Robotics
arXiv:cs.RO
Covers all aspects of robotics, including robotic systems design, motion planning, and robot learning.
Looking for a broader view? This category is part of:
Trending in Robotics
PointWorld: Scaling 3D World Models for In-The-Wild Robotic Manipulation
Humans anticipate, from a glance and a contemplated action of their bodies, how the 3D world will respond, a capability that is equally vital for robotic manipulation. We introduce PointWorld, a large pre-trained 3D world model that unifies state and action in a shared 3D space as 3D point flows: given one or few RGB-D images and a sequence of low-level robot action commands, PointWorld forecasts per-pixel displacements in 3D that respond to the given actions. By representing actions as 3D point flows instead of embodiment-specific action spaces (e.g., joint positions), this formulation directly conditions on physical geometries of robots while seamlessly integrating learning across embodiments. To train our 3D world model, we curate a large-scale dataset spanning real and simulated robotic manipulation in open-world environments, enabled by recent advances in 3D vision and simulated environments, totaling about 2M trajectories and 500 hours across a single-arm Franka and a bimanual humanoid. Through rigorous, large-scale empirical studies of backbones, action representations, learning objectives, partial observability, data mixtures, domain transfers, and scaling, we distill design principles for large-scale 3D world modeling. With a real-time (0.1s) inference speed, PointWorld can be efficiently integrated in the model-predictive control (MPC) framework for manipulation. We demonstrate that a single pre-trained checkpoint enables a real-world Franka robot to perform rigid-body pushing, deformable and articulated object manipulation, and tool use, without requiring any demonstrations or post-training and all from a single image captured in-the-wild. Project website at https://point-world.github.io/.
2601.03782
Jan 2026Robotics
InternVLA-A1: Unifying Understanding, Generation and Action for Robotic Manipulation
Prevalent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically built upon Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and demonstrate exceptional proficiency in semantic understanding, but they inherently lack the capability to deduce physical world dynamics. Consequently, recent approaches have shifted toward World Models, typically formulated via video prediction; however, these methods often suffer from a lack of semantic grounding and exhibit brittleness when handling prediction errors. To synergize semantic understanding with dynamic predictive capabilities, we present InternVLA-A1. This model employs a unified Mixture-of-Transformers architecture, coordinating three experts for scene understanding, visual foresight generation, and action execution. These components interact seamlessly through a unified masked self-attention mechanism. Building upon InternVL3 and Qwen3-VL, we instantiate InternVLA-A1 at 2B and 3B parameter scales. We pre-train these models on hybrid synthetic-real datasets spanning InternData-A1 and Agibot-World, covering over 533M frames. This hybrid training strategy effectively harnesses the diversity of synthetic simulation data while minimizing the sim-to-real gap. We evaluated InternVLA-A1 across 12 real-world robotic tasks and simulation benchmark. It significantly outperforms leading models like pi0 and GR00T N1.5, achieving a 14.5\% improvement in daily tasks and a 40\%-73.3\% boost in dynamic settings, such as conveyor belt sorting.
2601.02456
Jan 2026Robotics
CLAP: Contrastive Latent Action Pretraining for Learning Vision-Language-Action Models from Human Videos
Generalist Vision-Language-Action models are currently hindered by the scarcity of robotic data compared to the abundance of human video demonstrations. Existing Latent Action Models attempt to leverage video data but often suffer from visual entanglement, capturing noise rather than manipulation skills. To address this, we propose Contrastive Latent Action Pretraining (CLAP), a framework that aligns the visual latent space from videos with a proprioceptive latent space from robot trajectories. By employing contrastive learning, CLAP maps video transitions onto a quantized, physically executable codebook. Building on this representation, we introduce a dual-formulation VLA framework offering both CLAP-NTP, an autoregressive model excelling at instruction following and object generalization, and CLAP-RF, a Rectified Flow-based policy designed for high-frequency, precise manipulation. Furthermore, we propose a Knowledge Matching (KM) regularization strategy to mitigate catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CLAP significantly outperforms strong baselines, enabling the effective transfer of skills from human videos to robotic execution. Project page: https://lin-shan.com/CLAP/.
