Daily Papers

Recent advances in deep thinking models have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities on mathematical and coding tasks. However, their effectiveness in embodied domains which require continuous interaction with environments through image action interleaved trajectories remains largely -unexplored. We present Embodied Reasoner, a model that extends o1 style reasoning to interactive embodied search tasks. Unlike mathematical reasoning that relies primarily on logical deduction, embodied scenarios demand spatial understanding, temporal reasoning, and ongoing self-reflection based on interaction history. To address these challenges, we synthesize 9.3k coherent Observation-Thought-Action trajectories containing 64k interactive images and 90k diverse thinking processes (analysis, spatial reasoning, reflection, planning, and verification). We develop a three-stage training pipeline that progressively enhances the model's capabilities through imitation learning, self-exploration via rejection sampling, and self-correction through reflection tuning. The evaluation shows that our model significantly outperforms those advanced visual reasoning models, e.g., it exceeds OpenAI o1, o3-mini, and Claude-3.7 by +9\%, 24\%, and +13\%. Analysis reveals our model exhibits fewer repeated searches and logical inconsistencies, with particular advantages in complex long-horizon tasks. Real-world environments also show our superiority while exhibiting fewer repeated searches and logical inconsistency cases.

Humans can perceive and reason about spatial relationships from sequential visual observations, such as egocentric video streams. However, how pretrained models acquire such abilities, especially high-level reasoning, remains unclear. This paper introduces Embodied-R, a collaborative framework combining large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for perception and small-scale Language Models (LMs) for reasoning. Using Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a novel reward system considering think-answer logical consistency, the model achieves slow-thinking capabilities with limited computational resources. After training on only 5k embodied video samples, Embodied-R with a 3B LM matches state-of-the-art multimodal reasoning models (OpenAI-o1, Gemini-2.5-pro) on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution embodied spatial reasoning tasks. Embodied-R also exhibits emergent thinking patterns such as systematic analysis and contextual integration. We further explore research questions including response length, training on VLM, strategies for reward design, and differences in model generalization after SFT (Supervised Fine-Tuning) and RL training.

Embodied agents operating in the physical world must make decisions that are not only effective but also safe, spatially coherent, and grounded in context. While recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) have shown promising capabilities in visual understanding and language generation, their ability to perform structured reasoning for real-world embodied tasks remains underexplored. In this work, we aim to understand how well foundation models can perform step-by-step reasoning in embodied environments. To this end, we propose the Foundation Model Embodied Reasoning (FoMER) benchmark, designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of LMMs in complex embodied decision-making scenarios. Our benchmark spans a diverse set of tasks that require agents to interpret multimodal observations, reason about physical constraints and safety, and generate valid next actions in natural language. We present (i) a large-scale, curated suite of embodied reasoning tasks, (ii) a novel evaluation framework that disentangles perceptual grounding from action reasoning, and (iii) empirical analysis of several leading LMMs under this setting. Our benchmark includes over 1.1k samples with detailed step-by-step reasoning across 10 tasks and 8 embodiments, covering three different robot types. Our results highlight both the potential and current limitations of LMMs in embodied reasoning, pointing towards key challenges and opportunities for future research in robot intelligence. Our data and code will be made publicly available.

Recent advances in embodied AI highlight the potential of vision language models (VLMs) as agents capable of perception, reasoning, and interaction in complex environments. However, top-performing systems rely on large-scale models that are costly to deploy, while smaller VLMs lack the necessary knowledge and skills to succeed. To bridge this gap, we present Embodied Reasoning Agent (ERA), a two-stage framework that integrates prior knowledge learning and online reinforcement learning (RL). The first stage, Embodied Prior Learning, distills foundational knowledge from three types of data: (1) Trajectory-Augmented Priors, which enrich existing trajectory data with structured reasoning generated by stronger models; (2) Environment-Anchored Priors, which provide in-environment knowledge and grounding supervision; and (3) External Knowledge Priors, which transfer general knowledge from out-of-environment datasets. In the second stage, we develop an online RL pipeline that builds on these priors to further enhance agent performance. To overcome the inherent challenges in agent RL, including long horizons, sparse rewards, and training instability, we introduce three key designs: self-summarization for context management, dense reward shaping, and turn-level policy optimization. Extensive experiments on both high-level planning (EB-ALFRED) and low-level control (EB-Manipulation) tasks demonstrate that ERA-3B surpasses both prompting-based large models and previous training-based baselines. Specifically, it achieves overall improvements of 8.4\% on EB-ALFRED and 19.4\% on EB-Manipulation over GPT-4o, and exhibits strong generalization to unseen tasks. Overall, ERA offers a practical path toward scalable embodied intelligence, providing methodological insights for future embodied AI systems.

