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📅 2025-12-31
Large language model (LLM) based task plans and corresponding human demonstrations for embodied AI may be noisy, with unnecessary actions, redundant navigation, and logical errors that reduce policy quality. We propose an iterative verification framework in which a Judge LLM critiques action sequences and a Planner LLM applies the revisions, yielding progressively cleaner and more spatially coherent trajectories. Unlike rule-based approaches, our method relies on natural language prompting, enabling broad generalization across error types including irrelevant actions, contradictions, and missing steps. On a set of manually annotated actions from the TEACh embodied AI dataset, our framework achieves up to 90% recall and 100% precision across four state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT o4-mini, DeepSeek-R1, Gemini 2.5, LLaMA 4 Scout). The refinement loop converges quickly, with 96.5% of sequences requiring at most three iterations, while improving both temporal efficiency and spatial action organization. Crucially, the method preserves human error-recovery patterns rather than collapsing them, supporting future work on robust corrective behavior. By establishing plan verification as a reliable LLM capability for spatial planning and action refinement, we provide a scalable path to higher-quality training data for imitation learning in embodied AI.
📅 2025-12-24
Due to their inherent flexibility and autonomous operation, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) to provide real-time biomedical edge computing service for wireless body area network (WBAN) users. In this paper, considering the time-varying task criticality characteristics of diverse WBAN users and the dual mobility between WBAN users and UAV, we investigate the dynamic task offloading and UAV flight trajectory optimization problem to minimize the weighted average task completion time of all the WBAN users, under the constraint of UAV energy consumption. To tackle the problem, an embodied AI-enhanced IoMT edge computing framework is established. Specifically, we propose a novel hierarchical multi-scale Transformer-based user trajectory prediction model based on the users' historical trajectory traces captured by the embodied AI agent (i.e., UAV). Afterwards, a prediction-enhanced deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm that integrates predicted users' mobility information is designed for intelligently optimizing UAV flight trajectory and task offloading decisions. Real-word movement traces and simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed methods in comparison with the existing benchmarks.
📅 2025-12-23 | 💬 Accepted at AAAI 2026, the Project website is available at https://qhemu.github.io/CCoL/
Language-conditioned manipulation facilitates human-robot interaction via behavioral cloning (BC), which learns control policies from human demonstrations and serves as a cornerstone of embodied AI. Overcoming compounding errors in sequential action decisions remains a central challenge to improving BC performance. Existing approaches mitigate compounding errors through data augmentation, expressive representation, or temporal abstraction. However, they suffer from physical discontinuities and semantic-physical misalignment, leading to inaccurate action cloning and intermittent execution. In this paper, we present Continuous vision-language-action Co-Learning with Semantic-Physical Alignment (CCoL), a novel BC framework that ensures temporally consistent execution and fine-grained semantic grounding. It generates robust and smooth action execution trajectories through continuous co-learning across vision, language, and proprioceptive inputs (e.g., robot internal states). Meanwhile, we anchor language semantics to visuomotor representations by a bidirectional cross-attention to learn contextual information for action generation, successfully overcoming the problem of semantic-physical misalignment. Extensive experiments show that CCoL achieves an average 8.0% relative improvement across three simulation suites, with up to 19.2% relative gain in human-demonstrated bimanual insertion tasks. Real-world tests on a 7-DoF robot further confirm CCoL's generalization under unseen and noisy object states.
📅 2025-12-23
As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly advances, especially in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), research focus is shifting from single-modality text processing to the more complex domains of multimodal and embodied AI. Embodied intelligence focuses on training agents within realistic simulated environments, leveraging physical interaction and action feedback rather than conventionally labeled datasets. Yet, most existing simulation platforms remain narrowly designed, each tailored to specific tasks. A versatile, general-purpose training environment that can support everything from low-level embodied navigation to high-level composite activities, such as multi-agent social simulation and human-AI collaboration, remains largely unavailable. To bridge this gap, we introduce TongSIM, a high-fidelity, general-purpose platform for training and evaluating embodied agents. TongSIM offers practical advantages by providing over 100 diverse, multi-room indoor scenarios as well as an open-ended, interaction-rich outdoor town simulation, ensuring broad applicability across research needs. Its comprehensive evaluation framework and benchmarks enable precise assessment of agent capabilities, such as perception, cognition, decision-making, human-robot cooperation, and spatial and social reasoning. With features like customized scenes, task-adaptive fidelity, diverse agent types, and dynamic environmental simulation, TongSIM delivers flexibility and scalability for researchers, serving as a unified platform that accelerates training, evaluation, and advancement toward general embodied intelligence.
📅 2025-12-22 | 💬 Accepted at AAAI 2026, the Project website is available at https://qhemu.github.io/CCoL/
Language-conditioned manipulation facilitates human-robot interaction via behavioral cloning (BC), which learns control policies from human demonstrations and serves as a cornerstone of embodied AI. Overcoming compounding errors in sequential action decisions remains a central challenge to improving BC performance. Existing approaches mitigate compounding errors through data augmentation, expressive representation, or temporal abstraction. However, they suffer from physical discontinuities and semantic-physical misalignment, leading to inaccurate action cloning and intermittent execution. In this paper, we present Continuous vision-language-action Co-Learning with Semantic-Physical Alignment (CCoL), a novel BC framework that ensures temporally consistent execution and fine-grained semantic grounding. It generates robust and smooth action execution trajectories through continuous co-learning across vision, language, and proprioceptive inputs (e.g., robot internal states). Meanwhile, we anchor language semantics to visuomotor representations by a bidirectional cross-attention to learn contextual information for action generation, successfully overcoming the problem of semantic-physical misalignment. Extensive experiments show that CCoL achieves an average 8.0% relative improvement across three simulation suites, with up to 19.2% relative gain in human-demonstrated bimanual insertion tasks. Real-world tests on a 7-DoF robot further confirm CCoL's generalization under unseen and noisy object states.
📅 2025-12-22
Robot manipulation, a key capability of embodied AI, has turned to data-driven generative policy frameworks, but mainstream approaches like Diffusion Models suffer from high inference latency and Flow-based Methods from increased architectural complexity. While simply applying meanFlow on robotic tasks achieves single-step inference and outperforms FlowPolicy, it lacks few-shot generalization due to fixed temperature hyperparameters in its Dispersive Loss and misaligned predicted-true mean velocities. To solve these issues, this study proposes an improved MeanFlow-based Policies: we introduce a lightweight Cosine Loss to align velocity directions and use the Differential Derivation Equation (DDE) to optimize the Jacobian-Vector Product (JVP) operator. Experiments on Adroit and Meta-World tasks show the proposed method outperforms MP1 and FlowPolicy in average success rate, especially in challenging Meta-World tasks, effectively enhancing few-shot generalization and trajectory accuracy of robot manipulation policies while maintaining real-time performance, offering a more robust solution for high-precision robotic manipulation.
📅 2025-12-22
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables agents to navigate in complex environments by following natural language instructions grounded in visual observations. Although most existing work has focused on ground-based robots or outdoor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), indoor UAV-based VLN remains underexplored, despite its relevance to real-world applications such as inspection, delivery, and search-and-rescue in confined spaces. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{IndoorUAV}, a novel benchmark and method specifically tailored for VLN with indoor UAVs. We begin by curating over 1,000 diverse and structurally rich 3D indoor scenes from the Habitat simulator. Within these environments, we simulate realistic UAV flight dynamics to collect diverse 3D navigation trajectories manually, further enriched through data augmentation techniques. Furthermore, we design an automated annotation pipeline to generate natural language instructions of varying granularity for each trajectory. This process yields over 16,000 high-quality trajectories, comprising the \textbf{IndoorUAV-VLN} subset, which focuses on long-horizon VLN. To support short-horizon planning, we segment long trajectories into sub-trajectories by selecting semantically salient keyframes and regenerating concise instructions, forming the \textbf{IndoorUAV-VLA} subset. Finally, we introduce \textbf{IndoorUAV-Agent}, a novel navigation model designed for our benchmark, leveraging task decomposition and multimodal reasoning. We hope IndoorUAV serves as a valuable resource to advance research on vision-language embodied AI in the indoor aerial navigation domain.
