World Action Models (WAM) improve robot policies by augmenting sparse action supervision with dense future prediction. However, much of the predictable future is dominated by appearance and scene persistence rather than action-dependent dynamics. We observe that several recent WAM designs, including optical flow, motion-centric representations, and latent actions, can be understood from a common perspective in which world supervision becomes more efficient as it contains a higher proportion of action-relevant variation. Based on this insight, we introduce Action Tangent Fields, which reformulate world supervision through a local Taylor expansion of how actions induce changes in future dynamics. We represent future dynamics in Residual-VAE space, where the future latent remains recoverable from the current latent and its residual, and use a strong action-conditioned world model (ACWM) to probe the local correspondence between action variations and residual-world variations. This local first-order structure is distilled into the WAM to guide its denoising supervision toward dynamics that are more tightly coupled to action, rather than merely predictable from appearance. Across LIBERO-Plus, RoboTwin, and RoboTwin2.0-Plus, our method consistently improves robustness to lighting, background, camera, layout, and other environmental perturbations. Despite using no large-scale embodied pretraining, it achieves stronger robustness under several distribution shifts than pretrained policies. We further distill multi-step VideoDiT denoising into a single step for efficient inference. Our results suggest that effective WAM supervision should remain information-rich while concentrating its predictive capacity on the directions along which actions change the future.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09734
Robotic manipulation videos are increasingly used as visual plans for embodied agents, but optimizing purely for visual plausibility often fails to capture the fragile physical manifold of real-world interactions. Even minor physics-violating errors at the interaction boundary, such as interpenetration or premature object motion, can completely invalidate the inferred timing and pose needed for downstream execution. Because standard supervised fine-tuning lacks the direct pressure to penalize these localized failures, we introduce AgiBot-PhysPref. This rigorously curated 10,000-sample preference dataset isolates condition-matched physics violations, turning the generator's own failure distribution into a foundational signal for physical consistency. Building upon this, we propose RobotAPO, an adversarial physics preference optimization framework operating in the continuous flow-matching denoising space. To prevent the policy from merely memorizing static curated failures, RobotAPO employs a lightweight adversarial counterfactual proposer that learns a condition-dependent, physical-failure-biased direction in denoising space. This encourages the model to explore and better respect the physical interaction boundary, all while maintaining a pure prompt-and-reference inference interface without requiring external structural conditioning. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that explicitly correcting these localized physics violations improves downstream robot execution from generated videos. On held-out AgiBot conditions, RobotAPO outperforms the strongest controlled internal baseline in physical consistency by 6.8% hard score and 10.0% soft score. Crucially, in real-robot replay, it translates these physical-consistency gains into a 37.4% relative improvement in task success over the strongest controlled internal baseline.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09454
Pointing-gesture visual grounding requires connecting hand geometry with the visual identity and extent of a referred object. A central challenge for continuous latent reasoning is how to organize these complementary cues into useful intermediate supervision. We propose Spatial Latent Reasoning (SLR), a framework that structures this supervision around an ordered sequence of geometric and visual states. A spatial ray state is supervised by fingertip position and pointing direction, followed by four states aligned with target-region features. To construct the visual targets, we introduce parity pooling, which applies polyphase grouping to average region tokens on four interleaved spatial supports. All states are generated recurrently during training and inference; auxiliary annotations are required only during training. On EgoPoint-Ground, the framework improves mIoU over same-backbone supervised fine-tuning by 2.8, 17.5, and 21.1 percentage points on Qwen3.5-4B, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, and Qwen3-VL-8B, respectively, with improvements on both hard subsets. On YouRefIt, it achieves 77.6% precision at IoU 0.5, a numerical margin of 5.2 percentage points over the reported state of the art under differing evaluation protocols. Ablations support joint geometric and visual supervision on the standard and similar-object sets, and favor parity over three alternative pooling operators on the standard set. These results support task-structured supervision for continuous pointing grounding. We will release the code and supporting materials.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09418