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an intelligent system paradigm for achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), serving as the cornerstone for various applications and driving the evolution from cyberspace to physical systems. Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) and World Models (WMs) have drawn significant attention for embodied AI. On the one hand, LLMs empower embodied AI via semantic reasoning and task decomposition, bringing high-level natural language instructions and low-level natural language actions into embodied cognition. On the other hand, WMs empower embodied AI by building internal representations and future predictions of the external world, facilitating physical law-compliant embodied interactions. As such, this paper comprehensively explores the literature in embodied AI from basics to advances, covering both LLM driven and WM driven works. In particular, we first present the history, key technologies, key components, and hardware systems of embodied AI, as well as discuss its development via looking from unimodal to multimodal angle. We then scrutinize the two burgeoning fields of embodied AI, i.e., embodied AI with LLMs/multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) and embodied AI with WMs, meticulously delineating their indispensable roles in end-to-end embodied cognition and physical laws-driven embodied interactions. Building upon the above advances, we further share our insights on the necessity of the joint MLLM-WM driven embodied AI architecture, shedding light on its profound significance in enabling complex tasks within physical worlds. In addition, we examine representative applications of embodied AI, demonstrating its wide applicability in real-world scenarios. Last but not least, we point out future research directions of embodied AI that deserve further investigation.

While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made groundbreaking progress in embodied intelligence, they still face significant challenges in spatial reasoning for complex long-horizon tasks. To address this gap, we propose EmbodiedVSR (Embodied Visual Spatial Reasoning), a novel framework that integrates dynamic scene graph-guided Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to enhance spatial understanding for embodied agents. By explicitly constructing structured knowledge representations through dynamic scene graphs, our method enables zero-shot spatial reasoning without task-specific fine-tuning. This approach not only disentangles intricate spatial relationships but also aligns reasoning steps with actionable environmental dynamics. To rigorously evaluate performance, we introduce the eSpatial-Benchmark, a comprehensive dataset including real-world embodied scenarios with fine-grained spatial annotations and adaptive task difficulty levels. Experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing MLLM-based methods in accuracy and reasoning coherence, particularly in long-horizon tasks requiring iterative environment interaction. The results reveal the untapped potential of MLLMs for embodied intelligence when equipped with structured, explainable reasoning mechanisms, paving the way for more reliable deployment in real-world spatial applications. The codes and datasets will be released soon.

Building a conversational embodied agent to execute real-life tasks has been a long-standing yet quite challenging research goal, as it requires effective human-agent communication, multi-modal understanding, long-range sequential decision making, etc. Traditional symbolic methods have scaling and generalization issues, while end-to-end deep learning models suffer from data scarcity and high task complexity, and are often hard to explain. To benefit from both worlds, we propose JARVIS, a neuro-symbolic commonsense reasoning framework for modular, generalizable, and interpretable conversational embodied agents. First, it acquires symbolic representations by prompting large language models (LLMs) for language understanding and sub-goal planning, and by constructing semantic maps from visual observations. Then the symbolic module reasons for sub-goal planning and action generation based on task- and action-level common sense. Extensive experiments on the TEACh dataset validate the efficacy and efficiency of our JARVIS framework, which achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on all three dialog-based embodied tasks, including Execution from Dialog History (EDH), Trajectory from Dialog (TfD), and Two-Agent Task Completion (TATC) (e.g., our method boosts the unseen Success Rate on EDH from 6.1\% to 15.8\%). Moreover, we systematically analyze the essential factors that affect the task performance and also demonstrate the superiority of our method in few-shot settings. Our JARVIS model ranks first in the Alexa Prize SimBot Public Benchmark Challenge.

