Simulated environments enable scalable training data generation for embodied agents, but more data does not necessarily provide what a particular agent needs to learn. Existing environment-generation pipelines largely optimize generic properties such as realism, diversity, or task coverage, while different pretrained policies can fail for different environmental reasons. We therefore introduce WEDGE, a framework for weakness-guided navigation learning in which the failure modes of a pretrained agent guide the generation of training environments at each adaptation round. Given a pretrained policy, WEDGE uses an LLM to propose executable weakness features from contrasting successful and failed rollouts, automatically validates them on the diagnostic set, and selects the strongest validated weakness based on its success-rate gap. The validated weaknesses are then mapped to the environmental factors that control them. WEDGE varies these factors to construct environments in the difficulty regimes where the policy struggles, producing targeted training experience for adaptation. Across three navigation agents with different adaptation mechanisms, we find that policies exhibit distinct weakness profiles and benefit from different training environments. Weakness-conditioned adaptation consistently outperforms matched random and hard-example alternatives on ProcTHOR, while the resulting gains for Uni-NaVid and Gemini also extend to HM3D after ProcTHOR adaptation. Iterative re-diagnosis further shows that dominant weaknesses can persist or shift as the policy improves, providing updated guidance for subsequent environment construction. Together, these results show that policy failures are not only diagnostic signals, but actionable guidance for constructing training environments that target a policy's current weaknesses.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19420
Embodied visual tracking requires a robot to identify a designated target from visual observations and control its own motion to follow that target through an environment. Following an isolated person is a comparatively simple demonstration of embodied visual tracking, but following the intended person among distractors remains challenging. Existing methods exhibit a substantial drop in success from single-target to distractor tracking, motivating a focus on the shared spaces that person-following robots must navigate. We present \method{}, a vision--language waypoint policy built around the hypothesis that visual and language representations should be aligned before tracking-specific motion is learned. The policy combines complementary frozen visual encoders, multiscale temporal context, a transformer backbone, and a lightweight head for robot-centric waypoint prediction. Its training progresses through vision--language alignment, multimodal reasoning mid-training, and tracking specialization on 19,532 oracle episodes. Compared with 41.54\% distractor-tracking success for our earlier OmTrackVLA model, the complete multi-stage recipe achieves 55.80\%. We then explore on-policy refinement using filtered oracle labels for states visited by the policy. This preliminary study adds 2.42 percentage points of distractor-tracking success, reaching 58.22\%, while reducing collision rate by 1.99 pts. The final policy records the highest distractor- and ambiguous-tracking success rates among the compared methods. These results support staged multimodal learning as a promising direction for tracking among distractors and motivate further study of on-policy refinement for person following in shared spaces.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19361
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been widely applied in embodied agents and robotics for vision tasks. However, MLLMs suffer from limitations in spatial reasoning and perception. Post-training techniques have shown promise for improving these capabilities; yet, there are limited data-driven surveys of such approaches. In this survey, we consider approaches to fine-tuning pretrained MLLMs for spatial reasoning tasks, ranging from supervised to reinforcement learning, with an emphasis on the datasets used. We investigate themes of dataset construction, data modality and annotation, and evaluation of the resulting models. Based on these themes, we categorize research into three groups: dataset design, dataset construction and evaluation. We find four main methods for constructing fixed spatial annotations: rules and templates, LLM prompting, procedural generation, and human-in-the-loop. We also observe substantial variation in evaluation approaches, including different scoring methods, tolerance metrics, and benchmark types. Finally, we identify opportunities for future research in unified dynamic annotation, efficient spatial reasoning, standardization of evaluation, expanded spatial range, and human-centered spatial interactions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19108