2601.04061
Jan 2026Robotics
SOP: A Scalable Online Post-Training System for Vision-Language-Action Models
Vision-language-action (VLA) models achieve strong generalization through large-scale pre-training, but real-world deployment requires expert-level task proficiency in addition to broad generality. Existing post-training approaches for VLA models are typically offline, single-robot, or task-specific, limiting effective on-policy adaptation and scalable learning from real-world interaction. We introduce a Scalable Online Post-training (SOP) system that enables online, distributed, multi-task post-training of generalist VLA models directly in the physical world. SOP tightly couples execution and learning through a closed-loop architecture in which a fleet of robots continuously streams on-policy experience and human intervention signals to a centralized cloud learner, and asynchronously receives updated policies. This design supports prompt on-policy correction, scales experience collection through parallel deployment, and preserves generality during adaptation. SOP is agnostic to the choice of post-training algorithm; we instantiate it with both interactive imitation learning (HG-DAgger) and reinforcement learning (RECAP). Across a range of real-world manipulation tasks including cloth folding, box assembly, and grocery restocking, we show that SOP substantially improves the performance of large pretrained VLA models while maintaining a single shared policy across tasks. Effective post-training can be achieved within hours of real-world interaction, and performance scales near-linearly with the number of robots in the fleet. These results suggest that tightly coupling online learning with fleet-scale deployment is instrumental to enabling efficient, reliable, and scalable post-training of generalist robot policies in the physical world.
2601.03044
Jan 2026Robotics
Genie Sim 3.0 : A High-Fidelity Comprehensive Simulation Platform for Humanoid Robot
The development of robust and generalizable robot learning models is critically contingent upon the availability of large-scale, diverse training data and reliable evaluation benchmarks. Collecting data in the physical world poses prohibitive costs and scalability challenges, and prevailing simulation benchmarks frequently suffer from fragmentation, narrow scope, or insufficient fidelity to enable effective sim-to-real transfer. To address these challenges, we introduce Genie Sim 3.0, a unified simulation platform for robotic manipulation. We present Genie Sim Generator, a large language model (LLM)-powered tool that constructs high-fidelity scenes from natural language instructions. Its principal strength resides in rapid and multi-dimensional generalization, facilitating the synthesis of diverse environments to support scalable data collection and robust policy evaluation. We introduce the first benchmark that pioneers the application of LLM for automated evaluation. It leverages LLM to mass-generate evaluation scenarios and employs Vision-Language Model (VLM) to establish an automated assessment pipeline. We also release an open-source dataset comprising more than 10,000 hours of synthetic data across over 200 tasks. Through systematic experimentation, we validate the robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer capability of our open-source dataset, demonstrating that synthetic data can server as an effective substitute for real-world data under controlled conditions for scalable policy training. For code and dataset details, please refer to: https://github.com/AgibotTech/genie_sim.
2601.02078
Jan 2026Robotics
RoboReward: General-Purpose Vision-Language Reward Models for Robotics
A well-designed reward is critical for effective reinforcement learning-based policy improvement. In real-world robotic domains, obtaining such rewards typically requires either labor-intensive human labeling or brittle, handcrafted objectives. Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise as automatic reward models, yet their effectiveness on real robot tasks is poorly understood. In this work, we aim to close this gap by introducing (1) \textbf{RoboReward}, a robotics reward dataset and benchmark built on large-scale real-robot corpora from Open X-Embodiment (OXE) and RoboArena, and (2) vision-language reward models trained on this dataset (RoboReward 4B/8B). Because OXE is success-heavy and lacks failure examples, we propose a \emph{negative examples data augmentation} pipeline that generates calibrated \emph{negatives} and \emph{near-misses} via counterfactual relabeling of successful episodes and temporal clipping to create partial-progress outcomes from the same videos. Using this framework, we produce an extensive training and evaluation dataset that spans diverse tasks and embodiments and enables systematic evaluation of whether state-of-the-art VLMs can reliably provide rewards for robotics. Our evaluation of leading open-weight and proprietary VLMs reveals that no model excels across all tasks, underscoring substantial room for improvement. We then train general-purpose 4B- and 8B-parameter models that outperform much larger VLMs in assigning rewards for short-horizon robotic tasks. Finally, we deploy the 8B-parameter reward VLM in real-robot reinforcement learning and find that it improves policy learning over Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5, a frontier physical reasoning VLM trained on robotics data, by a large margin, while substantially narrowing the gap to RL training with human-provided rewards.