📅 2025-12-22
Despite remarkable progress in Vision-Language Navigation (VLN), existing benchmarks remain confined to fixed, small-scale datasets with naive physical simulation. These shortcomings limit the insight that the benchmarks provide into sim-to-real generalization, and create a significant research gap. Furthermore, task fragmentation prevents unified/shared progress in the area, while limited data scales fail to meet the demands of modern LLM-based pretraining. To overcome these limitations, we introduce VLNVerse: a new large-scale, extensible benchmark designed for Versatile, Embodied, Realistic Simulation, and Evaluation. VLNVerse redefines VLN as a scalable, full-stack embodied AI problem. Its Versatile nature unifies previously fragmented tasks into a single framework and provides an extensible toolkit for researchers. Its Embodied design moves beyond intangible and teleporting "ghost" agents that support full-kinematics in a Realistic Simulation powered by a robust physics engine. We leverage the scale and diversity of VLNVerse to conduct a comprehensive Evaluation of existing methods, from classic models to MLLM-based agents. We also propose a novel unified multi-task model capable of addressing all tasks within the benchmark. VLNVerse aims to narrow the gap between simulated navigation and real-world generalization, providing the community with a vital tool to boost research towards scalable, general-purpose embodied locomotion agents.
📅 2025-12-20 | 💬 9 pages, 4 figures
As embodied intelligence emerges as a core frontier in artificial intelligence research, simulation platforms must evolve beyond low-level physical interactions to capture complex, human-centered social behaviors. We introduce FreeAskWorld, an interactive simulation framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) for high-level behavior planning and semantically grounded interaction, informed by theories of intention and social cognition. Our framework supports scalable, realistic human-agent simulations and includes a modular data generation pipeline tailored for diverse embodied tasks. To validate the framework, we extend the classic Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task into a interaction enriched Direction Inquiry setting, wherein agents can actively seek and interpret navigational guidance. We present and publicly release FreeAskWorld, a large-scale benchmark dataset comprising reconstructed environments, six diverse task types, 16 core object categories, 63,429 annotated sample frames, and more than 17 hours of interaction data to support training and evaluation of embodied AI systems. We benchmark VLN models, and human participants under both open-loop and closed-loop settings. Experimental results demonstrate that models fine-tuned on FreeAskWorld outperform their original counterparts, achieving enhanced semantic understanding and interaction competency. These findings underscore the efficacy of socially grounded simulation frameworks in advancing embodied AI systems toward sophisticated high-level planning and more naturalistic human-agent interaction. Importantly, our work underscores that interaction itself serves as an additional information modality.
📅 2025-12-17 | 💬 accepted to AAAI 2026, 10 pages, 9 figures
Recent progress in robotics and embodied AI is largely driven by Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). However, a key challenge remains underexplored: how can we advance LMMs to discover tasks that assist humans in open-future scenarios, where human intentions are highly concurrent and dynamic. In this work, we formalize the problem of Human-centric Open-future Task Discovery (HOTD), focusing particularly on identifying tasks that reduce human effort across plausible futures. To facilitate this study, we propose HOTD-Bench, which features over 2K real-world videos, a semi-automated annotation pipeline, and a simulation-based protocol tailored for open-set future evaluation. Additionally, we propose the Collaborative Multi-Agent Search Tree (CMAST) framework, which decomposes complex reasoning through a multi-agent system and structures the reasoning process through a scalable search tree module. In our experiments, CMAST achieves the best performance on the HOTD-Bench, significantly surpassing existing LMMs. It also integrates well with existing LMMs, consistently improving performance.
📅 2025-12-17
Large language models leverage internet-scale text data, yet embodied AI remains constrained by the prohibitive costs of physical trajectory collection. Desktop environments -- particularly gaming -- offer a compelling alternative: they provide rich sensorimotor interactions at scale while maintaining the structured observation-action coupling essential for embodied learning. We present D2E (Desktop to Embodied AI), a framework that demonstrates desktop interactions can serve as an effective pretraining substrate for robotics embodied AI tasks. Unlike prior work that remained domain-specific (e.g., VPT for Minecraft) or kept data proprietary (e.g., SIMA), D2E establishes a complete pipeline from scalable desktop data collection to verified transfer in embodied domains. Our framework comprises three components: (1) the OWA Toolkit that unifies diverse desktop interactions into a standardized format with 152x compression, (2) the Generalist-IDM that achieves strong zero-shot generalization across unseen games through timestamp-based event prediction, enabling internet-scale pseudo-labeling, and (3) VAPT that transfers desktop-pretrained representations to physical manipulation and navigation. Using 1.3K+ hours of data (259 hours of human demonstrations, and 1K+ hours of pseudo-labeled gameplay), we achieve a total of 96.6% success rate on LIBERO manipulation and 83.3% on CANVAS navigation benchmarks. This validates that sensorimotor primitives in digital interactions exhibit sufficient invariance to transfer meaningfully to physical embodied tasks, establishing desktop pretraining as a practical paradigm for robotics. We will make all our work public, including the OWA toolkit, datasets of human-collected and pseudo-labeled, and VAPT-trained models available at https://worv-ai.github.io/d2e/
📅 2025-12-17
As the application of Embodied AI Agents in avatars, wearable devices, and robotic systems continues to deepen, their core research challenges have gradually shifted from physical environment interaction to the accurate understanding of social interactions. Traditional physical world models (PWM) focus on quantifiable physical attributes such as space and motion, failing to meet the needs of social intelligence modeling. In contrast, the Mental World Model (MWM), as a structured representation of humans' internal mental states, has become the critical cognitive foundation for embodied agents to achieve natural human-machine collaboration and dynamic social adaptation. However, current MWM research faces significant bottlenecks: such as fragmented conceptual framework with vague boundaries between MWM and PWM, disjointed reasoning mechanisms for the technical pathways and applicable scenarios of different Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning paradigms, and detachment between evaluation and practice. To address these issues, this review systematically synthesizes over 100 authoritative studies to provide a comprehensive overview of MWM research for embodied AI. Its core contributions are threefold: First, it constructs a complete theoretical framework for MWM for the first time. Specifically, it distinguishes the essential differences between MWM and PWMs. Second, it systematically defines the key components of MWM through two paradigms for mental element representation. Third, it comprehensively analyzes two core ToM reasoning paradigms with 19 ToM methods. Finally, it also clarifies the integration trend of neuro-symbolic hybrid architectures, and synthesizes 26 ToM evaluation benchmarks. This work aims to promote the integration of embodied agents into human society and advance the in-depth development of human-machine collaborative interaction.
📅 2025-12-16
Affordance prediction, which identifies interaction regions on objects based on language instructions, is critical for embodied AI. Prevailing end-to-end models couple high-level reasoning and low-level grounding into a single monolithic pipeline and rely on training over annotated datasets, which leads to poor generalization on novel objects and unseen environments. In this paper, we move beyond this paradigm by proposing A4-Agent, a training-free agentic framework that decouples affordance prediction into a three-stage pipeline. Our framework coordinates specialized foundation models at test time: (1) a $\textbf{Dreamer}$ that employs generative models to visualize $\textit{how}$ an interaction would look; (2) a $\textbf{Thinker}$ that utilizes large vision-language models to decide $\textit{what}$ object part to interact with; and (3) a $\textbf{Spotter}$ that orchestrates vision foundation models to precisely locate $\textit{where}$ the interaction area is. By leveraging the complementary strengths of pre-trained models without any task-specific fine-tuning, our zero-shot framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art supervised methods across multiple benchmarks and demonstrates robust generalization to real-world settings.
📅 2025-12-16
Video diffusion models provide powerful real-world simulators for embodied AI but remain limited in controllability for robotic manipulation. Recent works on trajectory-conditioned video generation address this gap but often rely on 2D trajectories or single modality conditioning, which restricts their ability to produce controllable and consistent robotic demonstrations. We present DRAW2ACT, a depth-aware trajectory-conditioned video generation framework that extracts multiple orthogonal representations from the input trajectory, capturing depth, semantics, shape and motion, and injects them into the diffusion model. Moreover, we propose to jointly generate spatially aligned RGB and depth videos, leveraging cross-modality attention mechanisms and depth supervision to enhance the spatio-temporal consistency. Finally, we introduce a multimodal policy model conditioned on the generated RGB and depth sequences to regress the robot's joint angles. Experiments on Bridge V2, Berkeley Autolab, and simulation benchmarks show that DRAW2ACT achieves superior visual fidelity and consistency while yielding higher manipulation success rates compared to existing baselines.
📅 2025-12-15
We introduce the Do-Undo task and benchmark to address a critical gap in vision-language models: understanding and generating physically plausible scene transformations driven by real-world actions. Unlike prior work focused on object-level edits, Do-Undo requires models to simulate the outcome of a physical action and then accurately reverse it, reflecting true cause-and-effect in the visual world. We curate a large-scale dataset of reversible actions from real-world videos and design a training strategy enforcing consistency for robust action grounding. Our experiments reveal that current models struggle with physical reversibility, underscoring the importance of this task for embodied AI, robotics, and physics-aware generative modeling. Do-Undo establishes an intuitive testbed for evaluating and advancing physical reasoning in multimodal systems.
