new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Jun 25

DataLadder: A Simulation-Enabled Interconversion Toolchain for the Embodied Data Pyramid

Generalist robot policies require trustworthy evaluation and robot-usable training data, but both are difficult to scale with physical robots alone. Real-robot trials and demonstrations remain the most faithful source of deployment signals, yet they are slow, costly, and hard to reproduce. We present DataLadder, a simulation-enabled interconversion toolchain for human-robot aligned model evaluation and data generation, denoted as Robot rightleftharpoons Simulation rightleftharpoons Human. On the one hand, the Robot rightarrow Simulation rightarrow Human pathway supports human-robot aligned model evaluation by reconstructing real-robot tabletop organization tasks as calibrated digital twins for scalable evaluation, while using human embodied feedback to inspect and refine the naturalness of simulated motions. On the other hand, the Human rightarrow Simulation rightarrow Robot pathway supports human-robot aligned data generation: it lifts ego-centric human demonstrations into simulation, checks them under robot physical constraints, and converts them into robot-centered trajectories, annotations, and visual observations. Together, these pathways use the JoySim simulator as both a scalable evaluation layer and a physical consistency filter for robot data generation. We further package the core reconstruction, simulation, rendering, and realism-augmentation modules as cloud services on JD Cloud, turning the system into reusable infrastructure for robot data generation and model evaluation.

  • 31 authors
·
Jun 14

PFEA: An LLM-based High-Level Natural Language Planning and Feedback Embodied Agent for Human-Centered AI

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has marked a significant breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence (AI), ushering in a new era of Human-centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). HAI aims to better serve human welfare and needs, thereby placing higher demands on the intelligence level of robots, particularly in aspects such as natural language interaction, complex task planning, and execution. Intelligent agents powered by LLMs have opened up new pathways for realizing HAI. However, existing LLM-based embodied agents often lack the ability to plan and execute complex natural language control tasks online. This paper explores the implementation of intelligent robotic manipulating agents based on Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in the physical world. We propose a novel embodied agent framework for robots, which comprises a human-robot voice interaction module, a vision-language agent module and an action execution module. The vision-language agent itself includes a vision-based task planner, a natural language instruction converter, and a task performance feedback evaluator. Experimental results demonstrate that our agent achieves a 28\% higher average task success rate in both simulated and real environments compared to approaches relying solely on LLM+CLIP, significantly improving the execution success rate of high-level natural language instruction tasks.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 28, 2025

Large Model Empowered Embodied AI: A Survey on Decision-Making and Embodied Learning

Embodied AI aims to develop intelligent systems with physical forms capable of perceiving, decision-making, acting, and learning in real-world environments, providing a promising way to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Despite decades of explorations, it remains challenging for embodied agents to achieve human-level intelligence for general-purpose tasks in open dynamic environments. Recent breakthroughs in large models have revolutionized embodied AI by enhancing perception, interaction, planning and learning. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey on large model empowered embodied AI, focusing on autonomous decision-making and embodied learning. We investigate both hierarchical and end-to-end decision-making paradigms, detailing how large models enhance high-level planning, low-level execution, and feedback for hierarchical decision-making, and how large models enhance Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for end-to-end decision making. For embodied learning, we introduce mainstream learning methodologies, elaborating on how large models enhance imitation learning and reinforcement learning in-depth. For the first time, we integrate world models into the survey of embodied AI, presenting their design methods and critical roles in enhancing decision-making and learning. Though solid advances have been achieved, challenges still exist, which are discussed at the end of this survey, potentially as the further research directions.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 14, 2025

Agent AI: Surveying the Horizons of Multimodal Interaction

Multi-modal AI systems will likely become a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives. A promising approach to making these systems more interactive is to embody them as agents within physical and virtual environments. At present, systems leverage existing foundation models as the basic building blocks for the creation of embodied agents. Embedding agents within such environments facilitates the ability of models to process and interpret visual and contextual data, which is critical for the creation of more sophisticated and context-aware AI systems. For example, a system that can perceive user actions, human behavior, environmental objects, audio expressions, and the collective sentiment of a scene can be used to inform and direct agent responses within the given environment. To accelerate research on agent-based multimodal intelligence, we define "Agent AI" as a class of interactive systems that can perceive visual stimuli, language inputs, and other environmentally-grounded data, and can produce meaningful embodied action with infinite agent. In particular, we explore systems that aim to improve agents based on next-embodied action prediction by incorporating external knowledge, multi-sensory inputs, and human feedback. We argue that by developing agentic AI systems in grounded environments, one can also mitigate the hallucinations of large foundation models and their tendency to generate environmentally incorrect outputs. The emerging field of Agent AI subsumes the broader embodied and agentic aspects of multimodal interactions. Beyond agents acting and interacting in the physical world, we envision a future where people can easily create any virtual reality or simulated scene and interact with agents embodied within the virtual environment.

  • 14 authors
·
Jan 7, 2024

Embodied Active Defense: Leveraging Recurrent Feedback to Counter Adversarial Patches

The vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial patches has motivated numerous defense strategies for boosting model robustness. However, the prevailing defenses depend on single observation or pre-established adversary information to counter adversarial patches, often failing to be confronted with unseen or adaptive adversarial attacks and easily exhibiting unsatisfying performance in dynamic 3D environments. Inspired by active human perception and recurrent feedback mechanisms, we develop Embodied Active Defense (EAD), a proactive defensive strategy that actively contextualizes environmental information to address misaligned adversarial patches in 3D real-world settings. To achieve this, EAD develops two central recurrent sub-modules, i.e., a perception module and a policy module, to implement two critical functions of active vision. These models recurrently process a series of beliefs and observations, facilitating progressive refinement of their comprehension of the target object and enabling the development of strategic actions to counter adversarial patches in 3D environments. To optimize learning efficiency, we incorporate a differentiable approximation of environmental dynamics and deploy patches that are agnostic to the adversary strategies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EAD substantially enhances robustness against a variety of patches within just a few steps through its action policy in safety-critical tasks (e.g., face recognition and object detection), without compromising standard accuracy. Furthermore, due to the attack-agnostic characteristic, EAD facilitates excellent generalization to unseen attacks, diminishing the averaged attack success rate by 95 percent across a range of unseen adversarial attacks.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 30, 2024

Octopus: Embodied Vision-Language Programmer from Environmental Feedback

Large vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved substantial progress in multimodal perception and reasoning. Furthermore, when seamlessly integrated into an embodied agent, it signifies a crucial stride towards the creation of autonomous and context-aware systems capable of formulating plans and executing commands with precision. In this paper, we introduce Octopus, a novel VLM designed to proficiently decipher an agent's vision and textual task objectives and to formulate intricate action sequences and generate executable code. Our design allows the agent to adeptly handle a wide spectrum of tasks, ranging from mundane daily chores in simulators to sophisticated interactions in complex video games. Octopus is trained by leveraging GPT-4 to control an explorative agent to generate training data, i.e., action blueprints and the corresponding executable code, within our experimental environment called OctoVerse. We also collect the feedback that allows the enhanced training scheme of Reinforcement Learning with Environmental Feedback (RLEF). Through a series of experiments, we illuminate Octopus's functionality and present compelling results, and the proposed RLEF turns out to refine the agent's decision-making. By open-sourcing our model architecture, simulator, and dataset, we aspire to ignite further innovation and foster collaborative applications within the broader embodied AI community.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 12, 2023 4

Simulating User Agents for Embodied Conversational-AI

Embodied agents designed to assist users with tasks must engage in natural language interactions, interpret instructions, execute actions, and communicate effectively to resolve issues. However, collecting large-scale, diverse datasets of situated human-robot dialogues to train and evaluate such agents is expensive, labor-intensive, and time-consuming. To address this challenge, we propose building a large language model (LLM)-based user agent that can simulate user behavior during interactions with an embodied agent in a virtual environment. Given a user goal (e.g., make breakfast), at each time step, the user agent may observe" the robot actions or speak" to either intervene with the robot or answer questions. Such a user agent assists in improving the scalability and efficiency of embodied dialogues dataset generation and is critical for enhancing and evaluating the robot's interaction and task completion ability, as well as for research in reinforcement learning using AI feedback. We evaluate our user agent's ability to generate human-like behaviors by comparing its simulated dialogues with the TEACh dataset. We perform three experiments: zero-shot prompting to predict dialogue acts, few-shot prompting, and fine-tuning on the TEACh training subset. Results show the LLM-based user agent achieves an F-measure of 42% with zero-shot prompting and 43.4% with few-shot prompting in mimicking human speaking behavior. Through fine-tuning, performance in deciding when to speak remained stable, while deciding what to say improved from 51.1% to 62.5%. These findings showcase the feasibility of the proposed approach for assessing and enhancing the effectiveness of robot task completion through natural language communication.