Embodied, ego-centric intelligence fundamentally requires the ability to comprehend spatial audio within complex environments. While large audio-language models excel at mono-channel reasoning, they lack spatial awareness, discarding critical spatial cues that enable sound localization and that can improve the disentanglement of overlapping sound sources. To address this, we present SEA-LM, a Spatial Audio Understanding model. First, we introduce FOACODER, a layout-flexible spatial audio encoder trained on source localization and ego-centric voice activity detection objectives to encode First Order Ambisonics derived from variable-count, variable-position smart-glasses arrays via beamforming. We train a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to understand these spatial audio embeddings through a two-stage curriculum spanning six tasks, including sound localization and spatially selective transcription in settings with multiple speakers and overlapping sounds. To prevent the transcription outputs from dominating the next token prediction loss and overwhelming the direction predictions, we introduce a Spatio-temporal Weighted Cross-Entropy Loss. On our evaluation set, SEA-LM achieves lower azimuth and elevation MAE, higher temporal IoU, lower external-source hallucination and missing-source rates, and lower WER on most transcription tasks than compared baselines, while remaining robust across 1,211 smart-glasses array configurations with 4 to 9 microphones.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05610
Language-guided panoramic video generation benefits various downstream applications, such as interactive 3D scene exploration, virtual reality experiences, and embodied agent training. Existing panoramic generators follow predefined trajectories, and interactive world models act through low-level actions in perspective views. We propose SPW-Nav, a streaming panoramic world model that understands movement instructions and streams one minute of 2K 360-degree video in real time from a single panorama. SPW-Nav interprets each instruction in the previously generated panorama as camera motion. Spherical rotation decoupling applies rotation exactly on the sphere, pose-aligned conditioning keeps translation inputs bounded over long streams, and a multi-term memory with a few-step generator continues the scene as instructions change. We also build SPW-NavSet, panoramic videos with camera trajectories and verified instructions. Driven by language, SPW-Nav outperforms prior panoramic generators in camera-following accuracy and video quality, and supports on-the-fly instruction switching.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08941
Deep-space crews cannot rely on real-time ground support for urgent off-nominal events. Initial alerts may underdetermine cause, while discriminating evidence may reside in crew observations or at locations that are unsafe, costly, or unavailable for crew inspection. We present an evidence-driven architecture for human-agent-robot teaming in Earth-independent anomaly triage. Agentic AI is treated as a stateful coordinator over bounded, inspectable services rather than as a fully autonomous vehicle controller. A triage state manager maintains hypotheses, evidence provenance, uncertainty, operational context, and tool status; a crew-facing embodied agent elicits observations and explains assessment changes; and a mobile robot acquires targeted, localized evidence. Typed interfaces separate dialogue and orchestration from monitoring, robot command, context retrieval, and safety-critical control. Two scenarios illustrate the architecture: a crewed deep-space mission based on an actual ISS ammonia false alarm, where suspected contamination restricts crew access, and a power-interface anomaly at a crewed lunar base, where robotic inspection distinguishes a local connector fault from other causes ambiguous in remote telemetry. Our main contribution is an authority-bounded closed evidence-loop architecture, exercised in a hardware-in-the-loop integration prototype using Reachy Mini and an Innate MARS mobile robot.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08933
Video world models can produce visually convincing yet physically inconsistent sequences, raising concerns about their reliability for prediction and planning in embodied AI systems. Existing evaluations often rely on model-based judgments or reference videos, while direct physical tests largely focus on mechanics. We introduce World Models' Last Exam in Physics, a measurement-based benchmark for evaluating physical consistency in video world models. The benchmark comprises 40 controlled tasks spanning mechanics, optics, fluids, thermal and phase-change phenomena, electromagnetism, and surface tension. Each task pairs an initial image and a generation prompt with predefined physical criteria, enabling interpretable tests of observable physical relationships without requiring reference videos. Its evaluator combines task-observability screening with task-specific quantitative physical measurements. Experiments on eight video generation models across 1,280 videos reveal persistent physical inconsistencies and substantial variation across tasks, with the best model achieving an overall score of 57.76 out of 100. Evaluation on synthetic videos with known physical relationships provides evidence for the validity of the measurement module under controlled conditions. The evaluator also achieves higher agreement with human judgments than a direct vision-language model baseline in both within-task rankings and pairwise comparisons. By combining coverage across physical domains with scores grounded in measurable evidence and explicit measurement limitations, the benchmark provides an interpretable basis for diagnosing physical inconsistencies and tracking progress toward physically consistent video world models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08791
Self-improving policies continually expose new failure patterns, changing what their judges must be able to verify. However, current fixed judges constrain both optimization feedback and the discovery of useful training examples, limiting further self-improvement. This challenge is even more acute in embodied reasoning, where reliable evaluation must account for spatial grounding, causal reasoning, and safety-aware decision-making. We introduce VeriFine, an agent harness framework that scales verification through the co-evolution of the policy, training curriculum, and judge. The Policy Improvement Loop uses a rubric judge to diagnose recurring failures, construct an adaptive curriculum, and optimize the policy. When progress plateaus and verification becomes a bottleneck, the Judge Improvement Loop selectively queries human guidance on informative failure cases and refines the judge through coactive calibration, in which humans and agents resolve disagreements and converge toward the objective rubric of physical reasoning. The revised judge then guides the next stage of data selection and policy optimization. Experiments on driving and robot navigation tasks demonstrate continuous self-improvement in both policy and judge capability across reinforcement and supervised fine-tuning. These results show how scaling verification supports continuous self-improvement as policy failure patterns evolve.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08761