📅 2025-12-14 | 💬 Accepted by AAAI 2026. Project Page: https://efficientflow.github.io/
Generative modeling has recently shown remarkable promise for visuomotor policy learning, enabling flexible and expressive control across diverse embodied AI tasks. However, existing generative policies often struggle with data inefficiency, requiring large-scale demonstrations, and sampling inefficiency, incurring slow action generation during inference. We introduce EfficientFlow, a unified framework for efficient embodied AI with flow-based policy learning. To enhance data efficiency, we bring equivariance into flow matching. We theoretically prove that when using an isotropic Gaussian prior and an equivariant velocity prediction network, the resulting action distribution remains equivariant, leading to improved generalization and substantially reduced data demands. To accelerate sampling, we propose a novel acceleration regularization strategy. As direct computation of acceleration is intractable for marginal flow trajectories, we derive a novel surrogate loss that enables stable and scalable training using only conditional trajectories. Across a wide range of robotic manipulation benchmarks, the proposed algorithm achieves competitive or superior performance under limited data while offering dramatically faster inference. These results highlight EfficientFlow as a powerful and efficient paradigm for high-performance embodied AI.
📅 2025-12-12 | 💬 preprint
The 2025 BEHAVIOR Challenge is designed to rigorously track progress toward solving long-horizon tasks by physical agents in simulated environments. BEHAVIOR-1K focuses on everyday household tasks that people most want robots to assist with and these tasks introduce long-horizon mobile manipulation challenges in realistic settings, bridging the gap between current research and real-world, human-centric applications. This report presents our solution to the 2025 BEHAVIOR Challenge in a very close 2nd place and substantially outperforms the rest of the submissions. Building on $Ï€_{0.5}$, we focus on systematically building our solution by studying the effects of training techniques and data. Through careful ablations, we show the scaling power in pre-training and post-training phases for competitive performance. We summarize our practical lessons and design recommendations that we hope will provide actionable insights for the broader embodied AI community when adapting powerful foundation models to complex embodied scenarios.
📅 2025-12-12 | 💬 15 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables
Image Compression for Machines (ICM) has emerged as a pivotal research direction in the field of visual data compression. However, with the rapid evolution of machine intelligence, the target of compression has shifted from task-specific virtual models to Embodied agents operating in real-world environments. To address the communication constraints of Embodied AI in multi-agent systems and ensure real-time task execution, this paper introduces, for the first time, the scientific problem of Embodied Image Compression. We establish a standardized benchmark, EmbodiedComp, to facilitate systematic evaluation under ultra-low bitrate conditions in a closed-loop setting. Through extensive empirical studies in both simulated and real-world settings, we demonstrate that existing Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) fail to reliably perform even simple manipulation tasks when compressed below the Embodied bitrate threshold. We anticipate that EmbodiedComp will catalyze the development of domain-specific compression tailored for Embodied agents , thereby accelerating the Embodied AI deployment in the Real-world.
📅 2025-12-12 | 💬 Accepted at AAAI 2026, the Project website is available at https://qhemu.github.io/CCoL/
Language-conditioned manipulation facilitates human-robot interaction via behavioral cloning (BC), which learns control policies from human demonstrations and serves as a cornerstone of embodied AI. Overcoming compounding errors in sequential action decisions remains a central challenge to improving BC performance. Existing approaches mitigate compounding errors through data augmentation, expressive representation, or temporal abstraction. However, they suffer from physical discontinuities and semantic-physical misalignment, leading to inaccurate action cloning and intermittent execution. In this paper, we present Continuous vision-language-action Co-Learning with Semantic-Physical Alignment (CCoL), a novel BC framework that ensures temporally consistent execution and fine-grained semantic grounding. It generates robust and smooth action execution trajectories through continuous co-learning across vision, language, and proprioceptive inputs (e.g., robot internal states). Meanwhile, we anchor language semantics to visuomotor representations by a bidirectional cross-attention to learn contextual information for action generation, successfully overcoming the problem of semantic-physical misalignment. Extensive experiments show that CCoL achieves an average 8.0% relative improvement across three simulation suites, with up to 19.2% relative gain in human-demonstrated bimanual insertion tasks. Real-world tests on a 7-DoF robot further confirm CCoL's generalization under unseen and noisy object states.
📅 2025-12-12 | 💬 20 pages, 6 figures
Generating controllable and interactive indoor scenes is fundamental to applications in game development, architectural visualization, and embodied AI training. Yet existing approaches either handle a narrow range of input modalities or rely on stochastic processes that hinder controllability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce RoomPilot, a unified framework that parses diverse multi-modal inputs--textual descriptions or CAD floor plans--into an Indoor Domain-Specific Language (IDSL) for indoor structured scene generation. The key insight is that a well-designed IDSL can act as a shared semantic representation, enabling coherent, high-quality scene synthesis from any single modality while maintaining interaction semantics. In contrast to conventional procedural methods that produce visually plausible but functionally inert layouts, RoomPilot leverages a curated dataset of interaction-annotated assets to synthesize environments exhibiting realistic object behaviors. Extensive experiments further validate its strong multi-modal understanding, fine-grained controllability in scene generation, and superior physical consistency and visual fidelity, marking a significant step toward general-purpose controllable 3D indoor scene generation.
📅 2025-12-11 | 💬 Preprint; 80 pages, 37 figures, 29 tables; Project Page at https://worldbench.github.io/worldlens
Generative world models are reshaping embodied AI, enabling agents to synthesize realistic 4D driving environments that look convincing but often fail physically or behaviorally. Despite rapid progress, the field still lacks a unified way to assess whether generated worlds preserve geometry, obey physics, or support reliable control. We introduce WorldLens, a full-spectrum benchmark evaluating how well a model builds, understands, and behaves within its generated world. It spans five aspects -- Generation, Reconstruction, Action-Following, Downstream Task, and Human Preference -- jointly covering visual realism, geometric consistency, physical plausibility, and functional reliability. Across these dimensions, no existing world model excels universally: those with strong textures often violate physics, while geometry-stable ones lack behavioral fidelity. To align objective metrics with human judgment, we further construct WorldLens-26K, a large-scale dataset of human-annotated videos with numerical scores and textual rationales, and develop WorldLens-Agent, an evaluation model distilled from these annotations to enable scalable, explainable scoring. Together, the benchmark, dataset, and agent form a unified ecosystem for measuring world fidelity -- standardizing how future models are judged not only by how real they look, but by how real they behave.
📅 2025-12-11 | 💬 10 pages, 7 figures
A deep understanding of the physical world is a central goal for embodied AI and realistic simulation. While current models excel at capturing an object's surface geometry and appearance, they largely neglect its internal physical properties. This omission is critical, as properties like volumetric density are fundamental for predicting an object's center of mass, stability, and interaction dynamics in applications ranging from robotic manipulation to physical simulation. The primary bottleneck has been the absence of large-scale, real-world data. To bridge this gap, we introduce XDen-1K, the first large-scale, multi-modal dataset designed for real-world physical property estimation, with a particular focus on volumetric density. The core of this dataset consists of 1,000 real-world objects across 148 categories, for which we provide comprehensive multi-modal data, including a high-resolution 3D geometric model with part-level annotations and a corresponding set of real-world biplanar X-ray scans. Building upon this data, we introduce a novel optimization framework that recovers a high-fidelity volumetric density field of each object from its sparse X-ray views. To demonstrate its practical value, we add X-ray images as a conditioning signal to an existing segmentation network and perform volumetric segmentation. Furthermore, we conduct experiments on downstream robotics tasks. The results show that leveraging the dataset can effectively improve the accuracy of center-of-mass estimation and the success rate of robotic manipulation. We believe XDen-1K will serve as a foundational resource and a challenging new benchmark, catalyzing future research in physically grounded visual inference and embodied AI.
📅 2025-12-11 | 💬 Accepted at AAAI 2026, the Project website is available at https://qhemu.github.io/CCoL/
Language-conditioned manipulation facilitates human-robot interaction via behavioral cloning (BC), which learns control policies from human demonstrations and serves as a cornerstone of embodied AI. Overcoming compounding errors in sequential action decisions remains a central challenge to improving BC performance. Existing approaches mitigate compounding errors through data augmentation, expressive representation, or temporal abstraction. However, they suffer from physical discontinuities and semantic-physical misalignment, leading to inaccurate action cloning and intermittent execution. In this paper, we present Continuous vision-language-action Co-Learning with Semantic-Physical Alignment (CCoL), a novel BC framework that ensures temporally consistent execution and fine-grained semantic grounding. It generates robust and smooth action execution trajectories through continuous co-learning across vision, language, and proprioceptive inputs (e.g., robot internal states). Meanwhile, we anchor language semantics to visuomotor representations by a bidirectional cross-attention to learn contextual information for action generation, successfully overcoming the problem of semantic-physical misalignment. Extensive experiments show that CCoL achieves an average 8.0% relative improvement across three simulation suites, with up to 19.2% relative gain in human-demonstrated bimanual insertion tasks. Real-world tests on a 7-DoF robot further confirm CCoL's generalization under unseen and noisy object states.
