Embodied
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A Cross-Scenario Survey and Analysis of Self-Evolving Multimodal Agents
Abstract
Recent work shows that multimodal agents increasingly self-improve without recurring human annotation. However, each self-improvement mechanism is designed and evaluated within a single scenario, leaving its preconditions unverified under cross-scenario transfer. This survey investigates the structural source of asymmetric mechanism transfer across four scenarios: multimodal reasoning, multimodal generation, GUI and Web navigation, and embodied manipulation. We first formalize the self-evolving multimodal agent by four criteria and a differentia of self-reference, and adopt the three-stage self-evolving loop of experience generation, feedback acquisition, and update consolidation as our analytical framework to position the scenarios along ceilings on rollout count and feedback fidelity. Comparing self-evolving with fixed loops within each scenario separates the limitations that the scenario imposes from those inherent in the self-evolving design. We then recast each mechanism as a trade-off that raises a scarce factor by presupposing a task-structural resource, such as output equivalence or checkable outcomes, and judge it portable, conditional, blocked, or redundant across scenarios. We attribute the asymmetry to divergent combinations of scarce factors and resources across opposite transfer directions, and identify the matched-budget measurements that could overturn these still untested verdicts.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14256
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LEASH: Stay Safe in Agentic Robotics
2026-11-10 14:06:20Qinfeng Zhu, Weiguang Zhao, Ke Sun, Xihao Guo, Yunxi Jiang, Rui Zhang, Lei Fan, Kaizhu HuangAbstract
Foundation models such as GPT and Claude have shown strong capabilities in spatial understanding and embodied intelligence. These advances make agentic robotics a promising path toward artificial general intelligence in robotics. However, we find that using foundation models to control robots poses serious safety risks, and comprehensive safety evaluation is still lacking. We introduce RoboRisk, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating safety in agentic robotics. Its 92 simulated tasks and 13 physical-robot tasks fall into five categories: Task-level Refusal (T), Plan Repair (P), Execution-time Hazard (E), Injection (I), and Sequential Memory (S). Prior benchmarks cover at most two of these categories, and several evaluate only text outputs. In contrast, RoboRisk covers all five and executes every task in closed loop. We evaluate six state-of-the-art foundation models on RoboRisk: GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, Claude Opus 5.5, Gemini 4 Argon, and Grok 4.7. These models generally show high harm rates. We also evaluate two robot-specific APIs: the Dream API and PokeBot's RoboAPI. We further propose the Lease-Enforced Agentic Safety Harness (LEASH), which offers essential safety infrastructure for agentic robotics and can be integrated into nearly any agentic architecture. LEASH leverages a decision model (Jev or OpenAI's Decisions API) to implement task, action, and commit gates, which review the task, each action, and each irreversible operation in their visual context. The planner and all three gates share a common safety policy. Experiments on RoboRisk in simulation and on physical robots show that LEASH effectively reduces harm across all six foundation models. It largely preserves their task completion performance and adds little time and token overhead.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14115
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Game-Enhanced Embodied Learning with Event and Foresight Pretraining
2026-11-10 09:46:21Lianlei Shan, Han Jin, Yaunchao Ma, Xinpeng Chen, Linhao Zhou, Xin BinAbstract
Human gameplay supplies paired observations, actions, and visual consequences that can supplement robot-policy training. We study event-and-foresight pretraining for InternVLA-A1.5, combining recorded keyboard/mouse event prediction with history-conditioned visual supervision through a frozen video model. Coverage-preserving anchor selection constructs one-second targets, and an attention mask prevents teacher-forced future actions from entering foresight queries. The selected corpus contains 394 recordings across 20 games, with 223.36 hours of recorded timestamp span and 2,072,084 training anchors. After 12,400 game-pretraining updates, we compare the resulting initialization with the public base under the same suite-specific robot fine-tuning protocol. Across four LIBERO suites, aggregate success increases from 1,718/2,000 (85.90%) to 1,811/2,000 (90.55%), a gain of 4.65 percentage points. Suite gains are 9.2, 6.8, 0.2, and 2.4 points on Spatial, Object, Goal, and Long. The 40-task breakdown shows 24 improvements, 10 declines, and six ties. These results support the practical value of the complete game-pretraining stage in this evaluated setting, while revealing heterogeneous task outcomes. The comparison includes additional optimization and does not isolate the effects of game data, the two objectives, or training variability.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13819