Language models provide a plug-and-play interface between humans and robots, but important challenges remain when speech, dialogue, fast interaction, and collaboration are required. We propose a benchmark for the community to use as a way to explore common spoken dialogue artifacts between robots and humans, including requests for clarification, interruptions, embodied signals (e.g., head nods or facial cues), and time constraints. We also explain our vision to extend the benchmark for other aspects of human-robot interaction that are important to the larger research community. To facilitate the benchmark, we further propose using \textit{Retico}, a real-time communication framework that fulfills important technical requirements to enable robots to have spoken dialogue capabilities.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08733
LLM-based agents are increasingly advancing scientific and engineering problem solving, with physics simulation emerging as a challenging yet practical testbed for reproducing complex physical phenomena with application in embodied AI, games and films. As the workhorse of such simulation, a solver computes how the state of a dynamic system evolves over time. Building such solvers requires physical understanding to identify appropriate models, mathematical reasoning to formulate the underlying dynamics, and software engineering to implement them as executable code, yet this capability of LLM agents remains underexplored. To this end, we introduce WorldSolver, a benchmark of 168 simulation tasks derived from physical phenomena in 61 classic computer graphics papers, spanning 7 physical domains. Each task contains a code scaffold that provides a fixed simulation environment for the scene, with the solver implementation left for the agent to complete. Specifically, we evaluate them along three dimensions: Execution Checks for successful execution, Visual Fidelity for reproducing the intended dynamic behavior in the rendered simulation, and Physical Plausibility for physics-grounded verification of the generated dynamics. Experiments on frontier agents reveal that producing executable solvers is difficult itself, and satisfying visual and physical correctness is even harder. GPT-5.6-Sol and Claude-Opus-5 perform comparatively better than the other evaluated agents, yet achieve overall scores of only 48.7% and 46.7%, respectively. WorldSolver is an early step toward agentic solver generation, and we hope it helps drive progress toward agents that can faithfully simulate the dynamic physical world. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08720
Embodied agents must reason about 3D space while the video is still arriving, answering questions as soon as they have observed enough of the scene. VLMs that incorporate 3D geometric priors achieve strong spatial reasoning, but they operate offline, i.e., the full video must be available before they produce an answer. Streaming VLMs process frames causally and decide for themselves when to respond, yet they lack explicit 3D representations. We present SpaTime, a streaming VLM that fuses causal geometry tokens into the language model at every frame, using only the frames observed so far. To supervise when the model answers, we propose a response-time loss that maps per-frame response probabilities to a differentiable expected response time and penalizes the distance from the ground-truth frame. For evaluation, we construct StreamVSTI-Bench and StreamVSI-Bench, streaming adaptations of VSTI-Bench and VSI-Bench. On StreamVSTI-Bench, SpaTime reaches 49.2% overall accuracy and reduces the mean response-time error by 66% relative to the strongest streaming baseline.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08713
Improving embodied agents often focuses on optimizing the underlying model through training, while the surrounding agent harness that controls planning, context, and tool use is typically engineered. We ask whether this harness can instead improve itself directly from experience traces under sparse environmental feedback. We propose EMbodied Agent Harness Optimization (EMHO), a self-evolving framework that keeps the embodied model frozen and iteratively revises its harness by analyzing execution trajectories and prior harness history. EMHO optimizes beyond skills or recovery prompts, modifying how the agent monitors progress, uses vision tools, grounds observations, and responds to failures. To support multiple subtasks with a single harness, we introduce EMHO-Merge, which addresses trade-offs in jointly optimizing a single shared harness across subtasks by using episode-level gains and losses to guide evidence-supported refinement of when and how revised behaviors are applied. We evaluate EMHO on EmbodiedBench across navigation and manipulation tasks, and EMHO consistently improves task success for both Qwen 9B and 27B models. Qualitative analysis shows that EMHO goes beyond recovering from failures and unproductive actions to reshape how the embodied agent interprets and interacts with its environment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08432