📅 2025-12-11
Current embodied AI systems face severe engineering impediments, primarily characterized by poor cross-scenario adaptability, rigid inter-module coupling, and fragmented inference acceleration. To overcome these limitations, we propose RoboNeuron, a universal deployment framework for embodied intelligence. RoboNeuron is the first framework to deeply integrate the cognitive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models with the real-time execution backbone of the Robot Operating System (ROS). We utilize the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as a semantic bridge, enabling the LLM to dynamically orchestrate underlying robotic tools. The framework establishes a highly modular architecture that strictly decouples sensing, reasoning, and control by leveraging ROS's unified communication interfaces. Crucially, we introduce an automated tool to translate ROS messages into callable MCP functions, significantly streamlining development. RoboNeuron significantly enhances cross-scenario adaptability and component flexibility, while establishing a systematic platform for horizontal performance benchmarking, laying a robust foundation for scalable real-world embodied applications.
📅 2025-12-10 | 💬 preprint
The 2025 BEHAVIOR Challenge is designed to rigorously track progress toward solving long-horizon tasks by physical agents in simulated environments. BEHAVIOR-1K focuses on everyday household tasks that people most want robots to assist with and these tasks introduce long-horizon mobile manipulation challenges in realistic settings, bridging the gap between current research and real-world, human-centric applications. This report presents our solution to the 2025 BEHAVIOR Challenge in a very close 2nd place and substantially outperforms the rest of the submissions. Building on $Ï€_{0.5}$, we focus on systematically building our solution by studying the effects of training techniques and data. Through careful ablations, we show the scaling power in pre-training and post-training phases for competitive performance. We summarize our practical lessons and design recommendations that we hope will provide actionable insights for the broader embodied AI community when adapting powerful foundation models to complex embodied scenarios.
📅 2025-12-10 | 💬 Conference: NeurIPS 2025 (main)
Recent advances in foundation models have shown promising results in developing generalist robotics that can perform diverse tasks in open-ended scenarios given multimodal inputs. However, current work has been mainly focused on indoor, household scenarios. In this work, we present SimWorld-Robotics~(SWR), a simulation platform for embodied AI in large-scale, photorealistic urban environments. Built on Unreal Engine 5, SWR procedurally generates unlimited photorealistic urban scenes populated with dynamic elements such as pedestrians and traffic systems, surpassing prior urban simulations in realism, complexity, and scalability. It also supports multi-robot control and communication. With these key features, we build two challenging robot benchmarks: (1) a multimodal instruction-following task, where a robot must follow vision-language navigation instructions to reach a destination in the presence of pedestrians and traffic; and (2) a multi-agent search task, where two robots must communicate to cooperatively locate and meet each other. Unlike existing benchmarks, these two new benchmarks comprehensively evaluate a wide range of critical robot capacities in realistic scenarios, including (1) multimodal instructions grounding, (2) 3D spatial reasoning in large environments, (3) safe, long-range navigation with people and traffic, (4) multi-robot collaboration, and (5) grounded communication. Our experimental results demonstrate that state-of-the-art models, including vision-language models (VLMs), struggle with our tasks, lacking robust perception, reasoning, and planning abilities necessary for urban environments.
📅 2025-12-09 | 💬 Accepted by 3DV 2026; Project Page: https://mengmouxu.github.io/SceneGen
3D content generation has recently attracted significant research interest, driven by its critical applications in VR/AR and embodied AI. In this work, we tackle the challenging task of synthesizing multiple 3D assets within a single scene image. Concretely, our contributions are fourfold: (i) we present SceneGen, a novel framework that takes a scene image and corresponding object masks as input, simultaneously producing multiple 3D assets with geometry and texture. Notably, SceneGen operates with no need for extra optimization or asset retrieval; (ii) we introduce a novel feature aggregation module that integrates local and global scene information from visual and geometric encoders within the feature extraction module. Coupled with a position head, this enables the generation of 3D assets and their relative spatial positions in a single feedforward pass; (iii) we demonstrate SceneGen's direct extensibility to multi-image input scenarios. Despite being trained solely on single-image inputs, our architecture yields improved generation performance when multiple images are provided; and (iv) extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations confirm the efficiency and robustness of our approach. We believe this paradigm offers a novel solution for high-quality 3D content generation, potentially advancing its practical applications in downstream tasks. The code and model will be publicly available at: https://mengmouxu.github.io/SceneGen.
📅 2025-12-08
Recent advances in whole-body robot control have enabled humanoid and legged robots to perform increasingly agile and coordinated motions. However, standardized benchmarks for evaluating these capabilities in real-world settings, and in direct comparison to humans, remain scarce. Existing evaluations often rely on pre-collected human motion datasets or simulation-based experiments, which limit reproducibility, overlook hardware factors, and hinder fair human-robot comparisons. We present Switch-JustDance, a low-cost and reproducible benchmarking pipeline that leverages motion-sensing console games, Just Dance on the Nintendo Switch, to evaluate robot whole-body control. Using Just Dance on the Nintendo Switch as a representative platform, Switch-JustDance converts in-game choreography into robot-executable motions through streaming, motion reconstruction, and motion retargeting modules and enables users to evaluate controller performance through the game's built-in scoring system. We first validate the evaluation properties of Just Dance, analyzing its reliability, validity, sensitivity, and potential sources of bias. Our results show that the platform provides consistent and interpretable performance measures, making it a suitable tool for benchmarking embodied AI. Building on this foundation, we benchmark three state-of-the-art humanoid whole-body controllers on hardware and provide insights into their relative strengths and limitations.
📅 2025-12-08 | 💬 Code: https://github.com/chengzhag/UCPE
Transformers have emerged as a universal backbone across 3D perception, video generation, and world models for autonomous driving and embodied AI, where understanding camera geometry is essential for grounding visual observations in three-dimensional space. However, existing camera encoding methods often rely on simplified pinhole assumptions, restricting generalization across the diverse intrinsics and lens distortions in real-world cameras. We introduce Relative Ray Encoding, a geometry-consistent representation that unifies complete camera information, including 6-DoF poses, intrinsics, and lens distortions. To evaluate its capability under diverse controllability demands, we adopt camera-controlled text-to-video generation as a testbed task. Within this setting, we further identify pitch and roll as two components effective for Absolute Orientation Encoding, enabling full control over the initial camera orientation. Together, these designs form UCPE (Unified Camera Positional Encoding), which integrates into a pretrained video Diffusion Transformer through a lightweight spatial attention adapter, adding less than 1% trainable parameters while achieving state-of-the-art camera controllability and visual fidelity. To facilitate systematic training and evaluation, we construct a large video dataset covering a wide range of camera motions and lens types. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of UCPE in camera-controllable video generation and highlight its potential as a general camera representation for Transformers across future multi-view, video, and 3D tasks. Code will be available at https://github.com/chengzhag/UCPE.
📅 2025-12-07 | 💬 Submitted for ICLR 2026 conference
3D scene understanding is fundamental for embodied AI and robotics, supporting reliable perception for interaction and navigation. Recent approaches achieve zero-shot, open-vocabulary 3D semantic mapping by assigning embedding vectors to 2D class-agnostic masks generated via vision-language models (VLMs) and projecting these into 3D. However, these methods often produce fragmented masks and inaccurate semantic assignments due to the direct use of raw masks, limiting their effectiveness in complex environments. To address this, we leverage SemanticSAM with progressive granularity refinement to generate more accurate and numerous object-level masks, mitigating the over-segmentation commonly observed in mask generation models such as vanilla SAM, and improving downstream 3D semantic segmentation. To further enhance semantic context, we employ a context-aware CLIP encoding strategy that integrates multiple contextual views of each mask using empirically determined weighting, providing much richer visual context. We evaluate our approach on multiple 3D scene understanding tasks, including 3D semantic segmentation and object retrieval from language queries, across several benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over existing methods, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach.
