Embodied foundation models are expected to benefit from data scaling like large language models, but face a much tighter data bottleneck. Teleoperated real-robot trajectories remain the dominant pretraining source due to their precise action supervision and embodiment alignment, yet their scalability is limited by high collection cost, acquisition difficulty, and low behavioral and environmental diversity.
arXiv:2607. 27549v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in large-scale imitation learning for robot manipulation has been driven by leveraging datasets across a wide range of robot embodiments.
By Ajay Sridhar, Jensen Gao, Jonathan Yang, Jean Mercat, Suneel Belkhale, Dorsa Sadigh
Recent progress in large-scale imitation learning for robot manipulation has been driven by leveraging datasets across a wide range of robot embodiments. However, achieving significant cross-embodiment transfer is often still challenging.
arXiv:2607. 11270v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning, at its core, extends beyond memorization to the ability to reason and solve novel problems by navigating a space of possibilities.
By Peijun Tang, Shangjin Xie, Baifu Huang, Binyan Sun, Haotian Yang, Kuncheng Luo, Weiqi Jin, Shilin Fang, Jianan Wang
AtomEgo investigates how to integrate large-scale egocentric human interaction data into embodied foundation model pre‑training. The study uses a curated 2,659‑hour corpus and a scalable data pipeline to evaluate three co‑training paradigms across vision‑language‑action and world‑action architectures. Results show that the benefit of egocentric data depends on both its scale and the quality of alignment with robotic embodiment, offering practical guidance for scalable ego‑robot pre‑training.
By Di Wu, Dongchen Zheng, Junhe Sheng, Zhongxing Wei, Songxin Zhang, Zejian Xie, Xiaoquan Sun, Junyang Zheng, Zhuoyang Song, Jiaxing Zhang, Jiayu Chen
arXiv:2604.19734v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Scaling humanoid foundation models is bottlenecked by the scarcity of robotic data. While massive egocentric human data offers a scalable alt...
By Boyu Chen, Yi Chen, Lu Qiu, Jerry Bai, Yuying Ge, Yixiao Ge
EmbodiedMidtrain bridges the gap between Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) and Vision‑Language‑Action Models (VLAs) by first analyzing the distribution mismatch between their data. It introduces a lightweight proximity estimator that selects VLA‑aligned samples from a large VLM pool, creating the EmbodiedMidtrain‑1M dataset used to mid‑train VLMs before VLA fine‑tuning. Experiments on simulated and real‑world robot tasks show consistent performance gains across different VLM backbones and VLA action heads, with early training steps already benefiting from the improved initialization.
By Yiyang Du, Zhanqiu Guo, Haochen Zhang, Annabella Macaluso, Xin Ye, Liu Ren, Yonatan Bisk, Chenyan Xiong
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:2606. 24472v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have made rapid progress in generalist robot manipulation by harnessing semantic knowledge from pretrained vision-language backbones, but their visual tokens remain grounded in 2D image coordinates rather than the calibrated geometry of the robot's cameras -- a mismatch especially pronounced in multi-camera setups, where views are coupled by known intrinsics and extrinsics yet processed as independent images.
By Yue Peng, Yongzhe Zhao, Artur Habuda, Khuyen Pham, Yanheng Zhu, Tran Nguyen Le, Fares Abu-Dakka, Li Guo
arXiv:2607. 13597v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models inherit rich semantic representations from pretrained Vision-Language Models, yet fine-tuning on limited robot demonstrations degrades this structure and undermines generalization.
By Yuan Xu, Youheng Shi, Chengyang Li, Wentao Zhu, Yizhou Wang
The paper investigates the geometric structure of task-relevant variables inside vision‑language‑action (VLA) policies for robotic manipulation. By combining controlled experiments, natural rollouts, linear probes, and activation interventions, the authors identify seven key concepts and show that their representations are largely multi‑dimensional, shaped by constraints such as joint limits and task geometry. These geometric patterns are consistent across simulated and real‑world VLA models, and the authors illustrate how steering along these geometries can be used to guide policy behavior.
By Mozes Jacobs, Aiden Swann, Mathilde Papillon, Siddharth Boppana, Fenil R. Doshi, Usha Bhalla, Thomas Icard, Matt Feiszli, Thomas McGrath, Vasudev Shyam, Demba Ba, Leon Bergen, Nina Miolane, Owen Lewis, Jack Merullo, Ekdeep Singh Lubana, Atticus Geiger, Matthew Kowal, Thomas Fel
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