Natural language serves as the primary mode of communication when an intelligent agent with a physical presence engages with human beings. While a plethora of research focuses on natural language understanding (NLU), encompassing endeavors such as sentiment analysis, intent prediction, question answering, and summarization, the scope of NLU directed at situations necessitating tangible actions by an embodied agent remains limited. The inherent ambiguity and incompleteness inherent in natural language present challenges for intelligent agents striving to decipher human intention. To tackle this predicament head-on, we introduce a novel system known as task and argument grounding for Embodied agents (tagE). At its core, our system employs an inventive neural network model designed to extract a series of tasks from complex task instructions expressed in natural language. Our proposed model adopts an encoder-decoder framework enriched with nested decoding to effectively extract tasks and their corresponding arguments from these intricate instructions. These extracted tasks are then mapped (or grounded) to the robot's established collection of skills, while the arguments find grounding in objects present within the environment. To facilitate the training and evaluation of our system, we have curated a dataset featuring complex instructions. The results of our experiments underscore the prowess of our approach, as it outperforms robust baseline models.

We introduce HY-Embodied-0.5, a family of foundation models specifically designed for real-world embodied agents. To bridge the gap between general Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and the demands of embodied agents, our models are developed to enhance the core capabilities required by embodied intelligence: spatial and temporal visual perception, alongside advanced embodied reasoning for prediction, interaction, and planning. The HY-Embodied-0.5 suite comprises two primary variants: an efficient model with 2B activated parameters designed for edge deployment, and a powerful model with 32B activated parameters targeted for complex reasoning. To support the fine-grained visual perception essential for embodied tasks, we adopt a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture to enable modality-specific computing. By incorporating latent tokens, this design effectively enhances the perceptual representation of the models. To improve reasoning capabilities, we introduce an iterative, self-evolving post-training paradigm. Furthermore, we employ on-policy distillation to transfer the advanced capabilities of the large model to the smaller variant, thereby maximizing the performance potential of the compact model. Extensive evaluations across 22 benchmarks, spanning visual perception, spatial reasoning, and embodied understanding, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our MoT-2B model outperforms similarly sized state-of-the-art models on 16 benchmarks, while the 32B variant achieves performance comparable to frontier models such as Gemini 3.0 Pro. In downstream robot control experiments, we leverage our robust VLM foundation to train an effective Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, achieving compelling results in real-world physical evaluations. Code and models are open-sourced at https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HY-Embodied.

Embodied AI aims to develop intelligent systems with physical forms capable of perceiving, decision-making, acting, and learning in real-world environments, providing a promising way to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Despite decades of explorations, it remains challenging for embodied agents to achieve human-level intelligence for general-purpose tasks in open dynamic environments. Recent breakthroughs in large models have revolutionized embodied AI by enhancing perception, interaction, planning and learning. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey on large model empowered embodied AI, focusing on autonomous decision-making and embodied learning. We investigate both hierarchical and end-to-end decision-making paradigms, detailing how large models enhance high-level planning, low-level execution, and feedback for hierarchical decision-making, and how large models enhance Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for end-to-end decision making. For embodied learning, we introduce mainstream learning methodologies, elaborating on how large models enhance imitation learning and reinforcement learning in-depth. For the first time, we integrate world models into the survey of embodied AI, presenting their design methods and critical roles in enhancing decision-making and learning. Though solid advances have been achieved, challenges still exist, which are discussed at the end of this survey, potentially as the further research directions.

Physical AI systems need to perceive, understand, and perform complex actions in the physical world. In this paper, we present the Cosmos-Reason1 models that can understand the physical world and generate appropriate embodied decisions (e.g., next step action) in natural language through long chain-of-thought reasoning processes. We begin by defining key capabilities for Physical AI reasoning, with a focus on physical common sense and embodied reasoning. To represent physical common sense, we use a hierarchical ontology that captures fundamental knowledge about space, time, and physics. For embodied reasoning, we rely on a two-dimensional ontology that generalizes across different physical embodiments. Building on these capabilities, we develop two multimodal large language models, Cosmos-Reason1-8B and Cosmos-Reason1-56B. We curate data and train our models in four stages: vision pre-training, general supervised fine-tuning (SFT), Physical AI SFT, and Physical AI reinforcement learning (RL) as the post-training. To evaluate our models, we build comprehensive benchmarks for physical common sense and embodied reasoning according to our ontologies. Evaluation results show that Physical AI SFT and reinforcement learning bring significant improvements. To facilitate the development of Physical AI, we will make our code and pre-trained models available under the NVIDIA Open Model License at https://github.com/nvidia-cosmos/cosmos-reason1.