Portable mobile-manipulation demonstrations can help alleviate data scarcity for embodied intelligence, but obtaining reliable, low-cost, and robot-free motion supervision from RGB observations remains challenging. Existing approaches often rely on teleoperation or specialized devices equipped with additional sensing hardware, while directly using estimated visual odometry (VO) trajectories can introduce inconsistencies due to accumulated drift and imperfect motion supervision. We present the Visual-Odometry-Conditioned Mobile Manipulation Interface (VOMMI), a portable demonstration collection and learning framework that connects portable RGB demonstrations to vision-language-action (VLA) post-training through offline trajectory reconstruction and online visual-motion conditioning. VOMMI synchronizes body and hand views to capture navigation context and local object interactions without requiring human-robot kinematic correspondence calibration. R2-VO refines offline demonstration trajectories using sparse geometric anchors and produces causal local-motion tokens over multiple prediction horizons for online policy conditioning. An action-group residual adapter incorporates these tokens only into the base branch. Experiments use a 500-trajectory portable for each task, with 75 trajectories held out for RGB-VO evaluation, and 200 robot demonstrations as references. Our policy, post-trained only on portable demonstrations, achieves 18.2% lower base-velocity error than a policy trained with robot-collected demonstrations, while maintaining comparable end-effector translation accuracy. Offline reconstruction reduces absolute trajectory errors for the body and hand streams by 24.6% on average relative to the best evaluated baseline for each stream. The complete system improves the mean success rate by 8.3 percentage points over OpenPI 0.5 across three real-robot tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08220
Zero-shot coordination in embodied settings requires acting while the partner is intermittently out of view, leaving existing methods with ambiguous partner representations and uncertainty over hidden partner states. We propose Predicting Intention of Partner (PIP) to jointly address these challenges. PIP uses a Joint-view VAE to distill richer training-time evidence from the union of both agents' local observations into a partner representation available from local observations alone. Partner-state Belief networks further infer the partner's hidden location and behavioral tendencies from the ego agent's interaction history. We evaluate PIP in Burrito-PO, Overcooked-PO, and a Melting Pot substrate, together with a human evaluation in Burrito-PO. PIP attains the highest mean performance among the compared methods across all three benchmarks. Human evaluation and diagnostic analyses further support coordination with unseen partners and the contributions of both components under partner occlusion.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08142
Smart factory inspection requires robots to reach connected equipment without a prior map or known target coordinates. Radio frequency (RF) signals from the target can provide directional cues to complement visual observations when occlusion or poor lighting limits target detection. However, multipath propagation can distort these cues, making it difficult to infer the target's true direction from instantaneous RF measurements. To enable navigation research under these conditions, we first construct a Habitat Sionna RT benchmark that uses detailed scene geometry and assigned material properties to generate aligned visual and RF observations in response to robot actions. Building on this benchmark, we propose an uncertainty aware multimodal navigation framework that jointly estimates target direction and its uncertainty from a history of RF, visual, and pose observations. These estimates inform action selection alongside visual context. Experiments in unseen scenes show relative improvements of 18.2% in success rate (SR) and 11.5% in success weighted by path length (SPL) over the strongest evaluated baseline.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08105
Realistic physical interaction is a cornerstone of embodied intelligence, yet collecting paired visual--tactile data remains costly. Visual-to-tactile synthesis offers a promising approach to augmenting such data, but learning this mapping is complicated by the gap between visual appearance and contact-related material properties, as well as spatial misalignment in paired observations. To address these challenges, we present \textbf{PhysTacGen}, a visual-to-optical-tactile image generation framework that integrates material-aware descriptions with geometric conditioning. First, we introduce Group Tactile Policy Optimization (GTPO), a reinforcement learning strategy that refines a vision--language model to generate structured material descriptions using task-specific rewards. Second, we combine DINOv2-based pair curation with monocular relative-depth estimation to select training pairs and provide geometric priors. Finally, an SDXL ControlNet synthesizes optical tactile images conditioned on RGB, relative depth, and GTPO-generated text. Experiments on curated SSVTP data demonstrate improved structural similarity over the compared baselines, while a blinded user study shows a preference for GTPO-generated descriptions. Generated tactile inputs also improve performance on an attribute-derived force-coefficient prediction proxy. Together, these results demonstrate the effectiveness of PhysTacGen for optical tactile image synthesis and its utility in the evaluated downstream this http URL code will be available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08068