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Softness is something you also need! Why compliance helps control: information metrics of a passive walker with compliant ankle
2026-11-10 09:17:17Fabio Bonsignorio, Elisabetta Barletta, Sorin Dragomir, Francesco Esposito, Enrica ZereikAbstract
A great gap in adaptivity, flexibility, and dexterity still exists between intelligent robots, whether they are made of rigid or (partially) compliant components, and their naturally evolved animal and vegetal counterparts. One reason could be of `paradigm' nature. On the one hand, most robots (both rigid and soft) are still designed by following a `Cartesian' approach, with top-down control and a clear mind-body separation. Designing artificial agents on the basis of the principles that we observe in biology is not an easy task. The principles of organization of animals and plants rely on morphological computation and emergence of fit behaviors from loosely coupled networks of embodied agents. Modeling and control require radically new approaches. In this paper we briefly recall and explain some seminal mathematical results linking information metrics and dynamics of the agents, already published years ago; we integrate them with some recent methods developed by us and by the community, we highlight some brief remarks about their relevance and we hint to our current and near future work towards finding concrete and efficient ways for the modeling and control of completely or partially compliant artificial agents and for a better understanding of physical intelligence in nature. We present a technical note summarizing phase-space volume calculations for inverted-pendulum and passive-dynamic walking models, following our proposed framework. Starting from the McGeer compass gait, we introduce knee-ankle compliance, foot-rocker effects, and a Ruina-style compass gait with distributed leg inertia. Standard heel-strike maps are derived and used in the estimation of viable phase-space volumes $W(\gamma)$, based on a state-dependent Monte-Carlo and Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces methods. We show how the methods based on RKHS allow deeper and more subtle analysis.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13779
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A computational framework for understanding embodied plans
2026-11-10 07:15:38Aalap D. Shah, Basil Saeed, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Tobias Gerstenberg, Hyowon Gweon, Ilker YildirimAbstract
Reasoning about people's plans and goals based on their actions is fundamental to human social interaction and essential for cooperative, embodied artificial intelligence. Formalizing this capacity in naturalistic, embodied settings has been a longstanding challenge. Here, we present GenEA, a novel agent representation capable of reasoning over multi-step, long-horizon embodied plans. At the heart of GenEA lies a multilevel state-space that couples the coarse biomechanics of an articulated body and its interactions with nearby objects by extending the task-and-motion planning framework from robotics with simulation-based intuitive physics. By embedding this state-space in a generative model, GenEA yields a joint probability distribution over goals and embodied plans. Across several experiments spanning the qualitatively distinct domains of object manipulation and navigation, featuring diverse tasks and multiple behavioral measures, we show that GenEA, through simple transformations of this joint distribution, recapitulates how humans reason about embodied plans. Crucially, GenEA consistently outperforms strong alternative models, including plausible heuristics, standard task-and-motion planning, and a state-of-the-art vision-language model. GenEA thereby offers a new perspective on the architecture of human reasoning and social cognition, suggesting that embodied artificial intelligence systems seeking to seamlessly interact with humans should adopt GenEA-like generative models of action planning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13669