EmbodiedCity: A Benchmark Platform for Embodied Agent in Real-world City Environment

Embodied artificial intelligence emphasizes the role of an agent's body in generating human-like behaviors. The recent efforts on EmbodiedAI pay a lot of attention to building up machine learning models to possess perceiving, planning, and acting abilities, thereby enabling real-time interaction with the world. However, most works focus on bounded indoor environments, such as navigation in a room or manipulating a device, with limited exploration of embodying the agents in open-world scenarios. That is, embodied intelligence in the open and outdoor environment is less explored, for which one potential reason is the lack of high-quality simulators, benchmarks, and datasets. To address it, in this paper, we construct a benchmark platform for embodied intelligence evaluation in real-world city environments. Specifically, we first construct a highly realistic 3D simulation environment based on the real buildings, roads, and other elements in a real city. In this environment, we combine historically collected data and simulation algorithms to conduct simulations of pedestrian and vehicle flows with high fidelity. Further, we designed a set of evaluation tasks covering different EmbodiedAI abilities. Moreover, we provide a complete set of input and output interfaces for access, enabling embodied agents to easily take task requirements and current environmental observations as input and then make decisions and obtain performance evaluations. On the one hand, it expands the capability of existing embodied intelligence to higher levels. On the other hand, it has a higher practical value in the real world and can support more potential applications for artificial general intelligence. Based on this platform, we evaluate some popular large language models for embodied intelligence capabilities of different dimensions and difficulties.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 12, 2024

EmbodiedBrain: Expanding Performance Boundaries of Task Planning for Embodied Intelligence

The realization of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) necessitates Embodied AI agents capable of robust spatial perception, effective task planning, and adaptive execution in physical environments. However, current large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) for embodied tasks suffer from key limitations, including a significant gap between model design and agent requirements, an unavoidable trade-off between real-time latency and performance, and the use of unauthentic, offline evaluation metrics. To address these challenges, we propose EmbodiedBrain, a novel vision-language foundation model available in both 7B and 32B parameter sizes. Our framework features an agent-aligned data structure and employs a powerful training methodology that integrates large-scale Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Step-Augumented Group Relative Policy Optimization (Step-GRPO), which boosts long-horizon task success by integrating preceding steps as Guided Precursors. Furthermore, we incorporate a comprehensive reward system, including a Generative Reward Model (GRM) accelerated at the infrastructure level, to improve training efficiency. For enable thorough validation, we establish a three-part evaluation system encompassing General, Planning, and End-to-End Simulation Benchmarks, highlighted by the proposal and open-sourcing of a novel, challenging simulation environment. Experimental results demonstrate that EmbodiedBrain achieves superior performance across all metrics, establishing a new state-of-the-art for embodied foundation models. Towards paving the way for the next generation of generalist embodied agents, we open-source all of our data, model weight, and evaluating methods, which are available at https://zterobot.github.io/EmbodiedBrain.github.io.

  • 20 authors
·
Oct 23, 2025

Embodied-R1.5: Evolving Physical Intelligence via Embodied Foundation Models

We introduce Embodied-R1.5, a unified Embodied Foundation Model (EFM) that integrates comprehensive embodied reasoning capabilities, spanning embodied cognition, task planning, correction, and pointing, within a single architecture toward general physical intelligence. Leveraging three automated data construction pipelines to significantly expand the data coverage of critical capabilities, we build a large-scale data system of over 15B tokens, and design a multi-task balanced RL recipe to alleviate heterogeneous task conflicts. We further introduce a Planner-Grounder-Corrector (PGC) closed-loop framework that enables a single model to autonomously execute and self-correct over long-horizon tasks. With only 8B parameters, Embodied-R1.5 achieves SOTA on 16 out of 24 embodied VLM benchmarks, surpassing leading models like Gemini-Robotics-ER-1.5 and GPT-5.4. Benefiting from the internalized embodied capabilities, Embodied-R1.5 can be fine-tuned into a VLA with only a small amount of data, outperforming leading VLA models like π_{0.5} across 4 popular manipulation benchmark suites. We further conduct extensive zero-shot real-robot experiments, validating performance in instruction following, affordance grounding, articulated object manipulation, and long-horizon complex tasks, demonstrating strong generalization to the physical world. We open-source model weights, datasets, training code, and EmbodiedEvalKit, an evaluation framework tailored for embodied tasks, to facilitate future research in EFMs.

  • 23 authors
·
Jun 8 1

Embodied AI: From LLMs to World Models

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an intelligent system paradigm for achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), serving as the cornerstone for various applications and driving the evolution from cyberspace to physical systems. Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) and World Models (WMs) have drawn significant attention for embodied AI. On the one hand, LLMs empower embodied AI via semantic reasoning and task decomposition, bringing high-level natural language instructions and low-level natural language actions into embodied cognition. On the other hand, WMs empower embodied AI by building internal representations and future predictions of the external world, facilitating physical law-compliant embodied interactions. As such, this paper comprehensively explores the literature in embodied AI from basics to advances, covering both LLM driven and WM driven works. In particular, we first present the history, key technologies, key components, and hardware systems of embodied AI, as well as discuss its development via looking from unimodal to multimodal angle. We then scrutinize the two burgeoning fields of embodied AI, i.e., embodied AI with LLMs/multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) and embodied AI with WMs, meticulously delineating their indispensable roles in end-to-end embodied cognition and physical laws-driven embodied interactions. Building upon the above advances, we further share our insights on the necessity of the joint MLLM-WM driven embodied AI architecture, shedding light on its profound significance in enabling complex tasks within physical worlds. In addition, we examine representative applications of embodied AI, demonstrating its wide applicability in real-world scenarios. Last but not least, we point out future research directions of embodied AI that deserve further investigation.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 24, 2025

Embodied Agent Interface: Benchmarking LLMs for Embodied Decision Making

We aim to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for embodied decision making. While a significant body of work has been leveraging LLMs for decision making in embodied environments, we still lack a systematic understanding of their performance because they are usually applied in different domains, for different purposes, and built based on different inputs and outputs. Furthermore, existing evaluations tend to rely solely on a final success rate, making it difficult to pinpoint what ability is missing in LLMs and where the problem lies, which in turn blocks embodied agents from leveraging LLMs effectively and selectively. To address these limitations, we propose a generalized interface (Embodied Agent Interface) that supports the formalization of various types of tasks and input-output specifications of LLM-based modules. Specifically, it allows us to unify 1) a broad set of embodied decision-making tasks involving both state and temporally extended goals, 2) four commonly-used LLM-based modules for decision making: goal interpretation, subgoal decomposition, action sequencing, and transition modeling, and 3) a collection of fine-grained metrics which break down evaluation into various types of errors, such as hallucination errors, affordance errors, various types of planning errors, etc. Overall, our benchmark offers a comprehensive assessment of LLMs' performance for different subtasks, pinpointing the strengths and weaknesses in LLM-powered embodied AI systems, and providing insights for effective and selective use of LLMs in embodied decision making.

  • 15 authors
·
Oct 9, 2024

Towards a Unified Understanding of Robot Manipulation: A Comprehensive Survey

Embodied intelligence has witnessed remarkable progress in recent years, driven by advances in computer vision, natural language processing, and the rise of large-scale multimodal models. Among its core challenges, robot manipulation stands out as a fundamental yet intricate problem, requiring the seamless integration of perception, planning, and control to enable interaction within diverse and unstructured environments. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of robotic manipulation, encompassing foundational background, task-organized benchmarks and datasets, and a unified taxonomy of existing methods. We extend the classical division between high-level planning and low-level control by broadening high-level planning to include language, code, motion, affordance, and 3D representations, while introducing a new taxonomy of low-level learning-based control grounded in training paradigms such as input modeling, latent learning, and policy learning. Furthermore, we provide the first dedicated taxonomy of key bottlenecks, focusing on data collection, utilization, and generalization, and conclude with an extensive review of real-world applications. Compared with prior surveys, our work offers both a broader scope and deeper insight, serving as an accessible roadmap for newcomers and a structured reference for experienced researchers. All related resources, including research papers, open-source datasets, and projects, are curated for the community at https://github.com/BaiShuanghao/Awesome-Robotics-Manipulation.

  • 18 authors
·
Oct 12, 2025

ENACT: Evaluating Embodied Cognition with World Modeling of Egocentric Interaction

Embodied cognition argues that intelligence arises from sensorimotor interaction rather than passive observation. It raises an intriguing question: do modern vision-language models (VLMs), trained largely in a disembodied manner, exhibit signs of embodied cognition? We introduce ENACT, a benchmark that casts evaluation of embodied cognition as world modeling from egocentric interaction in a visual question answering (VQA) format. Framed as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) whose actions are scene graph changes, ENACT comprises two complementary sequence reordering tasks: forward world modeling (reorder shuffled observations given actions) and inverse world modeling (reorder shuffled actions given observations). While conceptually simple, solving these tasks implicitly demands capabilities central to embodied cognition-affordance recognition, action-effect reasoning, embodied awareness, and interactive, long-horizon memory from partially observable egocentric input, while avoiding low-level image synthesis that could confound the evaluation. We provide a scalable pipeline that synthesizes QA pairs from robotics simulation (BEHAVIOR) and evaluates models on 8,972 QA pairs spanning long-horizon home-scale activities. Experiments reveal a performance gap between frontier VLMs and humans that widens with interaction horizon. Models consistently perform better on the inverse task than the forward one and exhibit anthropocentric biases, including a preference for right-handed actions and degradation when camera intrinsics or viewpoints deviate from human vision. Website at https://enact-embodied-cognition.github.io/.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 25, 2025 2

TouchAnything: A Dataset and Framework for Bimanual Tactile Estimation from Egocentric Video

Egocentric human video data, which captures rich human-environment interactions and can be collected at scale, has become a key driver of embodied intelligence research. However, existing egocentric datasets typically lack tactile sensing, a critical modality that provides direct cues about contact, force, and pressure in human-object interaction. Without such signals, models struggle to learn physically grounded representations of real-world interaction dynamics. While tactile sensors provide these cues, deploying high-quality tactile hardware at scale remains expensive and cumbersome. This raises a central question: can tactile feedback be inferred directly from visual observations, enabling scalable tactile supervision for egocentric video data and supporting physically grounded embodied learning? To enable research in this direction, we introduce EgoTouch, a large-scale multi-view egocentric dataset with dense tactile supervision for bimanual hand-object interaction. EgoTouch comprises 208 manipulation tasks spanning 1,891 episodes in diverse indoor and outdoor environments, with synchronized multi-view RGB (head-mounted egocentric and dual wrist-mounted cameras), bimanual 3D hand pose, and continuous pressure maps from wearable tactile sensors. Building on EgoTouch, we introduce TouchAnything, a baseline multi-view vision-to-touch prediction framework that uses the egocentric view as the primary input and flexibly leverages available wrist-mounted views at inference time. Experiments show that incorporating wrist-mounted views generally improves tactile prediction over egocentric-only input, achieving up to 5.0% relative improvement in Contact IoU and 6.1% relative improvement in Volumetric IoU. We will publicly release the dataset, code, and benchmark.