2601.00675
Jan 2026Robotics
Locomotion Beyond Feet
Most locomotion methods for humanoid robots focus on leg-based gaits, yet natural bipeds frequently rely on hands, knees, and elbows to establish additional contacts for stability and support in complex environments. This paper introduces Locomotion Beyond Feet, a comprehensive system for whole-body humanoid locomotion across extremely challenging terrains, including low-clearance spaces under chairs, knee-high walls, knee-high platforms, and steep ascending and descending stairs. Our approach addresses two key challenges: contact-rich motion planning and generalization across diverse terrains. To this end, we combine physics-grounded keyframe animation with reinforcement learning. Keyframes encode human knowledge of motor skills, are embodiment-specific, and can be readily validated in simulation or on hardware, while reinforcement learning transforms these references into robust, physically accurate motions. We further employ a hierarchical framework consisting of terrain-specific motion-tracking policies, failure recovery mechanisms, and a vision-based skill planner. Real-world experiments demonstrate that Locomotion Beyond Feet achieves robust whole-body locomotion and generalizes across obstacle sizes, obstacle instances, and terrain sequences.
2601.03607
Jan 2026Robotics
Wow, wo, val! A Comprehensive Embodied World Model Evaluation Turing Test
As world models gain momentum in Embodied AI, an increasing number of works explore using video foundation models as predictive world models for downstream embodied tasks like 3D prediction or interactive generation. However, before exploring these downstream tasks, video foundation models still have two critical questions unanswered: (1) whether their generative generalization is sufficient to maintain perceptual fidelity in the eyes of human observers, and (2) whether they are robust enough to serve as a universal prior for real-world embodied agents. To provide a standardized framework for answering these questions, we introduce the Embodied Turing Test benchmark: WoW-World-Eval (Wow,wo,val). Building upon 609 robot manipulation data, Wow-wo-val examines five core abilities, including perception, planning, prediction, generalization, and execution. We propose a comprehensive evaluation protocol with 22 metrics to assess the models' generation ability, which achieves a high Pearson Correlation between the overall score and human preference (>0.93) and establishes a reliable foundation for the Human Turing Test. On Wow-wo-val, models achieve only 17.27 on long-horizon planning and at best 68.02 on physical consistency, indicating limited spatiotemporal consistency and physical reasoning. For the Inverse Dynamic Model Turing Test, we first use an IDM to evaluate the video foundation models' execution accuracy in the real world. However, most models collapse to $\approx$ 0% success, while WoW maintains a 40.74% success rate. These findings point to a noticeable gap between the generated videos and the real world, highlighting the urgency and necessity of benchmarking World Model in Embodied AI.
2601.04137
Jan 2026Robotics
Stable Language Guidance for Vision-Language-Action Models
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generalized robotic control; however, they remain notoriously brittle to linguistic perturbations. We identify a critical ``modality collapse'' phenomenon where strong visual priors overwhelm sparse linguistic signals, causing agents to overfit to specific instruction phrasings while ignoring the underlying semantic intent. To address this, we propose \textbf{Residual Semantic Steering (RSS)}, a probabilistic framework that disentangles physical affordance from semantic execution. RSS introduces two theoretical innovations: (1) \textbf{Monte Carlo Syntactic Integration}, which approximates the true semantic posterior via dense, LLM-driven distributional expansion, and (2) \textbf{Residual Affordance Steering}, a dual-stream decoding mechanism that explicitly isolates the causal influence of language by subtracting the visual affordance prior. Theoretical analysis suggests that RSS effectively maximizes the mutual information between action and intent while suppressing visual distractors. Empirical results across diverse manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that RSS achieves state-of-the-art robustness, maintaining performance even under adversarial linguistic perturbations.
2601.04052
Jan 2026Robotics
Closing the Reality Gap: Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Deployment for Dexterous Force-Based Grasping and Manipulation
Human-like dexterous hands with multiple fingers offer human-level manipulation capabilities, but training control policies that can directly deploy on real hardware remains difficult due to contact-rich physics and imperfect actuation. We close this gap with a practical sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) framework that utilizes dense tactile feedback combined with joint torque sensing to explicitly regulate physical interactions. To enable effective sim-to-real transfer, we introduce (i) a computationally fast tactile simulation that computes distances between dense virtual tactile units and the object via parallel forward kinematics, providing high-rate, high-resolution touch signals needed by RL; (ii) a current-to-torque calibration that eliminates the need for torque sensors on dexterous hands by mapping motor current to joint torque; and (iii) actuator dynamics modeling to bridge the actuation gaps with randomization of non-ideal effects such as backlash, torque-speed saturation. Using an asymmetric actor-critic PPO pipeline trained entirely in simulation, our policies deploy directly to a five-finger hand. The resulting policies demonstrated two essential skills: (1) command-based, controllable grasp force tracking, and (2) reorientation of objects in the hand, both of which were robustly executed without fine-tuning on the robot. By combining tactile and torque in the observation space with effective sensing/actuation modeling, our system provides a practical solution to achieve reliable dexterous manipulation. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of controllable grasping on a multi-finger dexterous hand trained entirely in simulation and transferred zero-shot on real hardware.
