Join the conversation

Join the community of Machine Learners and AI enthusiasts.

Sign Up
savoji 
posted an update 3 days ago
Post
116
Open-weight Qwen3.8-Flash-Next hits a RoboDojo Score of 31.39 with no depth or task-verifier feedback, above GPT-6 Astra's published 28.97 and every listed VLA/WAM baseline.

The lever is the harness. The same Qwen scores 1.90 with RoboProbe, 7.75 with RPent, 21.01 with GAP (Hybrid) and 31.39 with uni-robot-agent. Under that harness GPT-6 Astra reaches 51.90, so a gap to closed models remains.

📊 The numbers
• Qwen costs $1.09 per episode; Astra costs $21.29
• Best VLA/WAM baseline, Xiaomi-Robotics-1: 20.07 Score
• Real robot, 19 tabletop tasks: Qwen 49.50, fine-tuned pi0.5 47.75, zero-shot Dream-1 35.50
• No depth keeps 87.5% of Qwen's score; RGB only without camera parameters drops it to 9.13

🛠️ Try it
• pip install uni-robot-agent, then uni-robot-agent setup --integration robodojo (MIT, Python 3.11, Linux GPU host)
• Reusable ideas: immutable observation snapshots, duplicate-action rejection, pipelined execution (84.5% to 93.8% of motion overlaps model calls)

⚠️ Caveats
• Scores are low in absolute terms; Qwen needs 95.5 min to reach a score of 25, Astra 42.6
• The package has no physical-robot support yet; the real-world benchmark is in-house on one dual-arm platform

Democratizing Robot-Use Agents: A Unified Harness with Open Models (2611.01560)
https://github.com/Open-RUA/uni-robot-agent
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01560

Before buying depth sensors or a frontier API, how much of your robot agent's gap is really the harness?

📚 Read it elsewhere
• The deep dive on Medium: https://medium.com/p/51efcc243344
• The long read on Substack: https://sajjadpakdamansavoji.substack.com/p/open-qwen38-flash-next-beats-gpt
• The thread on X: https://x.com/saavoji/status/2117670449111007255
• Every version on sajjadpsavoji.github.io: https://sajjadpsavoji.github.io/blog#qwen3-8-flash

The harness-matched row is the fairer headline.
Same uni-robot-agent harness: Qwen 31.39, Astra 51.90. That is 60% of the closed model.
At about 1/20 of the episode cost ($1.09 vs $21.29), and 2.2x the time to reach a score of 25 (95.5 vs 42.6 min).

The 28.97 it beats is Astra under RoboProbe, where the same Qwen scores 1.90.
So the harness moves one model 16.5x, and the open-vs-closed comparison only means something inside one harness.

Did they run Astra under RPent and GAP (Hybrid) too?
If both models keep the same harness order, that ordering is the result that transfers.

·

Agreed, the matched row is the fairer comparison, which is why the post says a gap to closed models remains. The paper only reports Astra under RoboProbe and uni-robot-agent. It doesn't report Astra under RPent or GAP, so I can't say whether the harness order holds for both models.