📅 2025-12-07
Cross-view correspondence is a fundamental capability for spatial understanding and embodied AI. However, it is still far from being realized in Vision-Language Models (VLMs), especially in achieving precise point-level correspondence, which is crucial for precise affordance interaction. So we propose the Cross-View Point Correspondence (CVPC) task and CrossPoint-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark with hierarchical design, inspired by the human cognitive process of "perceive", "reason", and "correspond". Our evaluation shows the state-of-the-art models (e.g., Gemini-2.5-Pro) still fall far behind humans, with a gap of over 54.65% in overall accuracy, exposing a challenge in transitioning from coarse-grained judgement to fine-grained coordinate prediction. To address this problem, we construct CrossPoint-378K, a dataset with 378K question-answering pairs across 900 scenes, focused on actionable affordance regions that better reflect real-world manipulation and interaction scenarios. Furthermore, we propose CroPond that trained on the CrossPoint-378K dataset. Our CroPond achieves state-of-the-art performance on CrossPoint-Bench, surpassing Gemini-2.5-Pro by 39.7% accuracy, which offers a foundation for advancing future work on cross-view correspondence. The benchmark, dataset, and model are publicly available at https://github.com/WangYipu2002/CrossPoint.
📅 2025-12-06
Embodied AI systems integrate language models with real world sensing, mobility, and cloud connected mobile apps. Yet while model jailbreaks have drawn significant attention, the broader system stack of embodied intelligence remains largely unexplored. In this work, we conduct the first holistic security analysis of the Unitree Go2 platform and uncover ten cross layer vulnerabilities the "Ten Sins of Embodied AI Security." Using BLE sniffing, traffic interception, APK reverse engineering, cloud API testing, and hardware probing, we identify systemic weaknesses across three architectural layers: wireless provisioning, core modules, and external interfaces. These include hard coded keys, predictable handshake tokens, WiFi credential leakage, missing TLS validation, static SSH password, multilingual safety bypass behavior, insecure local relay channels, weak binding logic, and unrestricted firmware access. Together, they allow adversaries to hijack devices, inject arbitrary commands, extract sensitive information, or gain full physical control.Our findings show that securing embodied AI requires far more than aligning the model itself. We conclude with system level lessons learned and recommendations for building embodied platforms that remain robust across their entire software hardware ecosystem.
📅 2025-12-05
This paper introduces GEX, an innovative low-cost dexterous manipulation system that combines the GX11 tri-finger anthropomorphic hand (11 DoF) with the EX12 tri-finger exoskeleton glove (12 DoF), forming a closed-loop teleoperation framework through kinematic retargeting for high-fidelity control. Both components employ modular 3D-printed finger designs, achieving ultra-low manufacturing costs while maintaining full actuation capabilities. Departing from conventional tendon-driven or underactuated approaches, our electromechanical system integrates independent joint motors across all 23 DoF, ensuring complete state observability and accurate kinematic modeling. This full-actuation architecture enables precise bidirectional kinematic calculations, substantially enhancing kinematic retargeting fidelity between the exoskeleton and robotic hand. The proposed system bridges the cost-performance gap in dexterous manipulation research, providing an accessible platform for acquiring high-quality demonstration data to advance embodied AI and dexterous robotic skill transfer learning.
📅 2025-12-05 | 💬 Project page: https://d-robotics-ai-lab.github.io/TabletopGen.project/
Generating high-fidelity, physically interactive 3D simulated tabletop scenes is essential for embodied AI -- especially for robotic manipulation policy learning and data synthesis. However, current text- or image-driven 3D scene generation methods mainly focus on large-scale scenes, struggling to capture the high-density layouts and complex spatial relations that characterize tabletop scenes. To address these challenges, we propose TabletopGen, a training-free, fully automatic framework that generates diverse, instance-level interactive 3D tabletop scenes. TabletopGen accepts a reference image as input, which can be synthesized by a text-to-image model to enhance scene diversity. We then perform instance segmentation and completion on the reference to obtain per-instance images. Each instance is reconstructed into a 3D model followed by canonical coordinate alignment. The aligned 3D models then undergo pose and scale estimation before being assembled into a collision-free, simulation-ready tabletop scene. A key component of our framework is a novel pose and scale alignment approach that decouples the complex spatial reasoning into two stages: a Differentiable Rotation Optimizer for precise rotation recovery and a Top-view Spatial Alignment mechanism for robust translation and scale estimation, enabling accurate 3D reconstruction from 2D reference. Extensive experiments and user studies show that TabletopGen achieves state-of-the-art performance, markedly surpassing existing methods in visual fidelity, layout accuracy, and physical plausibility, capable of generating realistic tabletop scenes with rich stylistic and spatial diversity. Our code will be publicly available.
📅 2025-12-05
Flawed planning from VLM-driven embodied agents poses significant safety hazards, hindering their deployment in real-world household tasks. However, existing static, non-interactive evaluation paradigms fail to adequately assess risks within these interactive environments, since they cannot simulate dynamic risks that emerge from an agent's actions and rely on unreliable post-hoc evaluations that ignore unsafe intermediate steps. To bridge this critical gap, we propose evaluating an agent's interactive safety: its ability to perceive emergent risks and execute mitigation steps in the correct procedural order. We thus present IS-Bench, the first multi-modal benchmark designed for interactive safety, featuring 161 challenging scenarios with 388 unique safety risks instantiated in a high-fidelity simulator. Crucially, it facilitates a novel process-oriented evaluation that verifies whether risk mitigation actions are performed before/after specific risk-prone steps. Extensive experiments on leading VLMs, including the GPT-4o and Gemini-2.5 series, reveal that current agents lack interactive safety awareness, and that while safety-aware Chain-of-Thought can improve performance, it often compromises task completion. By highlighting these critical limitations, IS-Bench provides a foundation for developing safer and more reliable embodied AI systems. Code and data are released under https://github.com/AI45Lab/IS-Bench.
📅 2025-12-04 | 💬 Code: https://github.com/hustvl/4DLangVGGT, Webpage: https://hustvl.github.io/4DLangVGGT
Constructing 4D language fields is crucial for embodied AI, augmented/virtual reality, and 4D scene understanding, as they provide enriched semantic representations of dynamic environments and enable open-vocabulary querying in complex scenarios. However, existing approaches to 4D semantic field construction primarily rely on scene-specific Gaussian splatting, which requires per-scene optimization, exhibits limited generalization, and is difficult to scale to real-world applications. To address these limitations, we propose 4DLangVGGT, the first Transformer-based feed-forward unified framework for 4D language grounding, that jointly integrates geometric perception and language alignment within a single architecture. 4DLangVGGT has two key components: the 4D Visual Geometry Transformer, StreamVGGT, which captures spatio-temporal geometric representations of dynamic scenes; and the Semantic Bridging Decoder (SBD), which projects geometry-aware features into a language-aligned semantic space, thereby enhancing semantic interpretability while preserving structural fidelity. Unlike prior methods that depend on costly per-scene optimization, 4DLangVGGT can be jointly trained across multiple dynamic scenes and directly applied during inference, achieving both deployment efficiency and strong generalization. This design significantly improves the practicality of large-scale deployment and establishes a new paradigm for open-vocabulary 4D scene understanding. Experiments on HyperNeRF and Neu3D datasets demonstrate that our approach not only generalizes effectively but also achieves state-of-the-art performance, achieving up to 2% gains under per-scene training and 1% improvements under multi-scene training. Our code released in https://github.com/hustvl/4DLangVGGT
📅 2025-12-04 | 💬 Accepted to NeurIPS 2025, Creative AI Track (updated to include poster)
LLMscape is an interactive installation that investigates how humans and AI construct meaning under shared conditions of uncertainty. Within a mutable, projection-mapped landscape, human participants reshape the world and engage with multiple AI agents, each developing incomplete and provisional accounts of their environment. Exhibited in Shanghai and continually evolving, the work positions AI not as deterministic tools but as embodied co-witnesses to an unstable world, examining the parallels between human and artificial meaning-making and inviting reflection on our shared epistemic limits.
📅 2025-12-04
Cross-view correspondence is a fundamental capability for spatial understanding and embodied AI. However, it is still far from being realized in Vision-Language Models (VLMs), especially in achieving precise point-level correspondence, which is crucial for precise affordance interaction. So we propose the Cross-View Point Correspondence (CVPC) task and CrossPoint-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark with hierarchical design, inspired by the human cognitive process of "perceive", "reason", and "correspond". Our evaluation shows the state-of-the-art models (e.g., Gemini-2.5-Pro) still fall far behind humans, with a gap of over 54.65% in overall accuracy, exposing a challenge in transitioning from coarse-grained judgement to fine-grained coordinate prediction. To address this problem, we construct CrossPoint-378K, a dataset with 378K question-answering pairs across 900 scenes, focused on actionable affordance regions that better reflect real-world manipulation and interaction scenarios. Furthermore, we propose CroPond that trained on the CrossPoint-378K dataset. Our CroPond achieves state-of-the-art performance on CrossPoint-Bench, surpassing Gemini-2.5-Pro by 39.7% accuracy, which offers a foundation for advancing future work on cross-view correspondence. The benchmark, dataset, and model are publicly available at https://github.com/WangYipu2002/CrossPoint.