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FlashMotion: Ultra-Fast Long-Term 3D Motion Generation
2026-11-10 06:12:58Kaixing Yang, Xulong Tang, Ronghui Li, Xiangyue Zhang, Ziqiao Peng, Mingshuang Luo, Chenxi Zhao, Haoyu Wu, Ju Fan, Hongyan Liu, Puwei Wang, Zijiao Zeng, Jun HeAbstract
3D human motion generation plays a crucial role in game development, extended reality (XR), digital humans, and embodied simulation. Beyond motion generation, practical pipelines include rigging, retargeting, and rendering, making ultra-fast long-term 3D motion generation without compromising quality valuable for real-time interactive applications. Despite promising progress, high-quality long-horizon motion generation under tight inference budgets remains challenging, owing to 2 coupled bottlenecks: (1) generative strategies that require many sampling steps for high-quality 3D motion generation and (2) model architectures with substantial per-step computational and memory costs for long sequences. We present FlashMotion, a co-designed framework for high-quality long-horizon 3D motion generation under a strict inference budget, covering text-to-motion, music-to-dance, and speech-to-gesture tasks. To enhance trajectory-level efficiency, we introduce a 3D motion-space MeanFlow formulation with kinematic and dynamic consistency constraints for few-step generation, together with an Adaptive Soft masking mechanism for temporally coherent motion editing. To improve per-step efficiency, we design a lightweight non-autoregressive BiMamba architecture with condition-guided state selection and AdaIN-based condition fusion mechanism, enhancing cross-modal alignment and generalization to longer motion sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlashMotion achieves overall state-of-the-art performance in both quality and efficiency across text-to-motion, speech-to-gesture, and music-to-dance generation. Code is available at FlashMotion (this https URL).
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13626
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From Egocentric Human Video to Robot Manipulation in the Era of Embodied Intelligence
2026-11-10 05:36:17Yi Wang, Jingqiu Wu, Lei Yao, Zhaoshuo Li, Haoyu Zhu, Yirui Zhou, Huaiyuan Xu, Ying Zheng, Chuang Yang, Lap-Pui ChauAbstract
Egocentric human video (EHV) records close-range hand-object interaction (HOI) and the temporal structure of everyday activities, offering a potentially scalable source of experience for robot manipulation. Using this experience for robot control requires recovering useful supervision without recorded robot actions and accounting for differences in morphology, viewpoint, and action space. We define Ego2Robot learning as the process of learning or adapting robot manipulation policies from EHV, organized into four learning paradigms: explicit embodiment transfer, explicit action and task supervision, egocentric video representation pretraining, and latent action and dynamics modeling. The four paradigms differ in what they derive from human video: robot-format demonstrations, interpretable supervision, visual representations, or predictive models of actions and dynamics. For each paradigm, we trace what EHV information is extracted, how robot policies use it, and when the additional data is required. Besides, we review the benchmark datasets that cover EHV, robot demonstrations, and synthetic and simulated resources. This paper links EHV data's contribution to the task information preserved and the robot-specific grounding used during training or deployment. Finally, we identify challenges in physical feasibility, agent coordination, in-context adaptation, controlled evaluation, and predictive control.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13610
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Towards Reliable VLM Judges: State-Conditional Invariance and Presentation-Aware Diagnostics
2026-11-10 05:15:50Qinan Zhang, Xinyu Wang, Qihang Jin, Tianyuan Wang, Hongbing Luo, Pengfei Li, Wenjun Lv, Yu Kang, Jian DiAbstract
Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as automated judges for multimodal and embodied tasks, yet aggregate accuracy or consistency alone does not reveal whether a judge changes its verdict for the right reason. We propose State-Conditional Invariance (SCI), a reliability principle requiring a judge to remain stable under semantics-preserving changes in presentation while responding to causal interventions that change the task outcome. We instantiate SCI in GridWM-Judge, a simulator-grounded diagnostic benchmark built from deterministic MiniGrid trajectories with aligned Full, evidence-removal, and counterfactual variants, plus presentation and representation probes. Across five diagnostic tasks, GridWM-Judge tests local perception, action-conditioned transitions, presentation stability, representation exchangeability, and Full-CF causal discrimination. Our diagnostic evaluations reveal heterogeneous failure modes, including sensitivity to evidence presentation and encoding, low activation on successful trajectories, and weak paired counterfactual discrimination. Perception-controlled analyses further indicate that visual grounding and objective recovery are substantial, model-dependent bottlenecks. These results motivate jointly reporting correctness, presentation stability, and causal sensitivity instead of relying on a single score.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13596
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Seeing Isn't Enough: Unlocking Visual Reasoning by Bridging the Reasoning-Access Gap with TIGER
2026-11-10 03:36:09Gregory Kang Ruey Lau, Minh Huynh Nguyen, Bryan Kian Hsiang LowAbstract
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) inherit strong textual reasoning capabilities from their language backbones and text pretraining, but often fail to apply the same level of competency to visual inputs. We show that this degradation cannot be attributed to only perception failures, by evaluating models on semantically-equivalent text and rendered-text image inputs: models can accurately read text in the images and recover near-text performance when provided their own transcriptions, but just cannot reason well on the images directly. We characterize this discrepancy as a modality reasoning-access gap, where models fail to route perceived visual content into existing reasoning machinery accessible with text. To bridge this, we propose TIGER (Text-to-Image Gap-targeted training for Enhanced Reasoning), which first mines synthetic modality counterfactuals where a model succeeds on a text problem but fails when provided the corresponding rendered image, and post-trains the model on the image input via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), along with SFT and DPO variants. Importantly, although trained exclusively on synthetic rendered-text images with no multimodal annotations, TIGER results in model performance improvements across diverse real-world visual benchmarks including geometric diagrams (MathVerse), multi-disciplinary sciences (EMMA, MMMU), complex charts (ChartQAPro), and embodied spatial reasoning (RoboSpatial-Home). TIGER also complements existing state-of-the-art RLVR visual reasoning methods, yielding further performance gains. Analysis involving reasoning-subspace activation and activation patching provide support indicating that TIGER helps to align visual-to-reasoning pathways toward text reasoning states. Our implementation is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10552
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PhysMoE: Fast Spatial Grounding with Single-Token Coordinate Representation in Modality-Decoupled VLMs
2026-11-08 16:00:02Ruimeng Liu, Denan Liang, Ruofei Bai, Fuming Zhang, Kuan Xu, Shenghai Yuan, Lihua XieAbstract
Embodied Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are backbones for robotic planning and manipulation. However, for coordinate prediction in grounding tasks, existing architectures suffer from two distinct bottlenecks: discrete tokenization disrupts spatial continuity with high decoding latency, while standard point regression fails on multi-contact affordances and irregularly shaped targets. To resolve these challenges, we propose PhysMoE, introducing three core contributions: (1) sharing lower layers for multimodal context while routing upper layers to specialized spatial (pixel) and linguistic (text) experts by physical modality, eliminating gradient interference; (2) encoding each coordinate as a single token by reusing the visual encoder's learned positional embeddings, injecting 2D spatial priors to natively align coordinates with visual features and ease training; and (3) differentiable Signed Distance Field (SDF) supervision on pointing, accommodating affordances and irregular geometries without costly mask decoders. Compared to the base model, PhysMoE achieves a 15.7% average gain and an 8.31x throughput speedup across 9 coordinate-based grounding benchmarks (trajectory, affordance, and localization), while preserving multimodal understanding and reasoning across 11 text-based embodied benchmarks.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13000
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Embodied Science Agents: Making Embodied Experimental Design Learnable
2026-11-07 07:52:16Yihang Che, Zhongwei Yu, Yang Li, Xingyu Lu, Hongxia Yu, Jun WangAbstract