  • 14 authors
·
May 12

EVOLVE-VLA: Test-Time Training from Environment Feedback for Vision-Language-Action Models

Achieving truly adaptive embodied intelligence requires agents that learn not just by imitating static demonstrations, but by continuously improving through environmental interaction, which is akin to how humans master skills through practice. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced robotic manipulation by leveraging large language models, yet remain fundamentally limited by Supervised Finetuning (SFT): requiring hundreds of demonstrations per task, rigidly memorizing trajectories, and failing to adapt when deployment conditions deviate from training. We introduce EVOLVE-VLA, a test-time training framework enabling VLAs to continuously adapt through environment interaction with minimal or zero task-specific demonstrations. The key technical challenge is replacing oracle reward signals (unavailable at test time) with autonomous feedback. We address this through a learned progress estimator providing dense feedback, and critically, we design our framework to ``tame'' this inherently noisy signal via two mechanisms: (1) an accumulative progress estimation mechanism smoothing noisy point-wise estimates, and (2) a progressive horizon extension strategy enabling gradual policy evolution. EVOLVE-VLA achieves substantial gains: +8.6\% on long-horizon tasks, +22.0\% in 1-shot learning, and enables cross-task generalization -- achieving 20.8\% success on unseen tasks without task-specific demonstrations training (vs. 0\% for pure SFT). Qualitative analysis reveals emergent capabilities absent in demonstrations, including error recovery and novel strategies. This work represents a critical step toward VLAs that truly learn and adapt, moving beyond static imitation toward continuous self-improvements.

showlab Show Lab
·
Dec 16, 2025 1

FaGeL: Fabric LLMs Agent empowered Embodied Intelligence Evolution with Autonomous Human-Machine Collaboration

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enhanced the reasoning capabilities of embodied agents, driving progress toward AGI-powered robotics. While LLMs have been applied to tasks like semantic reasoning and task generalization, their potential in open physical space exploration remains underexplored. This paper introduces FaGeL (Fabric aGent empowered by embodied intelligence with LLMs), an embodied agent integrating smart fabric technology for seamless, non-intrusive human-agent interaction. FaGeL autonomously generates tasks using multimodal data from wearable and ambient sensors, refining its behavior based on implicit human feedback in generated text, without explicit ratings or preferences. We also introduce a token-level saliency map to visualize LLM fine-tuning, enhancing the interpretability of token-level alignment. The system leverages dual feedback mechanisms to improve token-level alignment and addresses challenges in non-intrusive human-machine interaction and cognition evolution. Our contributions include FaGeL's development, the DualCUT algorithm for AI alignment, and experimental validation in cooperative tasks, demonstrating FaGeL's ability to adapt and evolve autonomously through implicit feedback. In the future, we plan to explore FaGeL's scalability in dynamic environments and its integration with other AI systems to develop AGI agents that adapt seamlessly to diverse human needs.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 28, 2024

HyCodePolicy: Hybrid Language Controllers for Multimodal Monitoring and Decision in Embodied Agents

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled richer perceptual grounding for code policy generation in embodied agents. However, most existing systems lack effective mechanisms to adaptively monitor policy execution and repair codes during task completion. In this work, we introduce HyCodePolicy, a hybrid language-based control framework that systematically integrates code synthesis, geometric grounding, perceptual monitoring, and iterative repair into a closed-loop programming cycle for embodied agents. Technically, given a natural language instruction, our system first decomposes it into subgoals and generates an initial executable program grounded in object-centric geometric primitives. The program is then executed in simulation, while a vision-language model (VLM) observes selected checkpoints to detect and localize execution failures and infer failure reasons. By fusing structured execution traces capturing program-level events with VLM-based perceptual feedback, HyCodePolicy infers failure causes and repairs programs. This hybrid dual feedback mechanism enables self-correcting program synthesis with minimal human supervision. Our results demonstrate that HyCodePolicy significantly improves the robustness and sample efficiency of robot manipulation policies, offering a scalable strategy for integrating multimodal reasoning into autonomous decision-making pipelines.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 4, 2025 2

Towards Efficient LLM Grounding for Embodied Multi-Agent Collaboration

Grounding the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) for embodied tasks is challenging due to the complexity of the physical world. Especially, LLM planning for multi-agent collaboration requires communication of agents or credit assignment as the feedback to re-adjust the proposed plans and achieve effective coordination. However, existing methods that overly rely on physical verification or self-reflection suffer from excessive and inefficient querying of LLMs. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for multi-agent collaboration that introduces Reinforced Advantage feedback (ReAd) for efficient self-refinement of plans. Specifically, we perform critic regression to learn a sequential advantage function from LLM-planned data, and then treat the LLM planner as an optimizer to generate actions that maximize the advantage function. It endows the LLM with the foresight to discern whether the action contributes to accomplishing the final task. We provide theoretical analysis by extending advantage-weighted regression in reinforcement learning to multi-agent systems. Experiments on Overcooked-AI and a difficult variant of RoCoBench show that ReAd surpasses baselines in success rate, and also significantly decreases the interaction steps of agents and query rounds of LLMs, demonstrating its high efficiency for grounding LLMs. More results are given at https://read-llm.github.io/.

  • 7 authors
·
May 23, 2024

SimWorld Studio: Automatic Environment Generation with Evolving Coding Agent for Embodied Agent Learning

LLM/VLM-based digital agents have advanced rapidly thanks to scalable sandboxes for coding, web navigation, and computer use, which provide rich interactive training grounds. In contrast, embodied agents still lack abundant, diverse, and automatically generated 3D environments for interactive learning. Existing embodied simulators rely on manually crafted scenes or procedural templates, while recent LLM-based 3D generation systems mainly produce static scenes rather than deployable environments with verifiable tasks and standard learning interfaces. We introduce SimWorld Studio, an open-source platform built on Unreal Engine 5 for generating evolving embodied learning environments. At its core is SimCoder, a tool/skill-augmented coding agent that writes and executes engine-level code to construct physically grounded 3D worlds from language/image instructions. SimCoder self-evolves by using verifier feedback (e.g., compilation errors, physics checks, VLM critiques) to revise environments and autonomously add reusable tools and skills to its library. Generated worlds are exported as Gym-style environments for embodied agent learning. SimWorld Studio further enables co-evolution between environment generation and embodied learning: agent performance feedback guides SimCoder to generate adaptive curricula near the learner's capability frontier, so that environments become increasingly challenging as the embodied agent improves. Three case studies on embodied navigation show that self-evolution improves generation reliability, generated environments substantially improve embodied agent performance that generalizes to unseen benchmarks, and co-evolution yields an 18-point success-rate gain over fixed-environment learning and a 40-point gain over an untrained agent.

  • 8 authors
·
May 9 1

Maximizing Alignment with Minimal Feedback: Efficiently Learning Rewards for Visuomotor Robot Policy Alignment

Visuomotor robot policies, increasingly pre-trained on large-scale datasets, promise significant advancements across robotics domains. However, aligning these policies with end-user preferences remains a challenge, particularly when the preferences are hard to specify. While reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become the predominant mechanism for alignment in non-embodied domains like large language models, it has not seen the same success in aligning visuomotor policies due to the prohibitive amount of human feedback required to learn visual reward functions. To address this limitation, we propose Representation-Aligned Preference-based Learning (RAPL), an observation-only method for learning visual rewards from significantly less human preference feedback. Unlike traditional RLHF, RAPL focuses human feedback on fine-tuning pre-trained vision encoders to align with the end-user's visual representation and then constructs a dense visual reward via feature matching in this aligned representation space. We first validate RAPL through simulation experiments in the X-Magical benchmark and Franka Panda robotic manipulation, demonstrating that it can learn rewards aligned with human preferences, more efficiently uses preference data, and generalizes across robot embodiments. Finally, our hardware experiments align pre-trained Diffusion Policies for three object manipulation tasks. We find that RAPL can fine-tune these policies with 5x less real human preference data, taking the first step towards minimizing human feedback while maximizing visuomotor robot policy alignment.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 6, 2024 2

Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Control

Large language models (LLMs) trained on code completion have been shown to be capable of synthesizing simple Python programs from docstrings [1]. We find that these code-writing LLMs can be re-purposed to write robot policy code, given natural language commands. Specifically, policy code can express functions or feedback loops that process perception outputs (e.g.,from object detectors [2], [3]) and parameterize control primitive APIs. When provided as input several example language commands (formatted as comments) followed by corresponding policy code (via few-shot prompting), LLMs can take in new commands and autonomously re-compose API calls to generate new policy code respectively. By chaining classic logic structures and referencing third-party libraries (e.g., NumPy, Shapely) to perform arithmetic, LLMs used in this way can write robot policies that (i) exhibit spatial-geometric reasoning, (ii) generalize to new instructions, and (iii) prescribe precise values (e.g., velocities) to ambiguous descriptions ("faster") depending on context (i.e., behavioral commonsense). This paper presents code as policies: a robot-centric formulation of language model generated programs (LMPs) that can represent reactive policies (e.g., impedance controllers), as well as waypoint-based policies (vision-based pick and place, trajectory-based control), demonstrated across multiple real robot platforms. Central to our approach is prompting hierarchical code-gen (recursively defining undefined functions), which can write more complex code and also improves state-of-the-art to solve 39.8% of problems on the HumanEval [1] benchmark. Code and videos are available at https://code-as-policies.github.io

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 16, 2022

EMAC+: Embodied Multimodal Agent for Collaborative Planning with VLM+LLM

Although LLMs demonstrate proficiency in several text-based reasoning and planning tasks, their implementation in robotics control is constrained by significant deficiencies: (1) LLM agents are designed to work mainly with textual inputs rather than visual conditions; (2) Current multimodal agents treat LLMs as static planners, which separates their reasoning from environment dynamics, resulting in actions that do not take domain-specific knowledge into account; and (3) LLMs are not designed to learn from visual interactions, which makes it harder for them to make better policies for specific domains. In this paper, we introduce EMAC+, an Embodied Multimodal Agent that collaboratively integrates LLM and VLM via a bidirectional training paradigm. Unlike existing methods, EMAC+ dynamically refines high-level textual plans generated by an LLM using real-time feedback from a VLM executing low-level visual control tasks. We address critical limitations of previous models by enabling the LLM to internalize visual environment dynamics directly through interactive experience, rather than relying solely on static symbolic mappings. Extensive experimental evaluations on ALFWorld and RT-1 benchmarks demonstrate that EMAC+ achieves superior task performance, robustness against noisy observations, and efficient learning. We also conduct thorough ablation studies and provide detailed analyses of success and failure cases.

  • 3 authors
·
May 26, 2025

EmbodiedEval: Evaluate Multimodal LLMs as Embodied Agents

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown significant advancements, providing a promising future for embodied agents. Existing benchmarks for evaluating MLLMs primarily utilize static images or videos, limiting assessments to non-interactive scenarios. Meanwhile, existing embodied AI benchmarks are task-specific and not diverse enough, which do not adequately evaluate the embodied capabilities of MLLMs. To address this, we propose EmbodiedEval, a comprehensive and interactive evaluation benchmark for MLLMs with embodied tasks. EmbodiedEval features 328 distinct tasks within 125 varied 3D scenes, each of which is rigorously selected and annotated. It covers a broad spectrum of existing embodied AI tasks with significantly enhanced diversity, all within a unified simulation and evaluation framework tailored for MLLMs. The tasks are organized into five categories: navigation, object interaction, social interaction, attribute question answering, and spatial question answering to assess different capabilities of the agents. We evaluated the state-of-the-art MLLMs on EmbodiedEval and found that they have a significant shortfall compared to human level on embodied tasks. Our analysis demonstrates the limitations of existing MLLMs in embodied capabilities, providing insights for their future development. We open-source all evaluation data and simulation framework at https://github.com/thunlp/EmbodiedEval.

  • 12 authors
·
Jan 20, 2025 2

MindForge: Empowering Embodied Agents with Theory of Mind for Lifelong Collaborative Learning

Contemporary embodied agents, such as Voyager in Minecraft, have demonstrated promising capabilities in open-ended individual learning. However, when powered with open large language models (LLMs), these agents often struggle with rudimentary tasks, even when fine-tuned on domain-specific knowledge. Inspired by human cultural learning, we present \collabvoyager, a novel framework that enhances Voyager with lifelong collaborative learning through explicit perspective-taking. \collabvoyager introduces three key innovations: (1) theory of mind representations linking percepts, beliefs, desires, and actions; (2) natural language communication between agents; and (3) semantic memory of task and environment knowledge and episodic memory of collaboration episodes. These advancements enable agents to reason about their and others' mental states, empirically addressing two prevalent failure modes: false beliefs and faulty task executions. In mixed-expertise Minecraft experiments, \collabvoyager agents outperform Voyager counterparts, significantly improving task completion rate by 66.6% (+39.4%) for collecting one block of dirt and 70.8% (+20.8%) for collecting one wood block. They exhibit emergent behaviors like knowledge transfer from expert to novice agents and collaborative code correction. \collabvoyager agents also demonstrate the ability to adapt to out-of-distribution tasks by using their previous experiences and beliefs obtained through collaboration. In this open-ended social learning paradigm, \collabvoyager paves the way for the democratic development of embodied AI, where agents learn in deployment from both peer and environmental feedback.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 19, 2024

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 three-modalities question-answer pairs 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.

ZhejiangUniversity Zhejiang University
·
Nov 23, 2025 2

Towards Physically Realizable Adversarial Attacks in Embodied Vision Navigation

The significant advancements in embodied vision navigation have raised concerns about its susceptibility to adversarial attacks exploiting deep neural networks. Investigating the adversarial robustness of embodied vision navigation is crucial, especially given the threat of 3D physical attacks that could pose risks to human safety. However, existing attack methods for embodied vision navigation often lack physical feasibility due to challenges in transferring digital perturbations into the physical world. Moreover, current physical attacks for object detection struggle to achieve both multi-view effectiveness and visual naturalness in navigation scenarios. To address this, we propose a practical attack method for embodied navigation by attaching adversarial patches to objects, where both opacity and textures are learnable. Specifically, to ensure effectiveness across varying viewpoints, we employ a multi-view optimization strategy based on object-aware sampling, which optimizes the patch's texture based on feedback from the vision-based perception model used in navigation. To make the patch inconspicuous to human observers, we introduce a two-stage opacity optimization mechanism, in which opacity is fine-tuned after texture optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that our adversarial patches decrease the navigation success rate by an average of 22.39%, outperforming previous methods in practicality, effectiveness, and naturalness. Code is available at: https://github.com/chen37058/Physical-Attacks-in-Embodied-Nav

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 16, 2024

VITA-E: Natural Embodied Interaction with Concurrent Seeing, Hearing, Speaking, and Acting

Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are often constrained by a rigid, static interaction paradigm, which lacks the ability to see, hear, speak, and act concurrently as well as handle real-time user interruptions dynamically. This hinders seamless embodied collaboration, resulting in an inflexible and unresponsive user experience. To address these limitations, we introduce VITA-E, a novel embodied interaction framework designed for both behavioral concurrency and nearly real-time interruption. The core of our approach is a dual-model architecture where two parallel VLA instances operate as an ``Active Model'' and a ``Standby Model'', allowing the embodied agent to observe its environment, listen to user speech, provide verbal responses, and execute actions, all concurrently and interruptibly, mimicking human-like multitasking capabilities. We further propose a ``model-as-controller'' paradigm, where we fine-tune the VLM to generate special tokens that serve as direct system-level commands, coupling the model's reasoning with the system's behavior. Experiments conducted on a physical humanoid platform demonstrate that VITA-E can reliably handle complex interactive scenarios. Our framework is compatible with various dual-system VLA models, achieving an extremely high success rate on emergency stops and speech interruptions while also successfully performing concurrent speech and action. This represents a significant step towards more natural and capable embodied assistants.

  • 18 authors
·
Oct 21, 2025 2

EnvGen: Generating and Adapting Environments via LLMs for Training Embodied Agents

Recent SOTA approaches for embodied learning via interaction directly employ large language models (LLMs) as agents to determine the next steps in an environment. Due to their world knowledge and reasoning capabilities, LLM agents achieve stronger performance than previous smaller agents based on reinforcement learning (RL); however, frequently calling LLMs is slow and expensive. Instead of directly employing LLMs as agents, can we use LLMs' reasoning capabilities to adaptively create training environments to help smaller embodied RL agents learn useful skills that they are weak at? We propose EnvGen, a novel framework to address this question. First, we prompt an LLM to generate training environments that allow agents to quickly learn different tasks in parallel. Concretely, the LLM is given the task description and simulator objectives that the agents should learn and is then asked to generate a set of environment configurations (e.g., different terrains, items given to agents, etc.). Next, we train a small RL agent in a mixture of the original and LLM-generated environments. Then, we enable the LLM to continuously adapt the generated environments to progressively improve the skills that the agent is weak at, by providing feedback to the LLM in the form of the agent's performance. We demonstrate the usefulness of EnvGen with comprehensive experiments in Crafter and Heist environments. We find that a small RL agent trained with EnvGen can outperform SOTA methods, including a GPT-4 agent, and learns long-horizon tasks significantly faster. We show qualitatively how the LLM adapts training environments to help improve RL agents' weaker skills over time. Additionally, EnvGen is substantially more efficient as it only uses a small number of LLM calls (e.g., 4 in total), whereas LLM agents require thousands of LLM calls. Lastly, we present detailed ablation studies for our design choices.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 18, 2024