World models (WMs) and world-action models (WAMs) focus on future world prediction and executable action generation, respectively. Although these models learn shared physical dynamics and interaction semantics from embodied trajectories, they are typically trained in isolation, which restricts knowledge reuse between prediction and control. The central challenge is therefore to develop a unified learning framework that shares these dynamics while preserving the distinct modeling capabilities required by each paradigm. We propose UniW(A)M, a mixture-of-experts world-(action) model built upon diffusion Transformers that unifies action-conditioned world modeling and diverse WAM variants. Shared experts capture common dynamics, while atomic capability experts are reused across interfaces so that each interface keeps its own conditional pathway. At deployment, a plug-in adaptive interface router (PAIR) learns from a small subset of target-task chunk scenarios to select a suitable WAM interface for each execution chunk, balancing task success and execution efficiency while keeping the backbone frozen. We evaluate UniW(A)M on LIBERO, RoboTwin 2.0, and three real-world manipulation tasks, where it achieves 88.3% average real-world success versus 76.7% for the strongest baseline. On WorldArena, it leads action-conditioned world modeling on all three tasks. AC-WM co-training contributes to action generation on every action interface and PAIR raises OOD success from 63.3% to 76.7%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18697
Recent advances in zero-shot voice cloning systems make it possible to reproduce a recognizable voice from a short recording and attach it to arbitrary virtual characters. Prior work suggests that familiar vocal identity can carry over associated personality impressions to new targets such as robots or virtual characters. However, these works have mainly examined familiarity and personalization effects rather than directly testing whether a cloned familiar voice systematically transfers personality impressions to an embodied virtual character. Such transference raises the concern that cloned voices could be used to manipulate people into engaging with virtual characters as capable social actors. Across two studies, we investigated whether personality impressions transfer when a virtual character speaks with the cloned voice of a familiar person. Study 1 examined this question in a real-world university setting using the cloned voice of a lecturer familiar to the participating students. Study 2 examined the same question online using voices of social media content creators and members of their communities. Drawing on the concepts of identity activation, trait transfer, and person reconstruction, we show that evidence of personality transfer was limited in both studies. Observed effects were selective and did not generalize across traits or study contexts. In the online study in particular, recognizable voice identity cues activated expectations about the speaker but did not reconstruct the broader person impression. Qualitative responses further indicated that judgments were frequently shaped by perceived artificiality and by whether voice and appearance fit together. Our findings moderate common concerns that cloned voices straightforwardly manipulate people into perceiving artificial characters as capable social actors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18669
An embodied agent must prioritise among competing bodily needs. In active inference, it can respond to an urgent need by increasing the precision of information about that need or by increasing its preference for outcomes that relieve it. We compare these two interventions, separately and together, in a foraging gridworld with three lethal needs, and ask how each changes survival, perception and the body model the agent learns. Precision sharpens interoceptive posteriors and improves survival. Preference reweighting keeps bodily states further from their lethal boundaries and changes the states from which the agent learns, so its learned model covers fewer need levels, with lower quality across all levels but slightly higher quality on the levels it visits. An experiment on 72 further layouts does not establish the predicted preference benefit on difficult layouts, but both interventions improve average survival there and their interaction is positive. Survival alone therefore gives an incomplete account of how a model prioritises needs and learns about its body.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18617
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown strong potential for embodied vision-language navigation (VLN), yet their performance degrades on long-horizon trajectories due to context-length limits, redundant historical observations, and unstable spatial alignment across time. These issues make it difficult to both compress long navigation histories and reliably reuse past spatial experience. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{MemoryVLN}, a unified memory-driven navigation system built around memory construction and management. During memory construction, \emph{Long Sequence Compression} employs forgetting-curve-inspired temporal sampling to preserve dense recent evidence and sparse yet representative distant observations under a limited token budget. \emph{Ego-Aware Memory Representation} further integrates 2D semantic tokens, 3D geometric tokens, and 6D agent poses, allowing each memory to encode both what was observed and where it was observed. During memory management, \emph{Hierarchical Memory Bank} maintains in-episode and context-level memories through cross-context warm-start and confidence-controlled write-back. \emph{Memory Enhancement} then retrieves the Top-$K$ relevant memories according to the current navigation state and fuses them with the current visual tokens. Together, these mechanisms transform raw navigation history into compact, spatially grounded, selectively retrievable, and reusable navigation experience. Extensive experiments on R2R-CE and RxR-CE demonstrate consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art baselines by a substantial margin (i.e., 2\% and 6.5\% in successful rate).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18478
We introduce HelpMeOut, an embodied AI benchmark for error-aware monitoring of household task execution. Existing embodied household benchmarks typically assume that humans execute tasks correctly, but this assumption does not hold for cognitively impaired persons or older adults whose everyday activities produce structured execution errors. To address this gap, HelpMeOut operationalizes research on everyday action errors into 20000 paired activity episodes, covering nine neuropsychologically motivated error categories. In each episode, agents observe a streaming human activity trajectory and must monitor whether the execution is unfolding correctly, diagnosing any structured errors as early as possible. We evaluate learned-monitor, symbolic, change-point, and frontier LLM prompting baselines. Results show that these methods perform poorly as error monitors, often missing when execution goes wrong. These results suggest a gap left by standard goal-inference and task-completion benchmarks, making HelpMeOut a testbed for error-aware assistive agents.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17694
Existing embodied navigation tasks commonly assume that traversability and object states remain fixed during an episode. Yet reaching a goal may require opening a door to access a room and then opening a container to reveal a hidden target. We formulate interactive navigation beyond reachability, unifying channel-induced changes in spatial connectivity, container-induced changes in target visibility, and their sequential dependencies. We introduce MultINav-Bench, a 3K-episode ObjectGoal benchmark in MolmoSpaces spanning channel, container, and mixed tasks, with interaction-necessity annotations covering required and unnecessary episodes. Its data generation pipeline automates task construction across multiple task types. The evaluation protocol separately measures navigation success, interaction effectiveness, and cost. We further propose MultINav-Agent, a three-stage agentic framework built on a persistent, state-conditioned interaction graph. Semantic interactive perception grounds entities and interaction states; a vision-language model selects task-relevant actions based on expected changes in connectivity and target observability; and post-interaction verification updates the graph to guide subsequent navigation, exploration, or interaction. Experiments on MultINav-Bench show that MultINav-Agent consistently outperforms adapted baselines across channel, container, and mixed tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17089
LLMs are used as high-level controllers for embodied agents, but it remains unclear whether they support collaborative reasoning, such as anticipating a collaborator's actions in real-time teamwork without dialogue. We ask if observing the partner's state, exchanging object knowledge, and predicting the partner's next action, shape task outcomes and coordination when agents can share percepts but never intentions, plans, or task-level messages, and whether the two agents occupy symmetric roles. Using the Habitat-based PARTNR benchmark, we introduce a Decoupled Partial Observability regime that enforces strictly individual perception, and we augment decentralized zero-shot ReAct planners with Other Agent's State (OAS) observation, object Knowledge Exchange (KE) between co-located agents, and Other Agent's Next Action (OANA) prediction, evaluated on the full 2 x 2 x 2 grid with four planners on 1,000 validation tasks. OAS observation improves task quality, reducing extraneous effort for every planner, whereas KE primarily improves execution efficiency, cutting simulation steps by up to 25% with little change in success. The two are largely redundant for strong planners but complementary for the weakest, for which KE without the OAS is the worst configuration. OANA prediction lowers the success rate in 15 of 16 model x context pairs while raising explicit partner mentions to 55-100%, and its accuracy gains lie mainly in the coarse action type, partly because agents recognize the action the partner is already performing. The robot retrieves objects sooner and completes its tasks earlier than the simulated human. Shared context reduces total task time by shortening the remaining duration that the human works alone. Also, coordination benefits arise from responding to shared context, especially the OAS, rather than explicit anticipation, yielding shallow, planner-dependent partner modeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16895