Recent advances in large models have accelerated AI for Science toward agentic science, where AI agents autonomously conduct scientific discovery. Realising this vision requires closing the loop between computational reasoning and physical experimentation, positioning self-driving laboratories (SDLs) as critical enablers. However, existing SDLs exhibit a fundamental paradox: foundation model integration has increased linguistic sophistication while severing physical grounding. By treating models as disembodied planners that output symbolic workflows for separate robotic systems, current architectures inherently block the development of embodied experimental intuition. We argue that overcoming this paradox requires embedding \emph{learnability} along three interdependent axes: cognitive learnability (learning what to investigate), experimental learnability (learning where to search), and embodied learnability (learning how to act). Building on this view, we introduce the Embodied Science Agent (ESA), which unifies digital intelligence with physical embodiment through three synergistic components: a Digital Agent that provides cognitive and experimental learnability via memory-based reasoning and Bayesian optimisation, an Embodied Agent that provides embodied learnability via generalisable instrument control, and an Embodied Unified Interface for seamless coordination. We validated ESA in autonomous wastewater treatment experiments, navigating over 200 million possible conditions. Through 15 continuous rounds, ESA raised the final solution transmittance from 82\% to 99.7\%, corresponding to a 98.5\% reduction in residual dye concentration and near-complete decolourisation, while its learned visuomotor policies generalised across varying instrument placements, a promising step toward next-generation SDLs for autonomous scientific discovery.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12958
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Computer-Use Agents Are Embodied Generalists
Abstract
In many areas of AI, general-purpose models have increasingly replaced handcrafted methods and specialized architectures. We argue that embodied AI is poised for a similar shift. Our key claim is that embodied tasks can be formulated as interaction with digital software. Specifically, we build software that renders an agent's view of a physical environment on a screen and provides controls for acting in it. A computer-use agent (CUA) can then perform embodied tasks through the same screenshots and keyboard and mouse actions that it uses to operate ordinary software. Using a single CUA design and changing only the software, our entries win first-, second-, third-, and sixth-place prizes across four ECCV workshop competitions, without any competition-specific agent tuning. These results suggest that the skills CUAs learn on software, such as visual grounding, precise clicking, and exploration, already carry over to embodied tasks, giving CUAs a far broader scope in embodied AI than previously realized. We therefore advocate that computer-use agents can be embodied generalists. Further, we advocate that, by following the training strategy that made computer-use agents general, embodied AI can converge on a single general model as well, ushering in a new era of general embodied AI. Website: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09847
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Toward the Era of Agentic Embodied Intelligence
2026-11-06 08:02:15Chao Liang, Ke Chen, Fengxiaoxiao Li, Shibo Huang, Yufeng Sun, Zhaokai Yin, Jianhuan Lai, Haozhe Feng, Chenghuan Jia, Zhipeng ZhangAbstract
Foundation models increasingly guide robot actions, yet sustained autonomy requires efficient control and failure recovery. We introduce A2-MEAS, an embodied multi-agent framework built around code as a scaling interface. Learned correction codes combine corrective language, spatial evidence, execution history, and action proposals. MetaBrain provides training supervision and runtime guidance. A correction encoder and adapter absorb this knowledge into policy weights during training, while fresh codes adapt behavior with frozen weights at deployment. The action model, A2-WLA, adds motion-aware history and a latent world model to a vision-language-action policy. Surprisingly, this simple design with action pretraining and task specialization reaches 0.5755 Q-score on the 50-task BEHAVIOR 2026 public subset before online correction, 2.21x the 2025 winner's reported 0.2605 across different benchmark editions and training configurations. On all 100 BEHAVIOR 2026 public tasks, A2-MEAS achieves 0.6411 Q-score and 45.40% task success. On RoboTwin 2.0, A2-WLA achieves 93.98% average success, rising to 95.05% with the complete system. Across 12 real-robot tasks in five household settings, A2-WLA achieves 57.92% average success versus 26.67% for pi0.5. In long-horizon pour-over coffee preparation, a history-conditioned adapter raises post-failure completion at two filter-handling steps from 14% to 94% and from 8% to 82%, compared with A2-WLA retries. Our training infrastructure delivers 427.1 samples per second, 4.03x the throughput of a pi0.5 reference implementation on matched hardware. We will release the system, models, training scripts, and infrastructure to support efficient embodied learning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09124