Explore with Long-term Memory: A Benchmark and Multimodal LLM-based Reinforcement Learning Framework for Embodied Exploration

An ideal embodied agent should possess lifelong learning capabilities to handle long-horizon and complex tasks, enabling continuous operation in general environments. This not only requires the agent to accurately accomplish given tasks but also to leverage long-term episodic memory to optimize decision-making. However, existing mainstream one-shot embodied tasks primarily focus on task completion results, neglecting the crucial process of exploration and memory utilization. To address this, we propose Long-term Memory Embodied Exploration (LMEE), which aims to unify the agent's exploratory cognition and decision-making behaviors to promote lifelong learning.We further construct a corresponding dataset and benchmark, LMEE-Bench, incorporating multi-goal navigation and memory-based question answering to comprehensively evaluate both the process and outcome of embodied exploration. To enhance the agent's memory recall and proactive exploration capabilities, we propose MemoryExplorer, a novel method that fine-tunes a multimodal large language model through reinforcement learning to encourage active memory querying. By incorporating a multi-task reward function that includes action prediction, frontier selection, and question answering, our model achieves proactive exploration. Extensive experiments against state-of-the-art embodied exploration models demonstrate that our approach achieves significant advantages in long-horizon embodied tasks.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 11

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

Embodied AI is a prominent research topic in both academia and industry. Current research centers on completing tasks based on explicit user instructions. However, for robots to integrate into human society, they must understand which actions are permissible and which are prohibited, even without explicit commands. We refer to the user-guided AI as passive intelligence and the unguided AI as active intelligence. This paper introduces RobotEQ, the first benchmark for active intelligence, aiming to assess whether existing models can comprehend and adhere to social norms in embodied scenarios. First, we construct RobotEQ-Data, a dataset consisting of 1,900 egocentric images, spanning 10 representative embodied categories and 56 subcategories. Through extensive manual annotation, we provide 5,353 action judgment questions and 1,286 spatial grounding questions, specifying appropriate robot actions across diverse scenarios. Furthermore, we establish RobotEQ-Bench to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art models on this task. Experimental results show that current models still fall short in achieving reliable active intelligence, particularly in spatial grounding. Meanwhile, we observe that leveraging RAG techniques to incorporate external social norm knowledge bases can generally enhance performance. This work can facilitate the transition of robotics from user-guided passive manipulation to active social compliance.

  • 15 authors
·
May 6

EmbodiedGPT: Vision-Language Pre-Training via Embodied Chain of Thought

Embodied AI is a crucial frontier in robotics, capable of planning and executing action sequences for robots to accomplish long-horizon tasks in physical environments. In this work, we introduce EmbodiedGPT, an end-to-end multi-modal foundation model for embodied AI, empowering embodied agents with multi-modal understanding and execution capabilities. To achieve this, we have made the following efforts: (i) We craft a large-scale embodied planning dataset, termed EgoCOT. The dataset consists of carefully selected videos from the Ego4D dataset, along with corresponding high-quality language instructions. Specifically, we generate a sequence of sub-goals with the "Chain of Thoughts" mode for effective embodied planning. (ii) We introduce an efficient training approach to EmbodiedGPT for high-quality plan generation, by adapting a 7B large language model (LLM) to the EgoCOT dataset via prefix tuning. (iii) We introduce a paradigm for extracting task-related features from LLM-generated planning queries to form a closed loop between high-level planning and low-level control. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of EmbodiedGPT on embodied tasks, including embodied planning, embodied control, visual captioning, and visual question answering. Notably, EmbodiedGPT significantly enhances the success rate of the embodied control task by extracting more effective features. It has achieved a remarkable 1.6 times increase in success rate on the Franka Kitchen benchmark and a 1.3 times increase on the Meta-World benchmark, compared to the BLIP-2 baseline fine-tuned with the Ego4D dataset.

  • 10 authors
·
May 24, 2023

HY-Embodied-0.5: Embodied Foundation Models for Real-World Agents

We introduce HY-Embodied-0.5, a family of foundation models specifically designed for real-world embodied agents. To bridge the gap between general Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and the demands of embodied agents, our models are developed to enhance the core capabilities required by embodied intelligence: spatial and temporal visual perception, alongside advanced embodied reasoning for prediction, interaction, and planning. The HY-Embodied-0.5 suite comprises two primary variants: an efficient model with 2B activated parameters designed for edge deployment, and a powerful model with 32B activated parameters targeted for complex reasoning. To support the fine-grained visual perception essential for embodied tasks, we adopt a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture to enable modality-specific computing. By incorporating latent tokens, this design effectively enhances the perceptual representation of the models. To improve reasoning capabilities, we introduce an iterative, self-evolving post-training paradigm. Furthermore, we employ on-policy distillation to transfer the advanced capabilities of the large model to the smaller variant, thereby maximizing the performance potential of the compact model. Extensive evaluations across 22 benchmarks, spanning visual perception, spatial reasoning, and embodied understanding, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our MoT-2B model outperforms similarly sized state-of-the-art models on 16 benchmarks, while the 32B variant achieves performance comparable to frontier models such as Gemini 3.0 Pro. In downstream robot control experiments, we leverage our robust VLM foundation to train an effective Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, achieving compelling results in real-world physical evaluations. Code and models are open-sourced at https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HY-Embodied.

Guava: An Effective and Universal Harness for Embodied Manipulation

Language models trained on large-scale vision-language data have demonstrated strong potential for embodied agents. Harnessing models through embodied tools use offers a promising alternative to end-to-end vision-language-action systems by combining high-level reasoning with external modules for perception, planning, and control. However, it remains unclear what makes an effective harness for embodied manipulation, and to what extent such a harness can unlock embodied capabilities in a wide range of reasoning models. In this work, we present Guava, a harness framework for embodied tool use developed through systematic exploration of the design space of agent workflows, action spaces, and observation spaces. Our study identifies three key ingredients for effective embodied agents: iterative perception-reasoning-action loops, semantic action abstractions, and multimodal observations. To understand whether these design principles are universal even to small models, we develop an end-to-end training pipeline that distills embodied manipulation capabilities into a 4B open-source model using fewer than 2K trajectories collected entirely in simulation. Experimental results in both simulation and real-world environments show performance comparable to frontier proprietary models while exhibiting strong generalization to unseen objects, novel instructions, and long-horizon tasks. Results suggest that a well-designed harness can serve as a scalable, model-agnostic interface for embodied manipulation, enabling strong emergent embodied capabilities in compact open-source models with minimal training data.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 15 5

GazeVLA: Learning Human Intention for Robotic Manipulation

Embodied foundation models have achieved significant breakthroughs in robotic manipulation, yet they still depend heavily on large-scale robot demonstrations. Although recent works have explored leveraging human data to alleviate this dependency, effectively extracting transferable knowledge remains a significant challenge due to the inherent embodiment gap between human and robot. We argue that the intention underlying human actions can serve as a powerful intermediate representation for bridging this gap. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that explicitly learns and transfers human intention to facilitate robotic manipulation. Specifically, we model intention through gaze, as it naturally precedes physical actions and serves as an observable proxy for human intent. Our model is first pretrained on a large-scale egocentric human dataset to capture human intention and its synergy with action, followed by finetuning on a small set of robot and human data. During inference, the model adopts a Chain-of-Thought reasoning paradigm, sequentially predicting intention before executing the action. Extensive evaluations in simulation and real-world settings, across long-horizon and fine-grained tasks, and under few-shot and robustness benchmarks, show that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines, generalizes better, and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://gazevla.github.io .

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 29

Embodied-R1: Reinforced Embodied Reasoning for General Robotic Manipulation

Generalization in embodied AI is hindered by the "seeing-to-doing gap," which stems from data scarcity and embodiment heterogeneity. To address this, we pioneer "pointing" as a unified, embodiment-agnostic intermediate representation, defining four core embodied pointing abilities that bridge high-level vision-language comprehension with low-level action primitives. We introduce Embodied-R1, a 3B Vision-Language Model (VLM) specifically designed for embodied reasoning and pointing. We use a wide range of embodied and general visual reasoning datasets as sources to construct a large-scale dataset, Embodied-Points-200K, which supports key embodied pointing capabilities. We then train Embodied-R1 using a two-stage Reinforced Fine-tuning (RFT) curriculum with a specialized multi-task reward design. Embodied-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on 11 embodied spatial and pointing benchmarks. Critically, it demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization by achieving a 56.2% success rate in the SIMPLEREnv and 87.5% across 8 real-world XArm tasks without any task-specific fine-tuning, representing a 62% improvement over strong baselines. Furthermore, the model exhibits high robustness against diverse visual disturbances. Our work shows that a pointing-centric representation, combined with an RFT training paradigm, offers an effective and generalizable pathway to closing the perception-action gap in robotics.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 19, 2025 2

EmbodiedBench: Comprehensive Benchmarking Multi-modal Large Language Models for Vision-Driven Embodied Agents

Leveraging Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to create embodied agents offers a promising avenue for tackling real-world tasks. While language-centric embodied agents have garnered substantial attention, MLLM-based embodied agents remain underexplored due to the lack of comprehensive evaluation frameworks. To bridge this gap, we introduce EmbodiedBench, an extensive benchmark designed to evaluate vision-driven embodied agents. EmbodiedBench features: (1) a diverse set of 1,128 testing tasks across four environments, ranging from high-level semantic tasks (e.g., household) to low-level tasks involving atomic actions (e.g., navigation and manipulation); and (2) six meticulously curated subsets evaluating essential agent capabilities like commonsense reasoning, complex instruction understanding, spatial awareness, visual perception, and long-term planning. Through extensive experiments, we evaluated 13 leading proprietary and open-source MLLMs within EmbodiedBench. Our findings reveal that: MLLMs excel at high-level tasks but struggle with low-level manipulation, with the best model, GPT-4o, scoring only 28.9% on average. EmbodiedBench provides a multifaceted standardized evaluation platform that not only highlights existing challenges but also offers valuable insights to advance MLLM-based embodied agents. Our code is available at https://embodiedbench.github.io.

