different contact outcomes, while phase-aware rewards and contact-selective credit concentrate policy improvement on decisive interactions. To accommodate part-specific dynamics, a lightweight bounded actor reuses the frozen representation for on-robot adaptation; RL remains defined over executable Cartesian actions, while an auxiliary wrench head preserves predictive, non-commanded action-contact coupling. Trained on ManuFacet-1K, a 1,000-hour force-synchronized corpus spanning three embodiments and multiple manufacturing cells, the bounded task-adapted system reaches 82% mean success on five sub-millimeter computer-assembly tasks, compared with 15% for the strongest baseline, with 0.5 mm placement accuracy and 50 ms command latency.

Haoyuan Deng, Haichao Liu, Wenkai Guo +6

1PINE Lab, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Robot Skill Learning Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Robot Foundation Models Robotic RL Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Dynamic Robotic Manipulation+1

Aug 31, 2026cs.AI

Scaffolding Foundation Models into Physical-World Agents Pushes the Frontier of Long-Horizon Navigation

Long-horizon physical-world agents must reason over distant goals while grounding decisions in reliable closed-loop behavior. Today's foundation models split these capabilities: vision-language models (VLMs) infer missing information and adapt high-level plans but remain brittle and inefficient at repeated navigation grounding, while navigation foundation models (NFMs) robustly execute semantic goals but operate as bounded episodes without persistent task-level reasoning. We introduce NavMCP, an agentic scaffolding framework that couples a VLM reasoning agent with an NFM executor for long-horizon exploration. The VLM decides what evidence to seek, where to search, and when to stop, while the NFM grounds each semantic sub-goal into closed-loop navigation. Three channels structure their collaboration: intent translates evidence needs into navigation calls, observation converts rollouts into source-grounded trajectory evidence, and memory accumulates findings, negative evidence, and unresolved goals across calls. This design turns isolated navigation rollouts into persistent embodied interaction without retraining either model. On Embodied Question Answering, NavMCP achieves state-of-the-art results on HM-EQA, MT-HM3D, and EXPRESS-Bench. Under matched agent and executor backbones, it outperforms an episodic interface by 14.9 percentage points on HM-EQA. On a Unitree Go2, NavMCP reaches 78.3% success, with its margin over the strongest baseline growing from 10 to 45 points as the task horizon increases. These results demonstrate the potential of scaffolding complementary foundation models into long-horizon physical-world agents.

Zixing Lei, Gengze Zhou, Xiong-Hui Chen +7

Shanghai Jiao Tong University · AIML, Adelaide University · Qwen Team, Alibaba Inc +3

Embodied Navigation Robot Foundation Models Embodied QA Long-Horizon Agent Tasks Memory-Augmented Agents

Aug 27, 2026cs.RO

Beyond Data Scaling: Representation-Centric Continued Pre-training for Vision-Language-Action Models

Scaling robot data is crucial for building generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, yet robot trajectories are harder to scale than web-scale image-text data because embodied collection is costly and sparsely covers the physical world. This makes representation quality a central bottleneck: under a fixed robot-data budget, continued pre-training must turn limited trajectories into transferable visual-action knowledge rather than merely fit actions. We propose VLAct, a VLA-oriented VLM backbone trained on broad, heterogeneous, multi-embodiment robot data before task-specific fine-tuning. VLAct preserves the broad VLM prior and encourages shared action semantics across embodiments through VLM-prior preservation, multi-head continuous action co-supervision, and a partially unified cross-embodiment action layout, while allowing task-specific action heads during fine-tuning. Across simulation, real-world, and unseen-embodiment transfer, VLAct consistently improves downstream performance under fixed fine-tuning protocols. On LIBERO-Plus and RoboTwin 2.0, VLAct surpasses industrial VLA systems including ABot-M0 and LingBot-VLA, achieving success rates of 82.6% and 92.5%. On RoboDojo, VLAct ranks sixth among all policies by success rate and outperforms all explicitly designated world-action model (WAM) entries on both metrics. Most notably, on RoboCasa-GR1, an unseen humanoid embodiment, VLAct using only 20% of downstream trajectories outperforms the full-data GR00T-N1.6 baseline. These results are obtained using fully open-source data and only a 16-GPU training setup, showing that representation-centric continued pre-training can deliver highly competitive performance under a modest compute budget and is an important independent axis of VLA progress beyond data scaling.

Senqiao Yang, Chengyao Wang, Yuxin Chen +13

Robot Foundation Models Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning Data-Efficient Robot Learning Vision-Language-Action Models

Aug 10, 2026cs.RO

RynnValue: Scaling Robotic Value Foundation Models with Temporal Distance

General-purpose reward models are increasingly the bottleneck for scaling robot learning, yet the recipe for learning value-related capabilities from large-scale heterogeneous corpora remains underexplored. Existing approaches tie supervision to task-internal anchors such as preferences or normalized progress, none of which transfer cleanly across embodiments and data sources. We introduce RynnValue, an open-source value foundation model for robotic manipulation that replaces these anchors with temporal distance, the directed cost-to-go from an observation to the language-specified goal. Because temporal-distance labels can be derived directly from timestamps, RynnValue scales to over 7,000 hours and roughly 3M instruction-conditioned clips without preference or progress annotations. To make temporal-value learning reliable at scale, we combine random temporal sampling, temporal-order shuffling, and value-isolation attention, suppressing shortcuts that would leave predictions insensitive to failures and regressions. Trained without preference labels, RynnValue attains an average Kendall's