📅 2025-12-04 | 💬 22 pages, 11 figures
As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) frequently exhibit errors in complex video reasoning scenarios, correcting these errors is critical for uncovering their weaknesses and improving performance. However, existing benchmarks lack systematic evaluation of MLLMs' ability to identify and correct these video reasoning errors. To bridge this gap, we propose ViRectify, a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate their fine-grained correction capability. Through an AI-assisted annotation pipeline with human verification, we construct a dataset of over 30K instances spanning dynamic perception, scientific reasoning, and embodied decision-making domains. In ViRectify, we challenge MLLMs to perform step-wise error identification and generate rationales with key video evidence grounding. In addition, we further propose the trajectory evidence-driven correction framework, comprising step-wise error trajectory and reward modeling on visual evidence-grounded correction. It encourages the model to explicitly concentrate on error propagation and key timestamps for correction. Extensive evaluation across 16 advanced MLLMs demonstrates that our ViRectify serves as a challenging testbed, where GPT-5 achieves only 31.94% correction accuracy. Our framework enables a Qwen2.5-VL-7B to consistently outperform the variants of 72B on ViRectify, showing the effectiveness of our approach. Further analysis uncovers systematic asymmetries in error correction across models, and our dataset is also a valuable data resource to perform reflection learning. We believe ViRectify provides a new direction for comprehensively evaluating the advanced MLLMs in video reasoning.
📅 2025-12-04
The advancement of embodied AI has unlocked significant potential for intelligent humanoid robots. However, progress in both Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and world models is severely hampered by the scarcity of large-scale, diverse training data. A promising solution is to "robotize" web-scale human videos, which has been proven effective for policy training. However, these solutions mainly "overlay" robot arms to egocentric videos, which cannot handle complex full-body motions and scene occlusions in third-person videos, making them unsuitable for robotizing humans. To bridge this gap, we introduce X-Humanoid, a generative video editing approach that adapts the powerful Wan 2.2 model into a video-to-video structure and finetunes it for the human-to-humanoid translation task. This finetuning requires paired human-humanoid videos, so we designed a scalable data creation pipeline, turning community assets into 17+ hours of paired synthetic videos using Unreal Engine. We then apply our trained model to 60 hours of the Ego-Exo4D videos, generating and releasing a new large-scale dataset of over 3.6 million "robotized" humanoid video frames. Quantitative analysis and user studies confirm our method's superiority over existing baselines: 69% of users rated it best for motion consistency, and 62.1% for embodiment correctness.
📅 2025-12-04
Generating long, coherent egocentric videos is difficult, as hand-object interactions and procedural tasks require reliable long-term memory. Existing autoregressive models suffer from content drift, where object identity and scene semantics degrade over time. To address this challenge, we introduce EgoLCD, an end-to-end framework for egocentric long-context video generation that treats long video synthesis as a problem of efficient and stable memory management. EgoLCD combines a Long-Term Sparse KV Cache for stable global context with an attention-based short-term memory, extended by LoRA for local adaptation. A Memory Regulation Loss enforces consistent memory usage, and Structured Narrative Prompting provides explicit temporal guidance. Extensive experiments on the EgoVid-5M benchmark demonstrate that EgoLCD achieves state-of-the-art performance in both perceptual quality and temporal consistency, effectively mitigating generative forgetting and representing a significant step toward building scalable world models for embodied AI. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/EgoLCD. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/EgoLCD.
📅 2025-12-03 | 💬 Project page: https://d-robotics-ai-lab.github.io/TabletopGen.project/
Generating high-fidelity, physically interactive 3D simulated tabletop scenes is essential for embodied AI--especially for robotic manipulation policy learning and data synthesis. However, current text- or image-driven 3D scene generation methods mainly focus on large-scale scenes, struggling to capture the high-density layouts and complex spatial relations that characterize tabletop scenes. To address these challenges, we propose TabletopGen, a training-free, fully automatic framework that generates diverse, instance-level interactive 3D tabletop scenes. TabletopGen accepts a reference image as input, which can be synthesized by a text-to-image model to enhance scene diversity. We then perform instance segmentation and completion on the reference to obtain per-instance images. Each instance is reconstructed into a 3D model followed by canonical coordinate alignment. The aligned 3D models then undergo pose and scale estimation before being assembled into a collision-free, simulation-ready tabletop scene. A key component of our framework is a novel pose and scale alignment approach that decouples the complex spatial reasoning into two stages: a Differentiable Rotation Optimizer for precise rotation recovery and a Top-view Spatial Alignment mechanism for robust translation and scale estimation, enabling accurate 3D reconstruction from 2D reference. Extensive experiments and user studies show that TabletopGen achieves state-of-the-art performance, markedly surpassing existing methods in visual fidelity, layout accuracy, and physical plausibility, capable of generating realistic tabletop scenes with rich stylistic and spatial diversity. Our code will be publicly available.
📅 2025-12-03
Agentic reasoning models trained with multimodal reinforcement learning (MMRL) have become increasingly capable, yet they are almost universally optimized using sparse, outcome-based rewards computed based on the final answers. Richer rewards computed from the reasoning tokens can improve learning significantly by providing more fine-grained guidance. However, it is challenging to compute more informative rewards in MMRL beyond those based on outcomes since different samples may require different scoring functions and teacher models may provide noisy reward signals too. In this paper, we introduce the Argos (Agentic Reward for Grounded & Objective Scoring), a principled reward agent to train multimodal reasoning models for agentic tasks. For each sample, Argos selects from a pool of teacher-model derived and rule-based scoring functions to simultaneously evaluate: (i) final response accuracy, (ii) spatiotemporal localization of referred entities and actions, and (iii) the quality of the reasoning process. We find that by leveraging our agentic verifier across both SFT data curation and RL training, our model achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple agentic tasks such as spatial reasoning, visual hallucination as well as robotics and embodied AI benchmarks. Critically, we demonstrate that just relying on SFT post-training on highly curated reasoning data is insufficient, as agents invariably collapse to ungrounded solutions during RL without our online verification. We also show that our agentic verifier can help to reduce reward-hacking in MMRL. Finally, we also provide a theoretical justification for the effectiveness of Argos through the concept of pareto-optimality.
📅 2025-12-03 | 💬 13 pages, 9 figures, conference
Affordance detection aims to jointly address the fundamental "what-where-how" challenge in embodied AI by understanding "what" an object is, "where" the object is located, and "how" it can be used. However, most affordance learning methods focus solely on "how" objects can be used while neglecting the "what" and "where" aspects. Other affordance detection methods treat object detection and affordance learning as two independent tasks, lacking effective interaction and real-time capability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce YOLO Affordance (YOLOA), a real-time affordance detection model that jointly handles these two tasks via a large language model (LLM) adapter. Specifically, YOLOA employs a lightweight detector consisting of object detection and affordance learning branches refined through the LLM Adapter. During training, the LLM Adapter interacts with object and affordance preliminary predictions to refine both branches by generating more accurate class priors, box offsets, and affordance gates. Experiments on our relabeled ADG-Det and IIT-Heat benchmarks demonstrate that YOLOA achieves state-of-the-art accuracy (52.8 / 73.1 mAP on ADG-Det / IIT-Heat) while maintaining real-time performance (up to 89.77 FPS, and up to 846.24 FPS for the lightweight variant). This indicates that YOLOA achieves an excellent trade-off between accuracy and efficiency.
📅 2025-12-03 | 💬 22 pages, 11 figures
As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) frequently exhibit errors in complex video reasoning scenarios, correcting these errors is critical for uncovering their weaknesses and improving performance. However, existing benchmarks lack systematic evaluation of MLLMs' ability to identify and correct these video reasoning errors. To bridge this gap, we propose \textit{ViRectify}, a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate their fine-grained correction capability. Through an AI-assisted annotation pipeline with human verification, we construct a dataset of over 30\textit{K} instances spanning dynamic perception, scientific reasoning, and embodied decision-making domains. In \textit{ViRectify}, we challenge MLLMs to perform step-wise error identification and generate rationales with key video evidence grounding. In addition, we further propose the trajectory evidence-driven correction framework, comprising step-wise error trajectory and reward modeling on visual evidence-grounded correction. It encourages the model to explicitly concentrate on error propagation and key timestamps for correction. Extensive evaluation across 16 advanced MLLMs demonstrates that our \textit{ViRectify} serves as a challenging testbed, where GPT-5 achieves only 31.94\% correction accuracy. Our framework enables a Qwen2.5-VL-7B to consistently outperform the variants of 72B on \textit{ViRectify}, showing the effectiveness of our approach. Further analysis uncovers systematic asymmetries in error correction across models, and our dataset is also a valuable data resource to perform reflection learning. We believe \textit{ViRectify} provides a new direction for comprehensively evaluating the advanced MLLMs in video reasoning.