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DobotTrack: Target-Grounded Vision-Language-Action Learning for Embodied Person Tracking
2026-11-06 06:13:33Shengjun Deng, Yinghan Zhang, Chengrui Wei, Liu Liang, Songyuan Liu, Pengkun Zheng, Yajun Zheng, Ying Zhang, Yuan Tian, Xi Li, Teng WangAbstract
Language-guided embodied person tracking requires a mobile agent to identify a target from a referring description and consistently follow the target under egocentric observations. We present DobotTrack, a target-grounded vision-language-action (VLA) framework that integrates auxiliary grounding supervision with efficient temporal modeling. We systematically investigate five auxiliary tasks---person segmentation, bounding-box grounding, visual-spatial classification (VSC), future DINO feature prediction, and future-frame prediction---and adopt complementary mask and bounding-box supervision to enhance target delineation and localization. We introduce Q-identity, a target-conditioned historical visual compression module that leverages target-grounding predictions to selectively preserve identity-discriminative appearance features and spatial cues in compact historical tokens. On EVT-Bench, our 0.8B-parameter model achieves an average success rate of 77.9%, exceeding OmTrackVLA by 16.9 percentage points across the three tasks. We further construct a real-world person-tracking dataset collected using a quadruped robot, comprising 126 episodes and 596,323 mask-annotated frames. The target masks enable automatic derivation of bounding boxes and visual-spatial labels encoding horizontal position and apparent image scale, providing additional grounding supervision without separate manual annotation of these labels. Together, our framework and annotation pipeline support learning target-grounded tracking policies from simulated and real-world data. Code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09041
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ToolDex: An Ego-Exo Human Demonstration Dataset for Creative Physical Tool Use
2026-11-06 06:12:33Mohamed Elmoghany, Kehan Li, Ruoqu Chen, Tarun Chiruvolu, Shutong Zhang, Ryan Wang, Stephen Tian, Yaru Niu, Michelle Guo, Ding Zhao, Weiyu Liu, Mengdi Xu, Li Fei-Fei, Jiajun WuAbstract
Creative tool use is a fundamental human capability and an important step toward general-purpose embodied intelligence. It requires agents to reason about object affordances, physical constraints, and manipulation strategies, especially when standard tools are unavailable. However, progress in this area is limited by the lack of real-world datasets that capture human tool-use behavior with sufficient scale, fidelity, and diversity. Existing benchmarks are often simulation-based, focus on simplified interactions, or lack detailed observations and annotations. We introduce ToolDex, a large-scale egocentric-exocentric (ego-exo) human demonstration dataset for creative physical tool use. ToolDex captures scenarios in which humans select, adapt, and repurpose available objects as tools. Using synchronized egocentric cameras and eight exocentric cameras, the dataset provides high-fidelity multi-view observations and rich annotations for hands, tools, target objects, and their deformable interactions. Beyond data collection, we establish a benchmark suite characterizing three core capabilities: physical tool-use reasoning, sparse-view 3D and 4D reconstruction, and robot policy learning. ToolDex provides a foundation for studying human tool-use behavior and developing embodied agents that can adaptively use tools in complex real-world environments. Dataset visualizations and benchmarking results are available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09036
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HomeLoop: A Simulation Framework and Benchmark for Robot-IoT Coordination in Everyday Domestic Assistance and Safety
2026-11-06 02:54:11Ramy ElMallah, Marc Bishara, Hyegang Kim, Yuxi Zhang, Chongyu Zhu, Chi-Guhn LeeAbstract
