Humanoid robots hold great promise as general-purpose agents in human-centered environments, yet generalist vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models are not readily applicable to humanoid whole-body loco-manipulation. The high dimensionality and interdependence of humanoid motions make it challenging for conventional single-stage VLA architectures to coordinate locomotion, waist posture, and dual-arm manipulation effectively.
arXiv:2605. 31286v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world household robots require Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models that can acquire reusable manipulation skills across diverse objects, task conditions, and household environments.
By Taiyi Su, Jian Zhu, Tianjian Wang, Youzhang He, Zitai Huang, Jianjun Zhang, Chong Ma, Hanyang Wang, Tianjiao Zhang, Munan Yin, Weihao Ding, Yi Xu
arXiv:2511. 07820v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite the rise of billion-parameter foundation models trained across thousands of graphical processing units (GPUs), similar scaling gains have not been shown for humanoid control.
By Zhengyi Luo, Ye Yuan, Tingwu Wang, Chenran Li, Fernando Casta\~neda, Sirui Chen, Zi-Ang Cao, Jiefeng Li, David Minor, Qingwei Ben, Jinhyung Park, David Sami, Zi Wang, Xingye Da, Runyu Ding, Cyrus Hogg, Lina Song, Edy Lim, Eugene Jeong, Tairan He, Haoru Xue, Wenli Xiao, Simon Yuen, Jan Kautz, Yan Chang, Umar Iqbal, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Yuke Zhu
ULTRA is a unified framework for autonomous humanoid whole-body locomotion and manipulation that overcomes limitations of prior methods by combining a physics-driven neural retargeting algorithm with a multimodal controller. The retargeting algorithm translates large-scale motion capture data into physically plausible humanoid motions, while the controller learns to handle both dense motion references and sparse task specifications using a range of sensory inputs, from accurate motion-capture states to noisy egocentric vision. In simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid, ULTRA demonstrates improved generalization and robustness, enabling coordinated whole-body behavior from sparse intent without relying on test-time reference motions.
By Xialin He, Sirui Xu, Xinyao Li, Runpei Dong, Liuyu Bian, Yu-Xiong Wang, Liang-Yan Gui
arXiv:2510. 08807v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: From loco-motion to dextrous manipulation, humanoid robots have made remarkable strides in demonstrating complex full-body capabilities.
By Zhenyu Zhao, Hongyi Jing, Xiawei Liu, Jiageng Mao, Abha Jha, Hanwen Yang, Rong Xue, Sergey Zakharov, Vitor Guizilini, Yue Wang
arXiv:2605. 30226v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for grounding visual-language understanding into real-world robotic manipulation.
By Zhongxi Chen, Yifan Han, Yanming Shao, Huanming Liu, Congsheng Xu, Xiaoyu Chen, Yao Mu, Wenzhao Lian
The paper introduces VLAct, a Vision‑Language‑Action model that focuses on representation‑centric continued pre‑training rather than merely scaling robot data. VLAct is trained on diverse, multi‑embodiment robot data and preserves a broad VLM prior while encouraging shared action semantics across embodiments. Experiments across simulation, real‑world, and unseen‑embodiment settings show that VLAct consistently outperforms existing industrial VLA systems, achieving high success rates with only a modest compute budget and open‑source data.
By Senqiao Yang, Chengyao Wang, Yuxin Chen, Zixuan Wang, Longxiang Tang, Haokun Gui, Jinhui Ye, Changsheng Lu, Xiaoyang Wu, Mingkang Zhu, Pengguang Chen, Shu Liu, Zhuotao Tian, Hengshuang Zhao, Bei Yu, Jiaya Jia
The paper presents Real‑Time EXPO‑FT, a reinforcement learning framework that fine‑tunes large Vision‑Language‑Action models for real‑time robotic control. It separates slow, expressive action generation from fast, reactive edits, allowing a lightweight policy to adjust actions based on the latest observation. Experiments on the Kinetix benchmark and four dynamic real‑world tasks show that Real‑Time EXPO‑FT achieves superior performance, improving policy success rates from 42% to 97% with only ten minutes of online data and no human intervention.
By Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn
arXiv:2603. 13707v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humanoid loco-manipulation requires coordinated task-space motion planning with stable loco-manipulation command tracking under complex robot-environment dynamics and long-horizon tasks.
By Zhaoyuan Gu, Yipu Chen, Zimeng Chai, Alfred Cueva, Thong Nguyen, Yifan Wu, Huishu Xue, Minji Kim, Isaac Legene, Fukang Liu, KyoungMok Kim, Ayan Barula, Yongxin Chen, Ye Zhao
arXiv:2506. 04147v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Building capable household and industrial robots requires mastering the control of versatile, high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) systems such as mobile manipulators.
By Jiaheng Hu, Peter Stone, Roberto Mart\'in-Mart\'in
arXiv:2608. 20114v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mobile manipulation requires a robot to predict how locomotion and arm motion jointly alter future observations and control.
By Siyuan Ma, Boshi Zhang, Yutian Zhang, Qinglian Wu, Jiaqi Zhai, Dong Wei, Qiaojun Yu
HIL-UMI is a policy-guided Universal Manipulation Interface that enables robot‑free, human‑in‑the‑loop post‑training of vision‑language‑action models. By querying the current policy during handheld demonstrations and using an Energy Score to detect out‑of‑distribution states, it selectively collects new data and refines a progress‑based advantage estimator. The updated estimator then drives advantage‑conditioned behavioral cloning, improving performance on long‑horizon and precise manipulation tasks while reducing per‑frame collection time compared to HG‑DAgger.
By Zimu Han, Yiming Zeng, Jiyao Zhang, Zihao Zhao, Yuanfei Wang, Yixiang Jin, Shiqi Li, Shuangben Chen, Wei Huang, Ruodai Li, Hui Shen, Hao Dong