Recent world action models draw on video generation priors to jointly predict future observations and robot actions. Adapting these priors to control requires determining how future predictions should guide policy learning. RAP-WAM combines predictive Rehearsal and Action Perturbations (RAP) with future-supervised queries and Coupled Action Projection for policy learning. Predictive rehearsal trains on model-generated inputs while retaining recorded targets, and accumulates recurring errors into a spatial prior. We perturb actions and measure changes in video predictions. Action-response-based spatiotemporal credit assignment combines these responses, prediction error, and the rehearsal prior to allocate visual supervision; spatially aggregating the responses determines supervision intensity across future action steps. No separate scoring network or deployment-time probe is required. The base learns from a video-pretrained backbone without intermediate pretraining on external embodied data. We evaluate the fixed base and its agent-refined, task-conditioned system. On 42 RoboDojo tasks, their average success rates are 12.85% and 15.62%, with Scores of 17.86 and 20.59. Across 15 real-robot tasks, the complete system achieves 89.00% task-macro-average success, exceeding the strongest of five baselines by 37.67 percentage points. Across 315 fixed-output simulation windows, 45.21% of response-top20 positions fall outside error-top20, revealing information beyond prediction error.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16443
Vision-language-action models for embodied navigation typically rely on RGB observations, limiting their applicability in lights-out industrial environments where visible illumination may be unavailable. We study illumination-independent navigation using spatial audio for target localization and depth for obstacle-aware geometry. To support this setting, we introduce DarkNav-Bench, a benchmark with 24 industrial scenes and four progressively challenging acoustic conditions. We further propose ADAPT, an audio-depth action-planning framework equipped with spatial-audio perception and optimized for closed-loop navigation through reinforcement learning (RL). Our key RL contribution, transition-aware reward shaping (TARS), defines a pose-aware shortest-action potential over a position-heading graph. Unlike conventional geodesic-progress rewards, TARS accounts for both feasible movements and in-place rotations, providing action-consistent feedback for policy optimization. Experiments show that ADAPT consistently outperforms training-based navigation baselines and zero-shot multimodal models on both seen and unseen scenes. On unseen environments, it achieves 90.6% success under Clean conditions and retains 60.0% success under the most challenging Localized Noise setting. These results demonstrate the potential of spatial audio and depth as complementary modalities for reliable RGB-free navigation in lights-out industrial environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15956
A central challenge in embodied recursive self-improvement is enabling agents to convert interaction history into capabilities that persist beyond one world and transfer to later tasks. A saved memory or successful final action does not by itself establish that a reusable capability was acquired; evaluation must separate capability change from carried-over resources, unequal source exposure, and early execution failures. We construct MC-EvoBench as a controlled Minecraft benchmark with a fixed catalog of 19 registered evolution chains, including 12 primary evaluation chains and seven calibration or probe chains, together with three graph-aligned paired probe families for transfer. The benchmark represents each task as a task-state graph, defines stage-level environment verifiers, assigns matched source and target roles, resets the target world, and permits only a declared agent artifact to cross the source-target boundary. For each probe, no-prior, related, unrelated, and shuffled source conditions are evaluated under matched environment-step budgets and five seeds; we report TSR, WGP, and VMP and retain provenance records. The benchmark reveals a consistent direct-capability gap between controller and planner-backed variants, while related experience yields no stable transfer: it does not improve either tool probe, its small wood-species gain hinges on one seed, and all intervals include zero. Stage audits further show that early wood-collection and crafting bottlenecks often leave later capabilities unobserved. MC-EvoBench thus offers a controlled testbed for durable, transferable embodied capabilities. Code and data are available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13829