τ_a

of 0.704 on RBM-EVAL-OOD, surpassing the fully preference-supervised state of the art (0.655) and more than doubling a progress-only counterpart (0.292), while generalizing zero-shot to unseen tasks, embodiments, and viewpoints. As a zero-shot reward model, RynnValue serves a range of downstream applications. Converted into dense rewards via potential-based shaping, it raises real-world policy success from 52.5% to 72.5% online and from 63.8% to 82.5% offline; used for data filtering, it improves multi-task behavior cloning success from 35.0% to 42.5%; and applied as inference-time value guidance, it lifts a frozen policy's success from 67.5% to 80.0%. These results establish temporal distance as a scalable supervision target and practical reward interface for generalist robot policies.

Dongchi Huang, Hongyin Zhang, Bohan Hou +11

DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group · Hupan Lab

Reward Modeling Robot Foundation Models Multimodal Reward Modeling

Aug 7, 2026cs.RO

How Should I Pick a Foundation Model for My Robot? In Favor of a Community Evaluation Framework for Social Robots

Researchers who seek to build social robot applications on foundation models are faced with a difficult question: how should we pick a model? Public leaderboards offer little guidance: the demands of real-time, embodied social interaction lie largely outside their focus. And direct evaluation is impractical at scale: each embodied study requires scarce participant, robot, and experimenter time. In this paper, we identify five evaluation dimensions for foundation models in social robots: (i) conversational competence, (ii) user safety, (iii) embodied character, (iv) target scene effectiveness, and (v) audience appropriateness. To make model selection cheaper and better informed, we propose a three-tiered evaluation funnel paradigm that first filters with general metrics, then extends to simulated interactions, and terminates in more expensive, robot-specific evaluation. We map all five dimensions across all three tiers, chart where applicable evaluation methods exist and are missing, and close with a call to action: let's build the evaluation framework together as a community.

Eric Nichols, Alva Markelius, Hatice Gunes

Honda Research Institute Japan, Wako, Japan. · Affective Intelligence and Robotics Lab, University of Cambridge, UK.

Robot Foundation Models Human-Robot Interaction Social Robotics

Aug 6, 2026cs.RO

JoyAI-RA 0.5: Scaling Robot Manipulation Learning via Dual Action Alignment

Robot data is scarce, so generalist policies need to learn from heterogeneous sources, including human egocentric video, simulation, and real robots, which differ in supervision and embodiment, with action labels missing or mutually incompatible. Human egocentric data scale best but sit farthest from robot data, and naive pooling causes negative transfer rather than knowledge sharing. We propose JoyAI-RA 0.5, a generalist Vision-Language-World-Action (VLWA) framework that couples physical world-dynamics priors with visual semantics and scales manipulation learning across such data via dual action alignment. Implicit action alignment infers latent actions from visual transitions, enabling action-free human, simulation, and robot data to guide a latent-action-conditioned world model in learning physical dynamics. Explicit alignment grounds reliable human and robot trajectories in a unified physical action space through a canonical action representation and camera-frame chunk-relative end-effector actions. An inner-outer-loop reinforcement stage then pairs efficient task adaptation with foundation-policy improvement. On a real-world AgiBot benchmark, JoyAI-RA performs strongly on both seen tasks and unseen variations. The task score improves consistently as the volume of human egocentric pretraining data increases and shows no sign of plateauing at our largest scale. This suggests that abundant but weakly labeled human experience can be converted into a transferable training signal, making human video not merely a weak auxiliary source but a primary axis along which manipulation capability can be scaled. Project page can be found at https://joyai-ra-05.github.io/.

JoyAI-RA Team

Joy Future Academy, JD

RL for Robotics Latent Action Learning Robot Skill Learning World Models for Robotics Robot Foundation Models Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning+1

Aug 5, 2026cs.RO

VLAff: Vision-Language-Affordance Model for Unified Actionable Affordances

Learning manipulation skills from human videos is promising for scalable robot learning. However, the embodiment mismatch between humans and robots makes this challenging. One promising solution is to learn object-centric actionable affordances that are embodiment-agnostic. In this work, we propose a framework that leverages egocentric human videos with state-of-the-art 3D Structure-from-Motion and hand mesh reconstruction to extract actionable affordances such as visual, grasp, and trajectory affordances that explicitly encode where to interact, how to grasp, and how to move. We construct EgoAffordance, a large-scale dataset comprising 204K episodes with 5.6M visual affordances and 11.6M grasp and trajectory affordances. Building on this, we introduce VLAff, a large vision-language model-based unified foundation model that learns cross-modal correlations across all actionable affordances. Given a visual observation and instruction, VLAff generates visual affordance heatmaps, grasp poses, and trajectories, which are then converted into directly executable actions by utilizing 3D scene information. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that VLAff not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on visual affordance prediction, but can also be effectively applied to real robot applications such as zero-shot manipulation and affordance-guided robot learning.

Jihoon Oh, Kento Kawaharazuka, Kei Okada

University of Tokyo, Japan

Robot Skill Learning Language-Conditioned Robot Manipulation Robot Foundation Models Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning VLMs for Robotics Robot Learning