The paper introduces $R^3$, a post‑training method that converts vision‑language models into robotic reasoners by first mid‑training on expert reasoning traces and then refining them with single‑step rubric‑based reinforcement learning. $R^3$ enables free‑form language reasoning to guide low‑level manipulation policies, improving exploration, generalization, and performance on long‑horizon tasks in Language Table and simulated bimanual grocery packing benchmarks. The approach outperforms instruction‑only imitation learning baselines and demonstrates that natural language reasoning can serve as a test‑time compute mechanism for steering robotic actions.
By Lehong Wu, Yuxiao Qu, Zheyuan Hu, Ivan Zhang, Limin Wei, Zackory Erickson, Aviral Kumar
Reasoning in language allows foundation models to spend more test-time compute on hard problems, such as those requiring decomposition, constraint tracking, and prediction of future consequences. Whet...
arXiv:2608. 11739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The prevailing recipe for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models couples a pretrained VLM with a separately trained flow-matching action expert.
By Yicheng Liu, Zibin Dong, Baijun Ye, Tianyuan Yuan, Tao Jiang, Anqi Yang, Shicheng Cao, Haonan Liu, Yue Sun, Zihan Guo, Xiao Liu, Dong Ke, Changxun Pan, Chenru Wu, Tailai Cheng, Xiaoshu Ren, Xinlei Zhang, Jianning Cui, Zijie Zhao, Haoyu Zhang, Kaiming Xu, Haodong Yang, Bowen Zhang, Jiahui Niu, Shaoting Zhu, Shiduo Zhang, Hang Zhao
arXiv:2601. 20334v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robotic manipulation has increasingly adopted vision-language-action (VLA) models, which achieve strong performance but typically require task-specific demonstrations and fine-tuning, and often generalize poorly under domain shift.
By Brian Y. Tsui, Alan Y. Fang, Tiffany J. Hwu
arXiv:2609.38057v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Improving robot policies on new tasks without collecting additional expert demonstrations remains a central challenge in robot learning. World action m...
By Shiyang Zhou, Xionghao Wu, Wenbo Li, Shenghe Zheng, Jiyao Zhang, Songsong Yu, Yijun Yang, Jianhui Liu, Haoze Sun, Senqiao Yang, Li Jiang, Jingyong Su, Haoyang Huang, Zhuotao Tian
OmniBrain-0 is a lightweight, unified embodied agent that coordinates manipulation and navigation through a shared high‑level decision model. It integrates task understanding, planning, progress tracking, and feedback‑driven recovery, and is trained via embodied pretraining, domain‑specialized agent distillation, and multi‑teacher on‑policy distillation. The framework also introduces Rubric‑Guided Recursive Self‑Improvement, a data flywheel that refines rubrics and trajectories for continual domain‑expert updates, enabling efficient transfer and consolidation of embodied capabilities across multiple benchmarks and real‑world tasks.
By Xiaomi Embodied Intelligence Team, Yuechen Luo (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Chong He (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Fang Li (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Shaoqing Xu (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Jingkai Wang (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Menglun Su (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Jiaxin Liu (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Shengyin Jiang (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Zhiyi Lai (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Long Chen (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Longlong Wang (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Liang Hu (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Haochen Liu (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Yuncheng Jiang (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Hongwei Xie (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Jieming Cui (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Hanbing Li (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Junjie Huang (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Zhixiang Duan (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Hexin Zhang (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Weixiang Liang (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Ying Gong (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Yuhan Wang (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Yong Pan (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Pengna Li (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Kangyi Wu (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Ken Deng (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Kun Ma (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Fuxi Wen (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Zhi-xin Yang (University of Macau, Tsinghua University), Hangjun Ye (University of Macau, Tsinghua University)
The paper evaluates GPT‑6‑Astra’s performance across 12 robotic benchmarks, showing it achieves unprecedented results when using in‑context learning from training‑set demonstrations. It highlights the benefits and costs of a dual‑system architecture (high‑level reasoning and low‑level control) and identifies practical gaps in real‑world deployment, such as expensive demonstration collection and physical constraints. The authors propose a new benchmark prototype that derives tasks from real‑world needs, omits in‑domain demos, and measures agents against a continuously running world clock.
By SenseNova, Joint Research Team, :, Zhongang Cai, Ziang Cao, Tailai Chen, Han Chong Chua, Linjun Dai, Hanming Deng, Hokin Deng, Haiwen Diao, Chenjing Ding, Weichen Fan, Xiao Fu, Zerui Gong, Chenyang Gu, Zexin He, Zhi Hou, Bo Li, Qinyue Li, Quanzhou Li, Xiaowan Li, Zhichao Liao, Dahua Lin, Zilong Lin, Bo Liu, Chunxiao Liu, Pengfei Liu, Tianqi Liu, Ziwei Liu, Chen Change Loy, Lewei Lu, Jiapeng Luo, Yuexiao Ma, Liang Pan, Xingang Pan, Oscar Qian, Ziyi Shang, Yuyao Shao, Dawei Su, Dacheng Tao, Qingyi Tao, Quan Wang, Ruisi Wang, Xiaogang Wang, Ziyi Wang, Beichen Wen, Donghao Wu, Jiaxu Wu, Silei Wu, Xiaoming Wu, Zhonghua Wu, Hongcan Xiao, Weiye Xu, Atsushi Yamashita, Lei Yang, Zhe Yang, Baiqiao Yin, Wanqi Yin, Hanfei Zhao, Tianbo Zhong, Long Zhuo, Jing Zuo
RoboAuto is a framework that enhances autonomous robot program search by explicitly incorporating physical understanding at the object, scene, and interaction levels. It uses a hierarchical knowledge base of executable skills and object-centric affordances, scene grounding to map knowledge to the current environment, and multi-stage planning with self-designed experiments to verify physical effects and resolve uncertainties. The approach achieves higher success rates than prior methods on multiple benchmark tasks and demonstrates transferability across simulators and embodiments.
By Buzhao Liu, Jianing Ye, Xiu Yuan, Yangtong Feng, Chengsong Huang, Tyler Dinh, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, Ning Zhang, Chongjie Zhang
arXiv:2608. 03701v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World-action modeling has emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic control, as it empowers models to go beyond reacting to observations and anticipate how a scene will evolve.
By Fan Yang, Yuting Su, Xiaobo Wang, Yuncheng You, Fugui Fan, Yuting Wu, Minghui Wu, Chenxu Zhao, JiaHong Ning, Peiguang Jing
Recently, LLM-based autonomous agents have shown strong capabilities in iteratively generating, evaluating, and refining executable solutions. In robotic manipulation, Code-as-Policy lets these agents...
The paper introduces SUN (Semantically UNified) Programs, typed executables that translate grounded relations into optimal control objectives, satisfaction predicates, and learning rewards. Using the Kuafu harness, a foundation model orchestrates scene preparation, verification, residual reinforcement learning, and data generation, repairing candidate programs and calibrating reward weights. Across nine multi‑stage manipulation tasks, Kuafu achieves an 82.03% success rate, outperforms learned baselines, generates demonstrations 10.57× faster than human teleoperation, and transfers zero‑shot to physical Franka and Kinova robots.
By Weiqi Wang, Zhi Li, Yudong Lei, David Martinez, Xiaofeng Gao, Yuxin Jiang, Chenfanfu Jiang, Yingnian Wu, Demetri Terzopoulos, Ran Gong
arXiv:2512.01946v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Robust robotic manipulation requires reliable failure detection and recovery. Although recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show promise in r...
By Paul Pacaud, Ricardo Garcia, Shizhe Chen, Cordelia Schmid