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have opened new opportunities for embodied intelligence, enabling multimodal understanding, reasoning, and interaction, as well as continuous spatial decision-making. Nevertheless, current MLLM-based embodied systems face two critical limitations. First, Geometric Adaptability Gap: models trained solely on 2D inputs or with hard-coded 3D geometry injection suffer from either insufficient spatial information or restricted 2D generalization, leading to poor adaptability across tasks with diverse spatial demands. Second, Embodiment Constraint Gap: prior work often neglects the physical constraints and capacities of real robots, resulting in task plans that are theoretically valid but practically infeasible.To address these gaps, we introduce OmniEVA -- an embodied versatile planner that enables advanced embodied reasoning and task planning through two pivotal innovations: (1) a Task-Adaptive 3D Grounding mechanism, which introduces a gated router to perform explicit selective regulation of 3D fusion based on contextual requirements, enabling context-aware 3D grounding for diverse embodied tasks. (2) an Embodiment-Aware Reasoning framework that jointly incorporates task goals and embodiment constraints into the reasoning loop, resulting in planning decisions that are both goal-directed and executable. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that OmniEVA not only achieves state-of-the-art general embodied reasoning performance, but also exhibits a strong ability across a wide range of downstream scenarios. Evaluations of a suite of proposed embodied benchmarks, including both primitive and composite tasks, confirm its robust and versatile planning capabilities. Project page: https://omnieva.github.io

The realization of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) necessitates Embodied AI agents capable of robust spatial perception, effective task planning, and adaptive execution in physical environments. However, current large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) for embodied tasks suffer from key limitations, including a significant gap between model design and agent requirements, an unavoidable trade-off between real-time latency and performance, and the use of unauthentic, offline evaluation metrics. To address these challenges, we propose EmbodiedBrain, a novel vision-language foundation model available in both 7B and 32B parameter sizes. Our framework features an agent-aligned data structure and employs a powerful training methodology that integrates large-scale Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Step-Augumented Group Relative Policy Optimization (Step-GRPO), which boosts long-horizon task success by integrating preceding steps as Guided Precursors. Furthermore, we incorporate a comprehensive reward system, including a Generative Reward Model (GRM) accelerated at the infrastructure level, to improve training efficiency. For enable thorough validation, we establish a three-part evaluation system encompassing General, Planning, and End-to-End Simulation Benchmarks, highlighted by the proposal and open-sourcing of a novel, challenging simulation environment. Experimental results demonstrate that EmbodiedBrain achieves superior performance across all metrics, establishing a new state-of-the-art for embodied foundation models. Towards paving the way for the next generation of generalist embodied agents, we open-source all of our data, model weight, and evaluating methods, which are available at https://zterobot.github.io/EmbodiedBrain.github.io.

We propose Embodied AI as the next fundamental step in the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence, juxtaposing it against current AI advancements, particularly Large Language Models. We traverse the evolution of the embodiment concept across diverse fields - philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and robotics - to highlight how EAI distinguishes itself from the classical paradigm of static learning. By broadening the scope of Embodied AI, we introduce a theoretical framework based on cognitive architectures, emphasizing perception, action, memory, and learning as essential components of an embodied agent. This framework is aligned with Friston's active inference principle, offering a comprehensive approach to EAI development. Despite the progress made in the field of AI, substantial challenges, such as the formulation of a novel AI learning theory and the innovation of advanced hardware, persist. Our discussion lays down a foundational guideline for future Embodied AI research. Highlighting the importance of creating Embodied AI agents capable of seamless communication, collaboration, and coexistence with humans and other intelligent entities within real-world environments, we aim to steer the AI community towards addressing the multifaceted challenges and seizing the opportunities that lie ahead in the quest for AGI.

Recent advanced vision-language models(VLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on passive, offline image and video understanding tasks. However, their effectiveness in embodied settings, which require online interaction and active scene understanding remains limited. In such scenarios, an agent perceives the environment from a first-person perspective, with each action dynamically shaping subsequent observations. Even state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.5 Pro struggle in open-environment interactions, exhibiting clear limitations in spatial reasoning and long-horizon planning. To address this gap, we introduce EmRACE-3K, a dataset of over 3,000 language-guided tasks situated in diverse, photorealistic environments constructed using Unreal Engine and the UnrealCV-Zoo framework. The tasks encompass a wide range of embodied challenges, including navigation, object manipulation, and multi-stage goal execution. Each task unfolds as a multi-step trajectory, pairing first-person visual observations with high-level instructions, grounded actions, and natural language rationales that express the agent's intent at every step. Using EmRACE-3K, we establish a benchmark to evaluate the embodied reasoning capabilities of VLMs across three key dimensions: Exploration, Dynamic Spatial-Semantic Reasoning, and Multi-stage Goal Execution. In zero-shot settings, all models achieve success rates below 20%, underscoring the challenge posed by our benchmark and the current limitations of VLMs in interactive environments. To demonstrate the utility of EmRACE-3K, we further fine-tune Qwen2.5-VL-7B using supervised learning followed by reinforcement learning. This approach yields substantial improvements across all three challenge categories, highlighting the dataset's effectiveness in enabling the development of embodied reasoning capabilities.