Monocular metric depth estimation and 3D visual grounding represent the two complementary cornerstones of monocular 3D spatial understanding (M3Sun), from which the fundamental 3D spatial information required by M3Sun can be acquired. However, these complementary tasks are generally conducted by separate frameworks, which pose challenges of inflexible and unaligned spatial information access for embodied intelligence systems. In this paper, we propose a unified agent for monocular 3D spatial understanding (M3SunAgent) that leverages a large language model (LLM) as a task planner for spatial visual programming, which flexibly generate structured programs and coordinate tools. For instance-level metric depth estimation task, M3SunAgent invokes an object detector tool to locate the target, estimates depth at selected points with a depth estimation tool, and aggregates these predictions into an instance-level depth estimate. We also construct the M3Sun Instance (M3SI) dataset, a benchmark with 2,910 samples for evaluation. For monocular 3D visual grounding task, M3SunAgent uses a vision-language model (VLM) tool to locate the target and output basic spatial attributes, then combines back-projection tool with a dimension-lifting tool to predict its 3D bounding box. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of M3SunAgent. Specifically, in evaluations of instance-level monocular metric depth estimation, M3SunAgent achieves the best performance among all compared models, 52.61% of predicted instances are distributed below depth error 0.25 ($\delta < 0.25$). In evaluations of monocular 3D visual grounding, M3SunAgent demonstrates overall competitive performance than vision and VLM models, reaching a 3D mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 41.73% and exceeding the state-of-the-art MonoVLM model by 3.62%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07982
Scaling robotic foundation models requires diverse training data and reliable evaluation environments. Simulation offers a scalable solution, yet existing generation pipelines remain constrained by predefined assets and skills, a disconnect between scene generation and task generation, and limited support for complex embodiments and physics. We introduce EmbodiedSmith, a framework for scalable embodied data generation through recursive self-improvement (RSI). EmbodiedSmith unifies asset, scene, and task generation in a pipeline that supports autonomous creation and language-driven customization. Its core is an agentic refinement loop: scene generation anticipates downstream task requirements, while task generation guides targeted scene edits, allowing scenes and tasks to iteratively improve one another. This joint refinement improves task generation success, including for long-horizon tasks. The framework further supports mobile manipulators, humanoids, and dexterous hands, as well as interactions involving deformable objects and fluids, broadening the range of behaviors and physical phenomena represented in generated data. Together, these capabilities provide a flexible simulation engine for both robot pretraining and evaluation. Extensive experiments validate the quality, diversity, and generation efficiency of the resulting data, while downstream policy experiments demonstrate that increased data diversity improves generalization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07969
A central capability of embodied agents is to accomplish complex objectives through sequences of interdependent tasks. Yet existing visual goal-conditioned policies underlying these agents are typically evaluated on isolated interactions where the target is already visible, and thus do not capture the conditions that arise during continuous long-horizon task execution. In such settings, each task begins from the state left by the previous one: the agent may end at a different position and orientation, the world may have been modified, and the next interaction target may lie outside the current field of view. As a result, agents relying on such policies may struggle to proceed to the next task when they cannot ground their target in the current observation. To address this challenge, we propose Attacca, a new approach that trains visual goal-conditioned policies on complete search-to-interact trajectories using goal images decoupled from the execution environment. Attacca uses context-decoupled goal sampling to pair each demonstration with a class-compatible masked goal image from another world, removing direct scene and pose correspondence. It learns dense current-view grounding through a target-mask prediction head, providing auxiliary supervision beyond action imitation. We further introduce behavioral-phase conditioning that teaches the policy to distinguish Search, Approach, and Interact stages and adapt its control as execution progresses. We evaluate Attacca on multiple short- and long-horizon embodied tasks in Minecraft. Our method achieves 39.0-47.5% clean success, improving over the strongest baseline by 1.7-2.4x. On long-horizon tasks, it attains 54%, 30%, and 28% completion, yielding up to a 7x improvement.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07785
The ability to interact with articulated objects is essential for embodied intelligent systems, but collecting large-scale real-world demonstrations for these interactions remains challenging due to the precise contact and constraint-following motions involved. Although simulation provides a promising alternative, existing synthetic data efforts cover limited articulated-object categories, while general-purpose synthesis pipelines lack explicit designs for part-level semantics and articulation constraints, hindering agentic task generation and scalable synthesis of high-quality articulated-manipulation demonstrations. To bridge this gap, we introduce SMART, a scalable system leveraging large-scale Synthesized Manipulation demonstrations for ARTiculated-object manipulation. At its core, we develop SMART-Sim, a simulation platform with articulation-aware design that enables effective task generation and efficient demonstration collection. Building on SMART-Sim, we apply agentic task generation and design a scalable distributed synthesis system, using them to synthesize SMART-Data, comprising over 1M demonstrations across 44 atomic task types, 5 robot setups, and 2,507 articulated objects. The vision-language-action (VLA) model pretrained on SMART-Data shows competitive performance on simulation benchmarks and achieves zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and scalable performance in real-world articulated-object manipulation tasks. This highlights the potential of synthetic demonstrations in providing effective and scalable supervision for improving VLA model performance in contact-rich articulated-object manipulation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07652