arXiv AI

Planning Takes More Than Token Prediction: Causal Plan for Benchmarking and Building Physically Grounded Embodied Reasoners

The paper argues that current embodied vision‑language planning benchmarks favor linguistic next‑token prediction over physically grounded next‑state reasoning, leading models to rely on language priors rather than true causal dependencies. To address this, the authors introduce Causal‑Plan‑Bench, a diagnostic suite covering four causal dimensions, and Causal‑Plan‑1M, a million‑scale corpus of explicit causal reasoning traces extracted from egocentric videos. Extensive experiments show that existing models perform poorly on these tasks, while a new model trained with a tailored recipe—Causal Planner based on Qwen3‑VL‑8B—achieves significant gains, demonstrating the feasibility of physically grounded causal reasoning.

arXiv AI
Jun 6

Causal Scaffolding for Physical Reasoning: A Benchmark for Causally-Informed Physical World Understanding in VLMs

arXiv:2606. 05966v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding and reasoning about the physical world is the foundation of intelligent behavior, yet state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) still fail at causal physical reasoning, often producing plausible but incorrect answers.

By Tianyi Tang, Zhuoyi Lin, Zeyu Feng, Tianyi Ma, Yew-Soon Ong, Ivor Tsang, Haiyan Yin
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

CausalWM: Causal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Embodied World Model

arXiv:2609.23184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied world models learn to predict future physical dynamics from visual observations and control signals, where physical knowledge is implicitly en...

By Ziming Xu, Shuang Liang, Ruobing Han, Ziqiao Xi, Mingxing Rao, Kun Zhou, Zijun Zhang, Yuchen Yan, Yufan Wei, Junbo Huang, Yifei Shao, Fang Nan, Biwei Huang
arXiv AI
Sep 24

AnchorReasoning: A Visual Grounding and Causal Reasoning Dataset in Long-Tail Autonomous Driving Scenarios

arXiv:2609. 28366v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) offer a promising approach to long-tail autonomous driving, but existing driving datasets provide limited supervision for connecting decision-critical visual evidence with reasoning and planning.

By Zhipeng Bao, Wenjie Zhao, Tianle Zhu, Haohua Que, Chence Yang, Geng Yuan, Qianwen Li
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Do Vision-Language-Action Models Mean What They Say? On the Role of Faithfulness in Embodied Reasoning

arXiv:2607. 04681v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied Chain-of-Thought has emerged as a promising mechanism to enhance robot decision-making and interpretability in black-box Vision-Language Action (VLA) models.

By Matthew Foutter, Matteo Cercola, Lena Wild, Yunshan Wang, Michelle Li, Daniele Gammelli, Marco Pavone
arXiv AI
3d ago

X-Planner: Event-Structured Task Planning for Embodied Intelligence

arXiv:2609.25187v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Task planning bridges high-level instructions and executable behavior in long-horizon manipulation, yet modern Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems...

By Howard Lu, Shalfun Li, Porter Pan, Cris, Lumen, Cyril, Eric Hu, Lily Li, Maeve Zhang, Rain Sun, Robert Wang, KZ Zheng, Viggo Chen, Tim Ding, Regsis Cheng, YJ Xiao, Kian, Hai Lin, Alan Song, Elise Ma, Gody Li, Victor Yao, Yohann Tang, Ingrid Yu, Jason He, James Wang, Ryan Yu, Ping Yang, Chris Pan, Vincent Chen, Roy Gan, Hao Wang, Qian Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
6d ago

CCRV-Bench: Constraint-Based Evaluation of Causal Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

CCRV-Bench is a constraint‑driven benchmark designed to evaluate visual causal reasoning in vision‑language models on single‑image physical scenarios. It assesses four causal task dimensions—causal relation discovery, state prediction, causal diagnosis, and intervention—while applying constraints such as entity symbolization, spatial grounding, factual adversarial constraints, and minimalist output constraints to reduce shortcut learning. Experiments on 15 multimodal models reveal that constraint sensitivity varies by task and model, with intervention and spatial grounding having the largest impact and factual adversarial constraints improving causal diagnosis across models.

By Linyuan Gao, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang
arXiv AI
Jun 11

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

arXiv:2606. 11324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Embodied-R1.

By Yifu Yuan, Yaoting Huang, Xianze Yao, Yutong Li, Shuoheng Zhang, Linqi Han, Pengyi Li, Jiangeng Sun, Wenting Jia, Zhao Zhang, Yuhao Liu, Ruihao Liao, Yucheng Hu, Qiyu Wu, Yuxiao Li, Zibin Dong, Fei Ni, Yan Zheng, Shuyang Gu, Yi Ma, Hongyao Tang, Han Hu, Jianye Hao
arXiv AI
Jun 29

EXPLORE-Bench: Egocentric Scene Prediction with Long-Horizon Reasoning

arXiv:2603. 09731v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly considered as a foundation for embodied agents, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably reason about the long-term physical consequences of actions from an egocentric viewpoint.

By Chengjun Yu, Xuhan Zhu, Chaoqun Du, Pengfei Yu, Wei Zhai, Yang Cao, Zheng-Jun Zha