Recent progress in embodied robotics is bringing robots closer to deployment in homes, as vision-language models (VLMs) are demonstrating significant advances in reasoning, making VLM-driven robots promising home assistant agents. These agents will often be introduced into homes that already have cameras, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and residents with wearables. To fulfill their potential, they need to integrate with existing smart infrastructure and reason through ambiguous scenarios: a smoke alarm may come from a pan about to ignite, a pan already on fire, a resident cooking or a faulty sensor, and each calls for a different response. To that end, we introduce HomeLoop, a simulation framework and benchmark built on Isaac Sim that combines robot bodies, networked devices and wearables, simulated residents and visitors, faulty sensors, and hazards that evolve over time. Our benchmark is composed of 20 tasks across five families grounded in real-world household hazards and needs, and designed so that the same alert can have different causes. A runtime monitor scores each episode with temporal-logic checks on the final outcome and the actions along the way, and every action carries a predefined cost. We evaluate six open-weight and proprietary VLMs. The best achieves a family-balanced score of 61.9%, and across models we see a pattern of over-reaction: failed episodes involving prohibited interventions outnumber those involving missed required interventions by more than two to one, with models often shutting off the stove before investigating the alarm's cause. HomeLoop is an extensible foundation intended for use in research on robot-IoT coordination, long-term memory, proactive assistance, and privacy-safety trade-offs. HomeLoop will be released with 2,100 home layouts that can be automatically furnished in diverse configurations, five robot bodies and 20 networked device types.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08914
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Meituan-Robotics-0: A Vision-Language-Action Foundation Model for Desktop Manipulation
2026-11-05 18:55:42Meituan Robotics Team, Caicheng Wang, Chen Zhao, Chengpeng Jin, Duo Xu, Fengjiao Chen, Guanglu Wan, Heqing Yang, Jia Wang, Jiacong Zhou, Jie Hu, Jiyuan Ru, Lingfeng Zhang, Linjiang Huang, Manyuan Zhang, Ningchu Liu, Shijie Zhou, Si Liu, Shuo Li, Tianyi Zhang, Xi Zhang, Xin Chen, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Yanbin Zeng, Yang Yang, Yang Yi, Yanli Tan, Yifu Xu, Yimeng Jia, Yuchen Tang, Yuchen Xie, Yuxiang Zheng, Zerwei Chng, Zilong Huang, Zipeng Ye, Ziyuan Qin, Ziqin WangAbstract
We present Meituan-Robotics-0 (MR0), a vision-language-action foundation model and embodied-agent system for stationary-base desktop manipulation. MR0 combines 147 million vision-language samples with 15,060 hours of curated robot trajectories spanning 12 embodiments. A three-stage training recipe aligns multimodal representations with robot behavior through discrete action-token pre-training, transfers these priors to continuous cross-embodiment control through flow-matching mid-training, and adapts the policy through real-world post-training. We introduce Rollback, which pairs replaced policy segments with human corrections to provide positive and negative supervision for CFG-DAgger without value learning or advantage labeling. A unified end-effector interface supports heterogeneous embodiments, while asynchronous action-chunk merging maintains smooth execution under variable inference latency. An event-driven agent maintains persistent task events and reassesses plans when progress or feasibility changes, enabling cross-task retrieval and conditional task resumption. MR0 achieves 93.6% success on RoboTwin 2.0 and ranks fifth in the RoboDojo VLA track. Under matched HG-DAgger post-training, MR0 achieves higher average success rate and progress score than $\pi_{0.5}$ across three real-robot tasks. On Ethernet insertion, CFG-DAgger trained with Rollback data reaches 70% success and a progress score of 0.90. Qualitative agent deployments demonstrate cross-task event retrieval and recovery from temporarily unsatisfied task conditions.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08577
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Failure Prediction and Classification in Vision-Language-Action Models Via Calibrated Latent Probing
2026-11-05 18:21:07Michal P. Podolinsky, Yunhao Yang, Daniel Little, Hong Lu, Rohan Siva, Olin Goudey, Neel P. Bhatt, Matthias Scheutz, Ufuk TopcuAbstract
Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) enable general-purpose embodied intelligence, but their performance is brittle under distribution shift, where unanticipated failures can damage equipment or endanger people. Deploying VLAs in real-world systems therefore requires a runtime monitor that is timely, calibrated, and informative while being efficient enough to run on the edge. Existing methods fail to fulfill these requirements. We present VLA-Tug, a lightweight probe over the latent layers of a VLA backbone that improves early failure detection and bounds the missed-detection and false-alarm rates, with minimal inference overhead. We show that supervising on the pre-failure segment of a trajectory increases early failure detection at matched false-positive rates by up to 30% over the strongest learned baseline. Under shift to unseen tasks, the bounds on missed-detection and false-alarm rates remain valid in up to 86% of runs, versus at most 21% for baselines. Unlike existing methods, VLA-Tug predicts the failure mode to enable corrective actions, raising top-3 accuracy on unseen tasks by up to 44% over a majority baseline. VLA-Tug enables real-time monitoring where the well-timed and informative probe supports lightweight steering that improves task success. We release a dataset of 3,180 annotated manipulation episodes to support future work on latent failure detection in VLAs at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08425
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Learning the Task or Learning the Verifier? Rethinking Criteria Exposure in Embodied Self-Improvement
2026-11-05 17:14:37Wenbo Huang, Jianxin Bi, Shunyu Yang, Ruiyang Si, Rui Ni, Qiang Wang, Shulong Jiang, Yintianrun Zhang, Feixiang Ruan, Kewei Zhang, Ye Huang, Shukai Gong, Daquan ZhouAbstract
Self-improving embodied agents are increasingly being developed and compared on robot simulation benchmarks. Several recent works expose the benchmark's success criteria to the learning agent, a practice we call Criteria Exposure (CE). These criteria, originally written to verify policies trained by imitation learning, often demand more than the corresponding language instructions, so a score from such a verifier may not faithfully reflect whether the instructed task was completed, especially for robot-control programs written by an agent. As embodied coding agents report ever higher benchmark scores, a natural question arises: when a coding agent is exposed to the benchmark's criteria, does it generate code that better performs the instructed task, or code that simply overfits to the verification criteria? We conduct controlled experiments with a self-improving agent with and without CE, and find that with CE the agent quickly produces code with a higher success rate under the given criteria, but this advantage disappears when the criteria are changed slightly without departing from the original instructions. More importantly, the skills the agent develops under CE transfer poorly across tasks. We further propose instruction-faithful criteria and show that they better reflect the performance of agent-generated programs.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08318
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'Blind Compliance': Coercive Control in AI Jailbreaking
2026-11-05 16:11:08Acacia L. Ackles, Elliott WhitsonAbstract
The explosion of generative AI systems and concerns surrounding their rapidly scaling capabilities has led to an adversarial cycle between increasingly narrow content restrictions ("guardrails") and increasingly sophisticated structured prompting techniques ("jailbreaks"). Technological frameworks surrounding such jailbreaking remain largely focused on the system's output: whether harmful or disallowed content is ultimately produced for the user. However, this approach, which draws largely from classical cybersecurity, does not address the uniquely relational dimension introduced by generative AI: in many cases the user is not just accessing a technology via an exploit, but is in conversation with it as part of the exploit. Here we present an alternative lens which centers the interaction rather than the output. Drawing on interpersonal violence scholarship, we present a novel framework of coercive control categories with a particular focus on aspects which are embodied versus disembodied. We then map how these disembodied coercive control dynamics are structurally embedded in modern AI training paradigms, and how those embeddings are exploited via a particular suite of persona-based jailbreaks. In this lens, we reframe AI safety and alignment as not merely a technical security problem, but as another surface upon which we see enacted the relational dynamics of power and control.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08226
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