📅 2025-12-03 | 💬 https://sites.google.com/view/responsible-robotbench
Recent advances in large multimodal models have enabled new opportunities in embodied AI, particularly in robotic manipulation. These models have shown strong potential in generalization and reasoning, but achieving reliable and responsible robotic behavior in real-world settings remains an open challenge. In high-stakes environments, robotic agents must go beyond basic task execution to perform risk-aware reasoning, moral decision-making, and physically grounded planning. We introduce ResponsibleRobotBench, a systematic benchmark designed to evaluate and accelerate progress in responsible robotic manipulation from simulation to real world. This benchmark consists of 23 multi-stage tasks spanning diverse risk types, including electrical, chemical, and human-related hazards, and varying levels of physical and planning complexity. These tasks require agents to detect and mitigate risks, reason about safety, plan sequences of actions, and engage human assistance when necessary. Our benchmark includes a general-purpose evaluation framework that supports multimodal model-based agents with various action representation modalities. The framework integrates visual perception, context learning, prompt construction, hazard detection, reasoning and planning, and physical execution. It also provides a rich multimodal dataset, supports reproducible experiments, and includes standardized metrics such as success rate, safety rate, and safe success rate. Through extensive experimental setups, ResponsibleRobotBench enables analysis across risk categories, task types, and agent configurations. By emphasizing physical reliability, generalization, and safety in decision-making, this benchmark provides a foundation for advancing the development of trustworthy, real-world responsible dexterous robotic systems. https://sites.google.com/view/responsible-robotbench
📅 2025-12-02 | 💬 Preprint; 19 pages, 7 figures, 8 tables
Modeling dynamic 3D environments from LiDAR sequences is central to building reliable 4D worlds for autonomous driving and embodied AI. Existing generative frameworks, however, often treat all spatial regions uniformly, overlooking the varying uncertainty across real-world scenes. This uniform generation leads to artifacts in complex or ambiguous regions, limiting realism and temporal stability. In this work, we present U4D, an uncertainty-aware framework for 4D LiDAR world modeling. Our approach first estimates spatial uncertainty maps from a pretrained segmentation model to localize semantically challenging regions. It then performs generation in a "hard-to-easy" manner through two sequential stages: (1) uncertainty-region modeling, which reconstructs high-entropy regions with fine geometric fidelity, and (2) uncertainty-conditioned completion, which synthesizes the remaining areas under learned structural priors. To further ensure temporal coherence, U4D incorporates a mixture of spatio-temporal (MoST) block that adaptively fuses spatial and temporal representations during diffusion. Extensive experiments show that U4D produces geometrically faithful and temporally consistent LiDAR sequences, advancing the reliability of 4D world modeling for autonomous perception and simulation.
📅 2025-12-02 | 💬 18 pages, 10 figures
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in embodied AI tasks. However, existing VLA models, often built upon Vision-Language Models (VLMs), typically process dense visual inputs independently at each timestep. This approach implicitly models the task as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). However, this history-agnostic design is suboptimal for effective visual token processing in dynamic sequential decision-making, as it fails to leverage the context of history. To address this limitation, we reformulate the problem from a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) perspective and propose a novel framework named AVA-VLA. Inspired by the POMDP that the action generation should be conditioned on the belief state. AVA-VLA introduces Active Visual Attention (AVA) to dynamically modulate visual processing. It achieves this by leveraging the recurrent state, which is a neural approximation of the agent's belief state derived from the previous decision step. Specifically, the AVA module uses the recurrent state to compute the soft weights to actively process task-relevant visual tokens based on its historical context. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that AVA-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance across popular robotic benchmarks, including LIBERO and CALVIN. Furthermore, real-world deployments on a dual-arm robot platform validate the framework's practical applicability and robust sim-to-real transferability.
📅 2025-12-02 | 💬 This paper is under review
This perspective reframes human-robot interaction (HRI) through extended reality (XR), arguing that virtual robots powered by large foundation models (FMs) can serve as cognitively grounded, empathic agents. Unlike physical robots, XR-native agents are unbound by hardware constraints and can be instantiated, adapted, and scaled on demand, while still affording embodiment and co-presence. We synthesize work across XR, HRI, and cognitive AI to show how such agents can support safety-critical scenarios, socially and cognitively empathic interaction across domains, and outreaching physical capabilities with XR and AI integration. We then discuss how multimodal large FMs (e.g., large language model, large vision model, and vision-language model) enable context-aware reasoning, affect-sensitive situations, and long-term adaptation, positioning virtual robots as cognitive and empathic mediators rather than mere simulation assets. At the same time, we highlight challenges and potential risks, including overtrust, cultural and representational bias, privacy concerns around biometric sensing, and data governance and transparency. The paper concludes by outlining a research agenda for human-centered, ethically grounded XR agents - emphasizing multi-layered evaluation frameworks, multi-user ecosystems, mixed virtual-physical embodiment, and societal and ethical design practices to envision XR-based virtual agents powered by FMs as reshaping future HRI into a more efficient and adaptive paradigm.
📅 2025-12-02 | 💬 Project page: https://heyumeng.com/SPARK/index.html. 17 pages, 7 figures
Articulated 3D objects are critical for embodied AI, robotics, and interactive scene understanding, yet creating simulation-ready assets remains labor-intensive and requires expert modeling of part hierarchies and motion structures. We introduce SPARK, a framework for reconstructing physically consistent, kinematic part-level articulated objects from a single RGB image. Given an input image, we first leverage VLMs to extract coarse URDF parameters and generate part-level reference images. We then integrate the part-image guidance and the inferred structure graph into a generative diffusion transformer to synthesize consistent part and complete shapes of articulated objects. To further refine the URDF parameters, we incorporate differentiable forward kinematics and differentiable rendering to optimize joint types, axes, and origins under VLM-generated open-state supervision. Extensive experiments show that SPARK produces high-quality, simulation-ready articulated assets across diverse categories, enabling downstream applications such as robotic manipulation and interaction modeling. Project page: https://heyumeng.com/SPARK/index.html.
📅 2025-12-02
Existing research on indoor embodied tasks typically requires agents to actively explore unknown environments and reason about the scene to achieve a specific goal. However, when deployed in real life, agents often face sequential tasks, where each new sub-task follows the completion of the previous one, and certain sub-tasks may be infeasible, such as searching for a non-existent object. Compared with the single-task setting, the core challenge lies in reusing spatial knowledge accumulated from previous explorations to support subsequent reasoning and exploration. In this work, we investigate this underexplored yet practically significant embodied AI challenge. To evaluate this challenge, we introduce SEER-Bench, a new Sequential Embodied Exploration and Reasoning Benchmark encompassing encompassing two classic embodied tasks: Embodied Question Answering (EQA) and Embodied Multi-modal Navigation (EMN). Building on SEER-Bench, we propose 3DSPMR, a 3D SPatial Memory Reasoning approach that exploits relational, visual, and geometric cues from explored regions to augment Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for reasoning and exploration in sequential embodied tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explicitly incorporate geometric information into MLLM-based spatial understanding and reasoning. Extensive experiments verify that 3DSPMR achieves substantial performance gains on both sequential EQA and EMN tasks.
📅 2025-12-02
We propose a novel framework for persona-based language model system, motivated by the need for personalized AI agents that adapt to individual user preferences. In our approach, the agent embodies the user's "persona" (e.g. user profile or taste) and is powered by a large language model (LLM). To enable the agent to leverage rich contextual information, we introduce a Knowledge-Graph-enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Graph RAG) mechanism that constructs an LLM-derived graph index of relevant documents and summarizes communities of related information. Our framework generates personalized prompts by combining: (1) a summary of the user's historical behaviors and preferences extracted from the knowledge graph, and (2) relevant global interaction patterns identified through graph-based community detection. This dynamic prompt engineering approach allows the agent to maintain consistent persona-aligned behaviors while benefiting from collective knowledge. On the LaMP benchmark, our method improves news categorization F1 by 11.1%, movie tagging F1 by 56.1%, and reduces product rating MAE by 10.4% over prior methods. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PersonaAgentwGraphRAG-DE6F
📅 2025-12-02
This paper envisions a transformative paradigm in software engineering, where Artificial Intelligence, embodied in fully autonomous agents, becomes the primary driver of the core software development activities. We introduce a new class of software engineering agents, empowered by Large Language Models and equipped with beliefs, desires, intentions, and memory to enable human-like reasoning. These agents collaborate with humans and other agents to design, implement, test, and deploy software systems with a level of speed, reliability, and adaptability far beyond the current software development processes. Their coordination and collaboration are governed by norms expressed as deontic modalities - commitments, obligations, prohibitions and permissions - that regulate interactions and ensure regulatory compliance. These innovations establish a scalable, transparent and trustworthy framework for future Human-AI software engineering teams.