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 13, 2025 2

BEAR: Benchmarking and Enhancing Multimodal Language Models for Atomic Embodied Capabilities

Embodied capabilities refer to a suite of fundamental abilities for an agent to perceive, comprehend, and interact with the physical world. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promise as embodied agents, a thorough and systematic evaluation of their embodied capabilities remains underexplored, as existing benchmarks primarily focus on specific domains such as planning or spatial understanding. To bridge this gap, we introduce BEAR, a comprehensive and fine-grained benchmark that evaluates MLLMs on atomic embodied capabilities. BEAR comprises 4,469 interleaved image-video-text entries across 14 domains in 6 categories, including tasks from low-level pointing, trajectory understanding, spatial reasoning, to high-level planning. Extensive evaluation results of 20 representative MLLMs reveal their persistent limitations across all domains of embodied capabilities. To tackle the shortfall, we propose BEAR-Agent, a multimodal conversable agent that integrates pretrained vision models to strengthen MLLM perception, 3D understanding, and planning capabilities. It substantially enhances MLLM performance across diverse embodied capabilities on BEAR, yielding a 9.12% absolute gain and a relative improvement of 17.5% on GPT-5. Furthermore, our experiments indicate that improving MLLM embodied capabilities can benefit embodied tasks in simulated environments. Project website: https://bear-official66.github.io/

  • 20 authors
·
Oct 9, 2025 2

When Robots Should Say "I Don't Know": Benchmarking Abstention in Embodied Question Answering

Embodied Question Answering (EQA) requires an agent to interpret language, perceive its environment, and navigate within 3D scenes to produce responses. Existing EQA benchmarks assume that every question must be answered, but embodied agents should know when they do not have sufficient information to answer. In this work, we focus on a minimal requirement for EQA agents, abstention: knowing when to withhold an answer. From an initial study of 500 human queries, we find that 32.4% contain missing or underspecified context. Drawing on this initial study and cognitive theories of human communication errors, we derive five representative categories requiring abstention: actionability limitation, referential underspecification, preference dependence, information unavailability, and false presupposition. We augment OpenEQA by having annotators transform well-posed questions into ambiguous variants outlined by these categories. The resulting dataset, AbstainEQA, comprises 1,636 annotated abstention cases paired with 1,636 original OpenEQA instances for balanced evaluation. Evaluating on AbstainEQA, we find that even the best frontier model only attains 42.79% abstention recall, while humans achieve 91.17%. We also find that scaling, prompting, and reasoning only yield marginal gains, and that fine-tuned models overfit to textual cues. Together, these results position abstention as a fundamental prerequisite for reliable interaction in embodied settings and as a necessary basis for effective clarification.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 3, 2025

Reinforcing Human Behavior Simulation via Verbal Feedback

Humans learn social norms and behaviors from verbal feedback (e.g., a parent saying "that was rude" or a friend explaining "here's why that hurt"). Yet, learning from feedback for LLMs has largely focused on domains like code and math, where RL rewards are directly verifiable and condensed into scalar values. As LLMs are increasingly used to simulate human behavior, e.g., standing in for users, patients, students, and other personas, there is a pressing need to make them more human-like, which requires embracing a fundamentally different kind of signal: feedback that is verbal, subjective, and multi-faceted. We present DITTO, a model trained by treating verbal feedback as a first-class signal in reinforcement learning. After each rollout, DITTO receives verbal feedback and generates a feedback-conditioned improved rollout; both outputs are jointly optimized with GRPO, distilling verbal guidance into the base policy without requiring feedback at test time. We also introduce SOUL (Simulation gym Of hUman-Like behavior), a unified benchmark and training data suite spanning 10 tasks across six categories: Theory of Mind, character role play, social skill, learner simulation, user simulation, and persona simulation. DITTO achieves an average 36% improvement over the base model and exceeds GPT-5.4 on 6 of 10 SOUL benchmarks, demonstrating that RL with verbal feedback is a promising direction for training LLMs to simulate human behavior.

  • 16 authors
·
May 18

An Anatomy of Vision-Language-Action Models: From Modules to Milestones and Challenges

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are driving a revolution in robotics, enabling machines to understand instructions and interact with the physical world. This field is exploding with new models and datasets, making it both exciting and challenging to keep pace with. This survey offers a clear and structured guide to the VLA landscape. We design it to follow the natural learning path of a researcher: we start with the basic Modules of any VLA model, trace the history through key Milestones, and then dive deep into the core Challenges that define recent research frontier. Our main contribution is a detailed breakdown of the five biggest challenges in: (1) Representation, (2) Execution, (3) Generalization, (4) Safety, and (5) Dataset and Evaluation. This structure mirrors the developmental roadmap of a generalist agent: establishing the fundamental perception-action loop, scaling capabilities across diverse embodiments and environments, and finally ensuring trustworthy deployment-all supported by the essential data infrastructure. For each of them, we review existing approaches and highlight future opportunities. We position this paper as both a foundational guide for newcomers and a strategic roadmap for experienced researchers, with the dual aim of accelerating learning and inspiring new ideas in embodied intelligence. A live version of this survey, with continuous updates, is maintained on our https://suyuz1.github.io/Survery/{project page}.

IRootech IROOTECH TECHNOLOGY
·
Dec 12, 2025 3

MultiPLY: A Multisensory Object-Centric Embodied Large Language Model in 3D World

Human beings possess the capability to multiply a melange of multisensory cues while actively exploring and interacting with the 3D world. Current multi-modal large language models, however, passively absorb sensory data as inputs, lacking the capacity to actively interact with the objects in the 3D environment and dynamically collect their multisensory information. To usher in the study of this area, we propose MultiPLY, a multisensory embodied large language model that could incorporate multisensory interactive data, including visual, audio, tactile, and thermal information into large language models, thereby establishing the correlation among words, actions, and percepts. To this end, we first collect Multisensory Universe, a large-scale multisensory interaction dataset comprising 500k data by deploying an LLM-powered embodied agent to engage with the 3D environment. To perform instruction tuning with pre-trained LLM on such generated data, we first encode the 3D scene as abstracted object-centric representations and then introduce action tokens denoting that the embodied agent takes certain actions within the environment, as well as state tokens that represent the multisensory state observations of the agent at each time step. In the inference time, MultiPLY could generate action tokens, instructing the agent to take the action in the environment and obtain the next multisensory state observation. The observation is then appended back to the LLM via state tokens to generate subsequent text or action tokens. We demonstrate that MultiPLY outperforms baselines by a large margin through a diverse set of embodied tasks involving object retrieval, tool use, multisensory captioning, and task decomposition.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 16, 2024

CLEA: Closed-Loop Embodied Agent for Enhancing Task Execution in Dynamic Environments

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities in the hierarchical decomposition of complex tasks through semantic reasoning. However, their application in embodied systems faces challenges in ensuring reliable execution of subtask sequences and achieving one-shot success in long-term task completion. To address these limitations in dynamic environments, we propose Closed-Loop Embodied Agent (CLEA) -- a novel architecture incorporating four specialized open-source LLMs with functional decoupling for closed-loop task management. The framework features two core innovations: (1) Interactive task planner that dynamically generates executable subtasks based on the environmental memory, and (2) Multimodal execution critic employing an evaluation framework to conduct a probabilistic assessment of action feasibility, triggering hierarchical re-planning mechanisms when environmental perturbations exceed preset thresholds. To validate CLEA's effectiveness, we conduct experiments in a real environment with manipulable objects, using two heterogeneous robots for object search, manipulation, and search-manipulation integration tasks. Across 12 task trials, CLEA outperforms the baseline model, achieving a 67.3% improvement in success rate and a 52.8% increase in task completion rate. These results demonstrate that CLEA significantly enhances the robustness of task planning and execution in dynamic environments.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 1, 2025 2