Scaling generalist robotic policies is limited by the high cost of collecting embodied interaction data. Large-scale egocentric human videos offer a rich alternative, but they lack robot action labels, and existing action annotation methods are often noisy under real-world visual complexity and diverse manipulation dynamics. We introduce LAPT-Scale, a scalable latent action pre-training paradigm with two components: LAPT-Scale-LAM learns continuous latent actions by explaining frame-to-frame visual transitions in human videos and uses them as human-derived supervision, while LAPT-Scale-Policy trains a VLA policy through human-video latent-action pre-training, target-robot embodiment alignment, and task-specific post-training. Unlike prior vector-quantized LAMs, LAPT-Scale-LAM uses a continuous latent space to preserve fine-grained motion and interaction dynamics. We further combine perceptual, semantic, and optical-flow alignment signals to improve transition-level supervision beyond pixel reconstruction. Trained on 23.3K hours of egocentric video, LAPT-Scale-LAM provides implicit action supervision for policy pre-training, yielding consistent scaling gains and improving real-robot success from 63.3% to 85.0% as annotated human video scales from 1K to 5K hours. The learned policy also generalizes to unseen visual conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13732
Long-horizon embodied agents must maintain task-relevant information, coordinate heterogeneous robots, and adapt their decisions as execution unfolds. Existing benchmarks investigate dynamic task execution and embodied multi-agent coordination, but provide limited evaluation of their intersection. We introduce MAGMA-Bench, an architecture-agnostic benchmark for persistent task reasoning in dynamic multi-robot environments. MAGMA-Bench evaluates agents across increasing task horizons and controlled online perturbations, including execution failures, task interruptions, and mission updates, with scenarios requiring coordination across robots with heterogeneous capabilities. It uses a structured skill-level interface to separate task-level reasoning from perception and low-level control. We evaluate locally deployable open-weight planners, multi-agent state-tracking strategies, and frontier models. Even the strongest evaluated models fail on a substantial fraction of clean episodes, and their success rates decrease further under online perturbations. Supervised adaptation greatly improves a small model, but performance remains substantially lower on longer and multi-robot missions. We release the benchmark, 261,646 task-level training examples, and an architecture-agnostic expert-trace generation pipeline.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13534
AI agents depend on repeated decisions to accomplish tasks, with large language models (LLMs) commonly serving as their core decision makers. The recent emergence of Jev offers an opportunity to make these decisions faster and at lower cost. However, it remains unclear whether such local savings can be translated into efficient and reliable task completion. In this paper, we investigate this efficiency transfer across five agents in two representative application settings, embodied tasks in ALFWorld and mobile app use in AndroidWorld. Across 4,500 task executions, we jointly evaluate task effectiveness, decision-level and task-level resource use, and execution behavior. Experimental results show that Jev integration substantially reduces decision cost and latency across all five agents, with task-level gains varying by workflow. Task success remains close to baseline levels on ALFWorld and declines more substantially in two mobile agents. Auxiliary reasoning and additional interactions absorb decision savings, while failed recovery and premature completion limit successful delivery. Mean cost per successful outcome increases in one agent even as spending per attempt falls. These findings highlight the importance of preserving progress, supporting recovery, and verifying completion when integrating efficient decision models into agent workflows. Their practical value should be assessed through successful task delivery, recovery behavior, and resources per delivered outcome.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13092
Continual learning requires models to accumulate past experience and transfer it to new tasks. Despite substantial research on continual learning, existing work remains largely confined to non-embodied settings, without extending to embodied environments. To address this gap, we introduce EmbodiedCLBench, the first benchmark in embodied simulation for evaluating the continual learning capability of self-evolving agents. With compositional generalization as the core evaluation principle, our benchmark evaluates whether agents can first learn from basic tasks and then recombine the acquired skills to solve complex, unseen advanced tasks. Based on EmbodiedCLBench, we conduct extensive experiments across multiple agent harnesses and learning methods, revealing consistent limitations and distinctive behaviors. Our results show that while advanced tasks can be hardly solved under zero-shot setting, the experience from basic tasks enables consistent improvement. Such benefit from the experience remains stable even if the task complexity increases. However, this improvement does not scale accordingly with the number of learning samples, and current agents cannot extract meaningful information from additional experience. Collectively, our findings highlight continual learning as a fundamental yet underexplored capability, and our benchmark offers valuable resources for designing effective self-evolving agents in embodied environments. Our code and dataset are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13021