2601.02778
Jan 2026Robotics
Dream2Flow: Bridging Video Generation and Open-World Manipulation with 3D Object Flow
Generative video modeling has emerged as a compelling tool to zero-shot reason about plausible physical interactions for open-world manipulation. Yet, it remains a challenge to translate such human-led motions into the low-level actions demanded by robotic systems. We observe that given an initial image and task instruction, these models excel at synthesizing sensible object motions. Thus, we introduce Dream2Flow, a framework that bridges video generation and robotic control through 3D object flow as an intermediate representation. Our method reconstructs 3D object motions from generated videos and formulates manipulation as object trajectory tracking. By separating the state changes from the actuators that realize those changes, Dream2Flow overcomes the embodiment gap and enables zero-shot guidance from pre-trained video models to manipulate objects of diverse categories-including rigid, articulated, deformable, and granular. Through trajectory optimization or reinforcement learning, Dream2Flow converts reconstructed 3D object flow into executable low-level commands without task-specific demonstrations. Simulation and real-world experiments highlight 3D object flow as a general and scalable interface for adapting video generation models to open-world robotic manipulation. Videos and visualizations are available at https://dream2flow.github.io/.
2512.24766
Dec 2025Robotics
RoboMIND 2.0: A Multimodal, Bimanual Mobile Manipulation Dataset for Generalizable Embodied Intelligence
While data-driven imitation learning has revolutionized robotic manipulation, current approaches remain constrained by the scarcity of large-scale, diverse real-world demonstrations. Consequently, the ability of existing models to generalize across long-horizon bimanual tasks and mobile manipulation in unstructured environments remains limited. To bridge this gap, we present RoboMIND 2.0, a comprehensive real-world dataset comprising over 310K dual-arm manipulation trajectories collected across six distinct robot embodiments and 739 complex tasks. Crucially, to support research in contact-rich and spatially extended tasks, the dataset incorporates 12K tactile-enhanced episodes and 20K mobile manipulation trajectories. Complementing this physical data, we construct high-fidelity digital twins of our real-world environments, releasing an additional 20K-trajectory simulated dataset to facilitate robust sim-to-real transfer. To fully exploit the potential of RoboMIND 2.0, we propose MIND-2 system, a hierarchical dual-system frame-work optimized via offline reinforcement learning. MIND-2 integrates a high-level semantic planner (MIND-2-VLM) to decompose abstract natural language instructions into grounded subgoals, coupled with a low-level Vision-Language-Action executor (MIND-2-VLA), which generates precise, proprioception-aware motor actions.
2512.24653
Dec 2025Robotics
Coordinated Humanoid Manipulation with Choice Policies
Humanoid robots hold great promise for operating in human-centric environments, yet achieving robust whole-body coordination across the head, hands, and legs remains a major challenge. We present a system that combines a modular teleoperation interface with a scalable learning framework to address this problem. Our teleoperation design decomposes humanoid control into intuitive submodules, which include hand-eye coordination, grasp primitives, arm end-effector tracking, and locomotion. This modularity allows us to collect high-quality demonstrations efficiently. Building on this, we introduce Choice Policy, an imitation learning approach that generates multiple candidate actions and learns to score them. This architecture enables both fast inference and effective modeling of multimodal behaviors. We validate our approach on two real-world tasks: dishwasher loading and whole-body loco-manipulation for whiteboard wiping. Experiments show that Choice Policy significantly outperforms diffusion policies and standard behavior cloning. Furthermore, our results indicate that hand-eye coordination is critical for success in long-horizon tasks. Our work demonstrates a practical path toward scalable data collection and learning for coordinated humanoid manipulation in unstructured environments.