SmartAgent: Chain-of-User-Thought for Embodied Personalized Agent in Cyber World

Recent advances in embodied agents with multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities based on large vision-language models (LVLMs), excel in autonomously interacting either real or cyber worlds, helping people make intelligent decisions in complex environments. However, the current works are normally optimized by golden action trajectories or ideal task-oriented solutions toward a definitive goal. This paradigm considers limited user-oriented factors, which could be the reason for their performance reduction in a wide range of personal assistant applications. To address this, we propose Chain-of-User-Thought (COUT), a novel embodied reasoning paradigm that takes a chain of thought from basic action thinking to explicit and implicit personalized preference thought to incorporate personalized factors into autonomous agent learning. To target COUT, we introduce SmartAgent, an agent framework perceiving cyber environments and reasoning personalized requirements as 1) interacting with GUI to access an item pool, 2) generating users' explicit requirements implied by previous actions, and 3) recommending items to fulfill users' implicit requirements. To demonstrate SmartAgent's capabilities, we also create a brand-new dataset SmartSpot that offers a full-stage personalized action-involved environment. To our best knowledge, our work is the first to formulate the COUT process, serving as a preliminary attempt towards embodied personalized agent learning. Our extensive experiments on SmartSpot illuminate SmartAgent's functionality among a series of embodied and personalized sub-tasks. We will release code and data upon paper notification at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/SmartAgent.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 10, 2024

BiTAgent: A Task-Aware Modular Framework for Bidirectional Coupling between Multimodal Large Language Models and World Models

Building generalist embodied agents requires a unified system that can interpret multimodal goals, model environment dynamics, and execute reliable actions across diverse real-world tasks. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer strong semantic priors and cross-modal generalization, while world models (WMs) provide actionable latent dynamics for prediction and control. Their combination holds promise for open-ended embodied intelligence, yet introduces two key challenges: (1) establishing a tight coupling between the semantic intent from MLLMs and the dynamic state representations within the WM's latent space, and (2) achieving task-aware adaptability that supports multi-task learning and cross-environment generalization. To address these limitations, we propose BiTAgent, a task-aware dynamic joint framework that enables bidirectional coupling between MLLMs and WMs. BiTAgent establishes two complementary pathways: a forward path that injects MLLM representations into the WM's latent space for semantically guided imagination, and a backward path where WM-generated feedback refines the MLLM's semantic space via dense text-conditioned rewards. This bidirectional interaction is realized through three synergistic components: Task-Aware Dynamic Joint Learning, Task-Aware Behavior Learning, and MLLM-WM Joint Optimization, which together harmonize semantic reasoning and dynamic prediction. Extensive experiments across multi-task and cross-environment settings demonstrate superior stability and generalization over state-of-the-art baselines, marking a step toward open-ended embodied learning.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 4, 2025

LoHoRavens: A Long-Horizon Language-Conditioned Benchmark for Robotic Tabletop Manipulation

The convergence of embodied agents and large language models (LLMs) has brought significant advancements to embodied instruction following. Particularly, the strong reasoning capabilities of LLMs make it possible for robots to perform long-horizon tasks without expensive annotated demonstrations. However, public benchmarks for testing the long-horizon reasoning capabilities of language-conditioned robots in various scenarios are still missing. To fill this gap, this work focuses on the tabletop manipulation task and releases a simulation benchmark, LoHoRavens, which covers various long-horizon reasoning aspects spanning color, size, space, arithmetics and reference. Furthermore, there is a key modality bridging problem for long-horizon manipulation tasks with LLMs: how to incorporate the observation feedback during robot execution for the LLM's closed-loop planning, which is however less studied by prior work. We investigate two methods of bridging the modality gap: caption generation and learnable interface for incorporating explicit and implicit observation feedback to the LLM, respectively. These methods serve as the two baselines for our proposed benchmark. Experiments show that both methods struggle to solve some tasks, indicating long-horizon manipulation tasks are still challenging for current popular models. We expect the proposed public benchmark and baselines can help the community develop better models for long-horizon tabletop manipulation tasks.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 18, 2023

WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators

Recent advancements in predictive models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in predicting the future state of objects and scenes. However, the lack of categorization based on inherent characteristics continues to hinder the progress of predictive model development. Additionally, existing benchmarks are unable to effectively evaluate higher-capability, highly embodied predictive models from an embodied perspective. In this work, we classify the functionalities of predictive models into a hierarchy and take the first step in evaluating World Simulators by proposing a dual evaluation framework called WorldSimBench. WorldSimBench includes Explicit Perceptual Evaluation and Implicit Manipulative Evaluation, encompassing human preference assessments from the visual perspective and action-level evaluations in embodied tasks, covering three representative embodied scenarios: Open-Ended Embodied Environment, Autonomous, Driving, and Robot Manipulation. In the Explicit Perceptual Evaluation, we introduce the HF-Embodied Dataset, a video assessment dataset based on fine-grained human feedback, which we use to train a Human Preference Evaluator that aligns with human perception and explicitly assesses the visual fidelity of World Simulators. In the Implicit Manipulative Evaluation, we assess the video-action consistency of World Simulators by evaluating whether the generated situation-aware video can be accurately translated into the correct control signals in dynamic environments. Our comprehensive evaluation offers key insights that can drive further innovation in video generation models, positioning World Simulators as a pivotal advancement toward embodied artificial intelligence.

  • 13 authors
·
Oct 23, 2024 2

ESI-Bench: Towards Embodied Spatial Intelligence that Closes the Perception-Action Loop

Spatial intelligence unfolds through a perception-action loop: agents act to acquire observations, and reason about how observations vary as a function of action. Rather than passively processing what is seen, they actively uncover what is unseen - occluded structure, dynamics, containment, and functionality that cannot be resolved from passive sensing alone. We move beyond prior formulations of spatial intelligence that assume oracle observations by recasting the observer as an actor. We introduce ESI-BENCH, a comprehensive benchmark for embodied spatial intelligence spanning 10 task categories and 29 subcategories built on OmniGibson, grounded in Spelke's core knowledge systems. Agents must decide what abilities to deploy - perception, locomotion, and manipulation - and how to sequence them to actively accumulate task-relevant evidence. We conduct extensive experiments on state-of-the-art MLLMs and find that active exploration substantially outperforms passive counterparts, with agents spontaneously discovering emergent spatial strategies without explicit instructions, while random multi-view often adds noise rather than signal despite consuming far more images. Most failures stem not from weak perception but from action blindness: poor action choices lead to poor observations, which in turn drive cascading errors. While explicit 3D grounding stabilizes reasoning on depth-sensitive tasks, imperfect 3D representation proves more harmful than 2D baselines by distorting spatial relations. Human studies further reveal that unlike humans who seek falsifying viewpoints and revise beliefs under contradiction, models commit prematurely with high confidence regardless of evidence quality, exposing a metacognitive gap that neither better perception nor more embodied interaction alone can close.

  • 8 authors
·
May 17 1

Embodied Web Agents: Bridging Physical-Digital Realms for Integrated Agent Intelligence

AI agents today are mostly siloed - they either retrieve and reason over vast amount of digital information and knowledge obtained online; or interact with the physical world through embodied perception, planning and action - but rarely both. This separation limits their ability to solve tasks that require integrated physical and digital intelligence, such as cooking from online recipes, navigating with dynamic map data, or interpreting real-world landmarks using web knowledge. We introduce Embodied Web Agents, a novel paradigm for AI agents that fluidly bridge embodiment and web-scale reasoning. To operationalize this concept, we first develop the Embodied Web Agents task environments, a unified simulation platform that tightly integrates realistic 3D indoor and outdoor environments with functional web interfaces. Building upon this platform, we construct and release the Embodied Web Agents Benchmark, which encompasses a diverse suite of tasks including cooking, navigation, shopping, tourism, and geolocation - all requiring coordinated reasoning across physical and digital realms for systematic assessment of cross-domain intelligence. Experimental results reveal significant performance gaps between state-of-the-art AI systems and human capabilities, establishing both challenges and opportunities at the intersection of embodied cognition and web-scale knowledge access. All datasets, codes and websites are publicly available at our project page https://embodied-web-agent.github.io/.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 18, 2025 2

ProAct: A Dual-System Framework for Proactive Embodied Social Agents

Embodied social agents have recently advanced in generating synchronized speech and gestures. However, most interactive systems remain fundamentally reactive, responding only to current sensory inputs within a short temporal window. Proactive social behavior, in contrast, requires deliberation over accumulated context and intent inference, which conflicts with the strict latency budget of real-time interaction. We present ProAct, a dual-system framework that reconciles this time-scale conflict by decoupling a low-latency Behavioral System for streaming multimodal interaction from a slower Cognitive System which performs long-horizon social reasoning and produces high-level proactive intentions. To translate deliberative intentions into continuous non-verbal behaviors without disrupting fluency, we introduce a streaming flow-matching model conditioned on intentions via ControlNet. This mechanism supports asynchronous intention injection, enabling seamless transitions between reactive and proactive gestures within a single motion stream. We deploy ProAct on a physical humanoid robot and evaluate both motion quality and interactive effectiveness. In real-world interaction user studies, participants and observers consistently prefer ProAct over reactive variants in perceived proactivity, social presence, and overall engagement, demonstrating the benefits of dual-system proactive control for embodied social interaction.

