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. 15275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent robot foundation models operate with single-step or short-history visuomotor context.
By Yunfan Jiang, Yevgen Chebotar, Ruijie Zheng, Fengyuan Hu, Yunhao Ge, Jimmy Wu, Tianyuan Dai, Scott Reed, Li Fei-Fei, Yuke Zhu, Linxi "Jim" Fan
arXiv:2607. 02466v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are fundamentally bottlenecked by the scarcity of expert demonstrations -- triplets of observations, instructions, and actions that are costly to collect at scale.
By Junhao Shi, Siyin Wang, Xiaopeng Yu, Li Ji, Jingjing Gong, Xipeng Qiu
arXiv:2606. 09811v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World-action models have emerged as a promising paradigm for robot manipulation, jointly modeling visual scene dynamics and actions to inject physical priors into policy learning.
By Jisong Cai, Long Ling, Shiwei Chu, Zhongshan Liu, Jiayue Kang, Zhixuan Liang, Wenjie Xu, Yinan Mao, Weinan Zhang, Xiaokang Yang, Ru Ying, Ran Zheng, Yao Mu
arXiv:2606. 00054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in generalizable embodied control has been driven by large-scale pretraining of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.
By Zhiyuan Feng, Qixiu Li, Huizhi Liang, Rushuai Yang, Yichao Shen, Zhiying Du, Zhaowei Zhang, Yu Deng, Li Zhao, Hao Zhao, Zongqing Lu, Oier Mees, Marc Pollefeys, Jiaolong Yang, Baining Guo
arXiv:2606. 10614v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic foundation models pre-trained on human demonstration videos have shown promise, but a significant embodiment gap remains when the resulting policies are deployed on real robots.
By Beomjun Kim, Seong Hyeon Park, Seunghoon Sim, Seungjun Moon, Sanghyeok Lee, Jinwoo Shin
arXiv:2505. 04999v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning robot control policies from demonstrations typically requires action-labeled expert data, which is expensive to collect through teleoperation.
By Anthony Liang, Pavel Czempin, Matthew M. Hong, Yutai Zhou, Jingzhen Wang, Erdem Biyik, Stephen Tu
Generalizable robot manipulation requires policies that can anticipate how visual scenes evolve while executing language instructions. While recent Vision-Language-Action models benefit from large-scale pretraining, their predominantly static pretraining objectives provide limited supervision for physical dynamics and temporal causality, leaving control-relevant knowledge to be learned from downstream robot demonstrations.
arXiv:2608. 11605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) couple future visual prediction with robot action generation, enabling policies to model how the physical world evolves during interaction.
By Jiakai Huang, Zhongbo Wu, Zheng Zhang, Zihan Wang, Shan You, Tao Huang
arXiv:2606. 02745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action models (VLAs) are promising general-purpose robot policies, but adapting them to new tasks typically requires costly task-specific teleoperation data.
By Jaehyeon Son, Junhyun Kim, Kyle Kam, Jeremiah Coholich, Seok Joon Kim, Jinhoo Kim, Chris Dongjoo Kim, Jaemin Cho, Dieter Fox, Zsolt Kira
Recently, a few works have made early attempts to study test-time scaling for embodied tasks. However, two major challenges remain unsolved: (1) reasoning can effectively improve the performance of the policy, but its scaling mechanism has seldom been studied; (2) historical information is essential, as embodied tasks are inherently long-horizon and sequential, making sole reliance on current observations for action scaling inadequate due to the lack of historical context utilization.
arXiv:2607. 04265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World-action (WA) models can generate long-horizon action chunks for general-purpose robotic manipulation, but they remain vulnerable to calibration, perception, and contact-dynamics errors in real-world precision tasks, often failing in the final few millimeters of alignment or insertion.
By Angen Ye, Weijie Ke, Xiaofeng Wang, Xinze Chen, Chaojun Ni, Guosheng Zhao, Boyuan Wang, Zheng Zhu, Junjie Xie, Dapeng Zhang