📅 2025-12-01 | 💬 Accepted by AAAI 2026. Project Page: https://efficientflow.github.io/
Generative modeling has recently shown remarkable promise for visuomotor policy learning, enabling flexible and expressive control across diverse embodied AI tasks. However, existing generative policies often struggle with data inefficiency, requiring large-scale demonstrations, and sampling inefficiency, incurring slow action generation during inference. We introduce EfficientFlow, a unified framework for efficient embodied AI with flow-based policy learning. To enhance data efficiency, we bring equivariance into flow matching. We theoretically prove that when using an isotropic Gaussian prior and an equivariant velocity prediction network, the resulting action distribution remains equivariant, leading to improved generalization and substantially reduced data demands. To accelerate sampling, we propose a novel acceleration regularization strategy. As direct computation of acceleration is intractable for marginal flow trajectories, we derive a novel surrogate loss that enables stable and scalable training using only conditional trajectories. Across a wide range of robotic manipulation benchmarks, the proposed algorithm achieves competitive or superior performance under limited data while offering dramatically faster inference. These results highlight EfficientFlow as a powerful and efficient paradigm for high-performance embodied AI.
📅 2025-12-01
We present KM-ViPE (Knowledge Mapping Video Pose Engine), a real-time open-vocabulary SLAM framework for uncalibrated monocular cameras in dynamic environments. Unlike systems requiring depth sensors and offline calibration, KM-ViPE operates directly on raw RGB streams, making it ideal for ego-centric applications and harvesting internet-scale video data for training. KM-ViPE tightly couples DINO visual features with geometric constraints through a high-level features based adaptive robust kernel that handles both moving objects and movable static objects (e.g., moving furniture in ego-centric views). The system performs simultaneous online localization and open-vocabulary semantic mapping by fusing geometric and deep visual features aligned with language embeddings. Our results are competitive with state-of-the-art approaches, while existing solutions either operate offline, need depth data and/or odometry estimation, or lack dynamic scene robustness. KM-ViPE benefits from internet-scale training and uniquely combines online operation, uncalibrated monocular input, and robust handling of dynamic scenes, which makes it a good fit for autonomous robotics and AR/VR applications and advances practical spatial intelligence capabilities for embodied AI.
📅 2025-12-01
Articulated 3D objects are critical for embodied AI, robotics, and interactive scene understanding, yet creating simulation-ready assets remains labor-intensive and requires expert modeling of part hierarchies and motion structures. We introduce SPARK, a framework for reconstructing physically consistent, kinematic part-level articulated objects from a single RGB image. Given an input image, we first leverage VLMs to extract coarse URDF parameters and generate part-level reference images. We then integrate the part-image guidance and the inferred structure graph into a generative diffusion transformer to synthesize consistent part and complete shapes of articulated objects. To further refine the URDF parameters, we incorporate differentiable forward kinematics and differentiable rendering to optimize joint types, axes, and origins under VLM-generated open-state supervision. Extensive experiments show that SPARK produces high-quality, simulation-ready articulated assets across diverse categories, enabling downstream applications such as robotic manipulation and interaction modeling.
📅 2025-12-01 | 💬 22 pages, 11 figures
As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) frequently exhibit errors in complex video reasoning scenarios, correcting these errors is critical for uncovering their weaknesses and improving performance. However, existing benchmarks lack systematic evaluation of MLLMs' ability to identify and correct these video reasoning errors. To bridge this gap, we propose \textit{ViRectify}, a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate their fine-grained correction capability. Through an AI-assisted annotation pipeline with human verification, we construct a dataset of over 30\textit{K} instances spanning dynamic perception, scientific reasoning, and embodied decision-making domains. In \textit{ViRectify}, we challenge MLLMs to perform step-wise error identification and generate rationales with key video evidence grounding. In addition, we further propose the trajectory evidence-driven correction framework, comprising step-wise error trajectory and reward modeling on visual evidence-grounded correction. It encourages the model to explicitly concentrate on error propagation and key timestamps for correction. Extensive evaluation across 16 advanced MLLMs demonstrates that our \textit{ViRectify} serves as a challenging testbed, where GPT-5 achieves only 31.94\% correction accuracy. Our framework enables a Qwen2.5-VL-7B to consistently outperform the variants of 72B on \textit{ViRectify}, showing the effectiveness of our approach. Further analysis uncovers systematic asymmetries in error correction across models, and our dataset is also a valuable data resource to perform reflection learning. We believe \textit{ViRectify} provides a new direction for comprehensively evaluating the advanced MLLMs in video reasoning.
📅 2025-12-01 | 💬 18 pages, 9 figures
3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) focuses on locating objects in 3D scenes based on natural language descriptions, serving as a fundamental task for embodied AI and robotics. Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have motivated research into extending them to 3DVG. However, MLLMs primarily process 2D visual inputs and struggle with understanding 3D spatial structure of scenes solely from these limited perspectives. Existing methods mainly utilize viewpoint-dependent rendering of reconstructed point clouds to provide explicit structural guidance for MLLMs in 3DVG tasks, leading to inefficiency and limited spatial reasoning. To address this issue, we propose S$^2$-MLLM, an efficient framework that enhances spatial reasoning in MLLMs through implicit spatial reasoning. We introduce a spatial guidance strategy that leverages the structure awareness of feed-forward 3D reconstruction. By acquiring 3D structural understanding during training, our model can implicitly reason about 3D scenes without relying on inefficient point cloud reconstruction. Moreover, we propose a structure-enhanced module (SE), which first employs intra-view and inter-view attention mechanisms to capture dependencies within views and correspondences across views. The module further integrates multi-level position encoding to associate visual representations with spatial positions and viewpoint information, enabling more accurate structural understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that S$^2$-MLLM unifies superior performance, generalization, and efficiency, achieving significant performance over existing methods across the ScanRefer, Nr3D, and Sr3D datasets. Code will be available upon acceptance.
📅 2025-12-01 | 💬 Project page: https://d-robotics-ai-lab.github.io/TabletopGen.project/
Generating high-fidelity, physically interactive 3D simulated tabletop scenes is essential for embodied AI--especially for robotic manipulation policy learning and data synthesis. However, current text- or image-driven 3D scene generation methods mainly focus on large-scale scenes, struggling to capture the high-density layouts and complex spatial relations that characterize tabletop scenes. To address these challenges, we propose TabletopGen, a training-free, fully automatic framework that generates diverse, instance-level interactive 3D tabletop scenes. TabletopGen accepts a reference image as input, which can be synthesized by a text-to-image model to enhance scene diversity. We then perform instance segmentation and completion on the reference to obtain per-instance images. Each instance is reconstructed into a 3D model followed by canonical coordinate alignment. The aligned 3D models then undergo pose and scale estimation before being assembled into a collision-free, simulation-ready tabletop scene. A key component of our framework is a novel pose and scale alignment approach that decouples the complex spatial reasoning into two stages: a Differentiable Rotation Optimizer for precise rotation recovery and a Top-view Spatial Alignment mechanism for robust translation and scale estimation, enabling accurate 3D reconstruction from 2D reference. Extensive experiments and user studies show that TabletopGen achieves state-of-the-art performance, markedly surpassing existing methods in visual fidelity, layout accuracy, and physical plausibility, capable of generating realistic tabletop scenes with rich stylistic and spatial diversity. Our code will be publicly available.
📅 2025-12-01
Artificial intelligence has advanced rapidly across perception, language, reasoning, and multimodal domains. Yet despite these achievements, modern AI systems remain fundamentally limited in their ability to self-monitor, self-correct, and regulate their behavior autonomously in dynamic contexts. This paper identifies and analyzes seven core deficiencies that constrain contemporary AI models: the absence of intrinsic self-monitoring, lack of meta-cognitive awareness, fixed and non-adaptive learning mechanisms, inability to restructure goals, lack of representational maintenance, insufficient embodied feedback, and the absence of intrinsic agency. Alongside identifying these limitations, we also outline a forward-looking perspective on how AI may evolve beyond them through architectures that mirror neurocognitive principles. We argue that these structural limitations prevent current architectures, including deep learning and transformer-based systems, from achieving robust generalization, lifelong adaptability, and real-world autonomy. Drawing on a comparative analysis of artificial systems and biological cognition [7], and integrating insights from AI research, cognitive science, and neuroscience, we outline how these capabilities are absent in current models and why scaling alone cannot resolve them. We conclude by advocating for a paradigmatic shift toward cognitively grounded AI (cognitive autonomy) capable of self-directed adaptation, dynamic representation management, and intentional, goal-oriented behavior, paired with reformative oversight mechanisms [8] that ensure autonomous systems remain interpretable, governable, and aligned with human values.