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 core challenge. Recent embodied systems often adopt a dual-system paradigm, where System 2 handles high-level reasoning while System 1 executes low-level control. In this work, we refer to System 2 as the embodied brain, emphasizing its role as the cognitive core for reasoning and decision-making in manipulation tasks. Given this role, systematic evaluation of the embodied brain is essential. Yet existing benchmarks emphasize execution success, or when targeting high-level reasoning, suffer from incomplete dimensions and limited task realism, offering only a partial picture of cognitive capability. To bridge this gap, we introduce RoboBench, a benchmark that systematically evaluates multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as embodied brains. Motivated by the critical roles across the full manipulation pipeline, RoboBench defines five dimensions-instruction comprehension, perception reasoning, generalized planning, affordance prediction, and failure analysis-spanning 14 capabilities, 25 tasks, and 6092 QA pairs. To ensure realism, we curate datasets across diverse embodiments, attribute-rich objects, and multi-view scenes, drawing from large-scale real robotic data. For planning, RoboBench introduces an evaluation framework, MLLM-as-world-simulator. It evaluate embodied feasibility by simulating whether predicted plans can achieve critical object-state changes. Experiments on 14 MLLMs reveal fundamental limitations: difficulties with implicit instruction comprehension, spatiotemporal reasoning, cross-scenario planning, fine-grained affordance understanding, and execution failure diagnosis. RoboBench provides a comprehensive scaffold to quantify high-level cognition, and guide the development of next-generation embodied MLLMs. The project page is in https://robo-bench.github.io.

  • 21 authors
·
Oct 20, 2025

Game On: Towards Language Models as RL Experimenters

We propose an agent architecture that automates parts of the common reinforcement learning experiment workflow, to enable automated mastery of control domains for embodied agents. To do so, it leverages a VLM to perform some of the capabilities normally required of a human experimenter, including the monitoring and analysis of experiment progress, the proposition of new tasks based on past successes and failures of the agent, decomposing tasks into a sequence of subtasks (skills), and retrieval of the skill to execute - enabling our system to build automated curricula for learning. We believe this is one of the first proposals for a system that leverages a VLM throughout the full experiment cycle of reinforcement learning. We provide a first prototype of this system, and examine the feasibility of current models and techniques for the desired level of automation. For this, we use a standard Gemini model, without additional fine-tuning, to provide a curriculum of skills to a language-conditioned Actor-Critic algorithm, in order to steer data collection so as to aid learning new skills. Data collected in this way is shown to be useful for learning and iteratively improving control policies in a robotics domain. Additional examination of the ability of the system to build a growing library of skills, and to judge the progress of the training of those skills, also shows promising results, suggesting that the proposed architecture provides a potential recipe for fully automated mastery of tasks and domains for embodied agents.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 5, 2024

A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied AI

Embodied AI is widely recognized as a key element of artificial general intelligence because it involves controlling embodied agents to perform tasks in the physical world. Building on the success of large language models and vision-language models, a new category of multimodal models -- referred to as vision-language-action models (VLAs) -- has emerged to address language-conditioned robotic tasks in embodied AI by leveraging their distinct ability to generate actions. In recent years, a myriad of VLAs have been developed, making it imperative to capture the rapidly evolving landscape through a comprehensive survey. To this end, we present the first survey on VLAs for embodied AI. This work provides a detailed taxonomy of VLAs, organized into three major lines of research. The first line focuses on individual components of VLAs. The second line is dedicated to developing control policies adept at predicting low-level actions. The third line comprises high-level task planners capable of decomposing long-horizon tasks into a sequence of subtasks, thereby guiding VLAs to follow more general user instructions. Furthermore, we provide an extensive summary of relevant resources, including datasets, simulators, and benchmarks. Finally, we discuss the challenges faced by VLAs and outline promising future directions in embodied AI. We have created a project associated with this survey, which is available at https://github.com/yueen-ma/Awesome-VLA.

  • 5 authors
·
May 22, 2024

A Comprehensive Survey on World Models for Embodied AI

Embodied AI requires agents that perceive, act, and anticipate how actions reshape future world states. World models serve as internal simulators that capture environment dynamics, enabling forward and counterfactual rollouts to support perception, prediction, and decision making. This survey presents a unified framework for world models in embodied AI. Specifically, we formalize the problem setting and learning objectives, and propose a three-axis taxonomy encompassing: (1) Functionality, Decision-Coupled vs. General-Purpose; (2) Temporal Modeling, Sequential Simulation and Inference vs. Global Difference Prediction; (3) Spatial Representation, Global Latent Vector, Token Feature Sequence, Spatial Latent Grid, and Decomposed Rendering Representation. We systematize data resources and metrics across robotics, autonomous driving, and general video settings, covering pixel prediction quality, state-level understanding, and task performance. Furthermore, we offer a quantitative comparison of state-of-the-art models and distill key open challenges, including the scarcity of unified datasets and the need for evaluation metrics that assess physical consistency over pixel fidelity, the trade-off between model performance and the computational efficiency required for real-time control, and the core modeling difficulty of achieving long-horizon temporal consistency while mitigating error accumulation. Finally, we maintain a curated bibliography at https://github.com/Li-Zn-H/AwesomeWorldModels.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 19, 2025

Aligning Language Models Using Follow-up Likelihood as Reward Signal

In natural human-to-human conversations, participants often receive feedback signals from one another based on their follow-up reactions. These reactions can include verbal responses, facial expressions, changes in emotional state, and other non-verbal cues. Similarly, in human-machine interactions, the machine can leverage the user's follow-up utterances as feedback signals to assess whether it has appropriately addressed the user's request. Therefore, we propose using the likelihood of follow-up utterances as rewards to differentiate preferred responses from less favored ones, without relying on human or commercial LLM-based preference annotations. Our proposed reward mechanism, ``Follow-up Likelihood as Reward" (FLR), matches the performance of strong reward models trained on large-scale human or GPT-4 annotated data on 8 pairwise-preference and 4 rating-based benchmarks. Building upon the FLR mechanism, we propose to automatically mine preference data from the online generations of a base policy model. The preference data are subsequently used to boost the helpfulness of the base model through direct alignment from preference (DAP) methods, such as direct preference optimization (DPO). Lastly, we demonstrate that fine-tuning the language model that provides follow-up likelihood with natural language feedback significantly enhances FLR's performance on reward modeling benchmarks and effectiveness in aligning the base policy model's helpfulness.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 20, 2024

RoboBERT: An End-to-end Multimodal Robotic Manipulation Model

Embodied intelligence integrates multiple modalities, enabling agents to understand images, language, and actions simultaneously. However, existing models always depend on additional datasets or extensive pre-training to maximize performance improvements, consuming abundant training time and expensive hardware cost. To tackle this issue, we present RoboBERT, a novel end-to-end robotic manipulation model integrated with a unique training strategy. This model utilizes a CNN-based diffusion policy, enhancing and stabilizing the effectiveness of this model by separating training processes for different modalities. It also underscores the importance of data augmentation, verifying various techniques to significantly boost performance. Unlike models that depend on extra data or large foundation models, RoboBERT achieves a highly competitive success rate while using only language-labeled expert demonstrations and maintaining a relatively smaller model size. Specifically, RoboBERT achieves an average length of 4.52 on the CALVIN benchmark for \(ABCD \rightarrow D\) task, setting a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) record. Furthermore, when tested on a real robot, the model demonstrates superior performance, achieving a higher success rate than other methods trained with the same data. We propose that these concepts and methodologies of RoboBERT demonstrate extensive versatility and compatibility, contributing significantly to the development of lightweight multimodal robotic models. The code can be accessed on https://github.com/PeterWangsicheng/RoboBERT

  • 12 authors
·
Feb 10, 2025

Eliciting Compatible Demonstrations for Multi-Human Imitation Learning

Imitation learning from human-provided demonstrations is a strong approach for learning policies for robot manipulation. While the ideal dataset for imitation learning is homogenous and low-variance -- reflecting a single, optimal method for performing a task -- natural human behavior has a great deal of heterogeneity, with several optimal ways to demonstrate a task. This multimodality is inconsequential to human users, with task variations manifesting as subconscious choices; for example, reaching down, then across to grasp an object, versus reaching across, then down. Yet, this mismatch presents a problem for interactive imitation learning, where sequences of users improve on a policy by iteratively collecting new, possibly conflicting demonstrations. To combat this problem of demonstrator incompatibility, this work designs an approach for 1) measuring the compatibility of a new demonstration given a base policy, and 2) actively eliciting more compatible demonstrations from new users. Across two simulation tasks requiring long-horizon, dexterous manipulation and a real-world "food plating" task with a Franka Emika Panda arm, we show that we can both identify incompatible demonstrations via post-hoc filtering, and apply our compatibility measure to actively elicit compatible demonstrations from new users, leading to improved task success rates across simulated and real environments.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 14, 2022

How Good are Foundation Models in Step-by-Step Embodied Reasoning?

Embodied agents operating in the physical world must make decisions that are not only effective but also safe, spatially coherent, and grounded in context. While recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) have shown promising capabilities in visual understanding and language generation, their ability to perform structured reasoning for real-world embodied tasks remains underexplored. In this work, we aim to understand how well foundation models can perform step-by-step reasoning in embodied environments. To this end, we propose the Foundation Model Embodied Reasoning (FoMER) benchmark, designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of LMMs in complex embodied decision-making scenarios. Our benchmark spans a diverse set of tasks that require agents to interpret multimodal observations, reason about physical constraints and safety, and generate valid next actions in natural language. We present (i) a large-scale, curated suite of embodied reasoning tasks, (ii) a novel evaluation framework that disentangles perceptual grounding from action reasoning, and (iii) empirical analysis of several leading LMMs under this setting. Our benchmark includes over 1.1k samples with detailed step-by-step reasoning across 10 tasks and 8 embodiments, covering three different robot types. Our results highlight both the potential and current limitations of LMMs in embodied reasoning, pointing towards key challenges and opportunities for future research in robot intelligence. Our data and code will be made publicly available.