Embodied agents must translate multimodal observations and user requests into executable actions while adapting to product constraints, changing goals, and execution feedback. We present JoyInside-VLM-Agent, a ReAct-style multimodal agent developed through product-conditioned trajectory construction and staged policy learning for robotic platforms and smart hardware. A closed-loop sandbox generates multimodal interaction trajectories covering goal revisions and failure recovery, which are checked against execution outcomes and semantic criteria. Supervised fine-tuning and multi-teacher on-policy distillation precede reinforcement learning with DPER (Dual-Source Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation with Token-Level Evidence Routing). DPER routes token-level evidence between a frozen privileged teacher and a privileged student sharing the rollout policy's parameters, modulating reward-derived token advantages while preserving their signs. Training rewards combine generative process evaluation, multi-judge rankings, and task-queue consistency. JoyInside-VLM-Agent achieves a BFCL v4 overall score of 77.44, exceeding the evaluated baselines; results on the other public benchmarks are mixed. On JoyInside-Devices and JoyInside-Robotics, the evaluated system, which includes domain-specific skill refinement, leads the baselines on all reported metrics. Two real-world quadruped case studies illustrate visually grounded search, replanning after execution failure, and explicit failure reporting.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12957
Understanding and manipulating spatial relations is fundamental to AI systems that reason about physical environments and construct grounded world models. However, existing evaluations of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for spatial reasoning rely predominantly on static question-answering (QA) over small-scale or synthetic scenes, rarely probing whether models can modify spatial configurations while satisfying explicit geometric constraints. We introduce GeoSpatialBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate an escalating progression of spatial cognition, ranging from spatial relation understanding and geometric reasoning to constrained spatial editing. Grounded in real-world urban data across six geographically diverse cities, GeoSpatialBench evaluates a comprehensive taxonomy of 28 topological, directional, metric, and ordering relations across structured GeoJSON and map image modalities, with ground-truth references and constraints verified via GIS operations. Our empirical evaluation across frontier MLLMs uncovers a stark spatial gap: structured GeoJSON consistently outperforms map images, with multimodal combinations offering no reliable gain over GeoJSON alone, and while models show reasonable competence on qualitative topological and ordering, performance drops on quantitative metric relations. Crucially, editing performance on ordering relations declines relative to QA, and most failed edits violate at least one specified spatial constraint. These results highlight a gap between passively recognizing spatial relations and actively manipulating geometric configurations. GeoSpatialBench provides an open, rigorous diagnostic testbed to benchmark these spatial limitations, laying essential empirical groundwork for physically grounded world models and embodied spatial AI.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12881
Agile and reliable navigation is a core capability for embodied robots navigating complex spatial constraints and dynamic interactions. However, a single policy often struggles to accommodate the distinct decision-making demands of diverse scenarios. We present TAME-Nav, an asymmetric Teacher-Student navigation framework built around a temporal soft mixture of experts (Soft-MoE). The Teacher combines clean observations with causally maintained dynamic-obstacle tracks to construct privileged representations, while the Student learns complementary navigation features from corrupted observation histories through temporal encoding, soft expert routing, and latent distillation. Procedural scenario generation and parallel task-level simulation broaden training coverage, while deployment-informed asymmetric domain randomization supports sim-to-real transfer. Across in-distribution and unseen compositional scenarios, TAME-Nav achieves higher success rates, lower collision rates, and higher navigation scores than representative baselines. On a real quadruped robot, it completes all twenty trials across local-trap escape and narrow-passage navigation with sudden dynamic obstacles, with only one minor contact.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12877