2512.25072
Dec 2025Robotics
Counterfactual VLA: Self-Reflective Vision-Language-Action Model with Adaptive Reasoning
Recent reasoning-augmented Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have improved the interpretability of end-to-end autonomous driving by generating intermediate reasoning traces. Yet these models primarily describe what they perceive and intend to do, rarely questioning whether their planned actions are safe or appropriate. This work introduces Counterfactual VLA (CF-VLA), a self-reflective VLA framework that enables the model to reason about and revise its planned actions before execution. CF-VLA first generates time-segmented meta-actions that summarize driving intent, and then performs counterfactual reasoning conditioned on both the meta-actions and the visual context. This step simulates potential outcomes, identifies unsafe behaviors, and outputs corrected meta-actions that guide the final trajectory generation. To efficiently obtain such self-reflective capabilities, we propose a rollout-filter-label pipeline that mines high-value scenes from a base (non-counterfactual) VLA's rollouts and labels counterfactual reasoning traces for subsequent training rounds. Experiments on large-scale driving datasets show that CF-VLA improves trajectory accuracy by up to 17.6%, enhances safety metrics by 20.5%, and exhibits adaptive thinking: it only enables counterfactual reasoning in challenging scenarios. By transforming reasoning traces from one-shot descriptions to causal self-correction signals, CF-VLA takes a step toward self-reflective autonomous driving agents that learn to think before they act.
2512.24426
Dec 2025Robotics
Unified Embodied VLM Reasoning with Robotic Action via Autoregressive Discretized Pre-training
General-purpose robotic systems operating in open-world environments must achieve both broad generalization and high-precision action execution, a combination that remains challenging for existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. While large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) improve semantic generalization, insufficient embodied reasoning leads to brittle behavior, and conversely, strong reasoning alone is inadequate without precise control. To provide a decoupled and quantitative assessment of this bottleneck, we introduce Embodied Reasoning Intelligence Quotient (ERIQ), a large-scale embodied reasoning benchmark in robotic manipulation, comprising 6K+ question-answer pairs across four reasoning dimensions. By decoupling reasoning from execution, ERIQ enables systematic evaluation and reveals a strong positive correlation between embodied reasoning capability and end-to-end VLA generalization. To bridge the gap from reasoning to precise execution, we propose FACT, a flow-matching-based action tokenizer that converts continuous control into discrete sequences while preserving high-fidelity trajectory reconstruction. The resulting GenieReasoner jointly optimizes reasoning and action in a unified space, outperforming both continuous-action and prior discrete-action baselines in real-world tasks. Together, ERIQ and FACT provide a principled framework for diagnosing and overcoming the reasoning-precision trade-off, advancing robust, general-purpose robotic manipulation.
2512.24125
Dec 2025Robotics
Compositional Diffusion with Guided Search for Long-Horizon Planning
Generative models have emerged as powerful tools for planning, with compositional approaches offering particular promise for modeling long-horizon task distributions by composing together local, modular generative models. This compositional paradigm spans diverse domains, from multi-step manipulation planning to panoramic image synthesis to long video generation. However, compositional generative models face a critical challenge: when local distributions are multimodal, existing composition methods average incompatible modes, producing plans that are neither locally feasible nor globally coherent. We propose Compositional Diffusion with Guided Search (CDGS), which addresses this mode averaging problem by embedding search directly within the diffusion denoising process. Our method explores diverse combinations of local modes through population-based sampling, prunes infeasible candidates using likelihood-based filtering, and enforces global consistency through iterative resampling between overlapping segments. CDGS matches oracle performance on seven robot manipulation tasks, outperforming baselines that lack compositionality or require long-horizon training data. The approach generalizes across domains, enabling coherent text-guided panoramic images and long videos through effective local-to-global message passing. More details: https://cdgsearch.github.io/
2601.00126
Dec 2025Robotics
GR-Dexter Technical Report
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have enabled language-conditioned, long-horizon robot manipulation, but most existing systems are limited to grippers. Scaling VLA policies to bimanual robots with high degree-of-freedom (DoF) dexterous hands remains challenging due to the expanded action space, frequent hand-object occlusions, and the cost of collecting real-robot data. We present GR-Dexter, a holistic hardware-model-data framework for VLA-based generalist manipulation on a bimanual dexterous-hand robot. Our approach combines the design of a compact 21-DoF robotic hand, an intuitive bimanual teleoperation system for real-robot data collection, and a training recipe that leverages teleoperated robot trajectories together with large-scale vision-language and carefully curated cross-embodiment datasets. Across real-world evaluations spanning long-horizon everyday manipulation and generalizable pick-and-place, GR-Dexter achieves strong in-domain performance and improved robustness to unseen objects and unseen instructions. We hope GR-Dexter serves as a practical step toward generalist dexterous-hand robotic manipulation.
2512.24210
Dec 2025Robotics