We aim to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for embodied decision making. While a significant body of work has been leveraging LLMs for decision making in embodied environments, we still lack a systematic understanding of their performance because they are usually applied in different domains, for different purposes, and built based on different inputs and outputs. Furthermore, existing evaluations tend to rely solely on a final success rate, making it difficult to pinpoint what ability is missing in LLMs and where the problem lies, which in turn blocks embodied agents from leveraging LLMs effectively and selectively. To address these limitations, we propose a generalized interface (Embodied Agent Interface) that supports the formalization of various types of tasks and input-output specifications of LLM-based modules. Specifically, it allows us to unify 1) a broad set of embodied decision-making tasks involving both state and temporally extended goals, 2) four commonly-used LLM-based modules for decision making: goal interpretation, subgoal decomposition, action sequencing, and transition modeling, and 3) a collection of fine-grained metrics which break down evaluation into various types of errors, such as hallucination errors, affordance errors, various types of planning errors, etc. Overall, our benchmark offers a comprehensive assessment of LLMs' performance for different subtasks, pinpointing the strengths and weaknesses in LLM-powered embodied AI systems, and providing insights for effective and selective use of LLMs in embodied decision making.

Embodied planning requires agents to make coherent multi-step decisions based on dynamic visual observations and natural language goals. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) excel at static perception tasks, they struggle with the temporal reasoning, spatial understanding, and commonsense grounding needed for planning in interactive environments. In this work, we introduce a reinforcement fine-tuning framework that brings R1-style reasoning enhancement into embodied planning. We first distill a high-quality dataset from a powerful closed-source model and perform supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to equip the model with structured decision-making priors. We then design a rule-based reward function tailored to multi-step action quality and optimize the policy via Generalized Reinforced Preference Optimization (GRPO). Our approach is evaluated on Embench, a recent benchmark for interactive embodied tasks, covering both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms models of similar or larger scale, including GPT-4o-mini and 70B+ open-source baselines, and exhibits strong generalization to unseen environments. This work highlights the potential of reinforcement-driven reasoning to advance long-horizon planning in embodied AI.

Recent video generation models can produce high-fidelity, temporally coherent videos, indicating that they may encode substantial world knowledge. Beyond realistic synthesis, they also exhibit emerging behaviors indicative of visual perception, modeling, and manipulation. Yet, an important question still remains: Are video models ready to serve as zero-shot reasoners in challenging visual reasoning scenarios? In this work, we conduct an empirical study to comprehensively investigate this question, focusing on the leading and popular Veo-3. We evaluate its reasoning behavior across 12 dimensions, including spatial, geometric, physical, temporal, and embodied logic, systematically characterizing both its strengths and failure modes. To standardize this study, we curate the evaluation data into MME-CoF, a compact benchmark that enables in-depth and thorough assessment of Chain-of-Frame (CoF) reasoning. Our findings reveal that while current video models demonstrate promising reasoning patterns on short-horizon spatial coherence, fine-grained grounding, and locally consistent dynamics, they remain limited in long-horizon causal reasoning, strict geometric constraints, and abstract logic. Overall, they are not yet reliable as standalone zero-shot reasoners, but exhibit encouraging signs as complementary visual engines alongside dedicated reasoning models. Project page: https://video-cof.github.io

Recent works have shown how the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) can be applied to domains beyond natural language processing, such as planning and interaction for robots. These embodied problems require an agent to understand many semantic aspects of the world: the repertoire of skills available, how these skills influence the world, and how changes to the world map back to the language. LLMs planning in embodied environments need to consider not just what skills to do, but also how and when to do them - answers that change over time in response to the agent's own choices. In this work, we investigate to what extent LLMs used in such embodied contexts can reason over sources of feedback provided through natural language, without any additional training. We propose that by leveraging environment feedback, LLMs are able to form an inner monologue that allows them to more richly process and plan in robotic control scenarios. We investigate a variety of sources of feedback, such as success detection, scene description, and human interaction. We find that closed-loop language feedback significantly improves high-level instruction completion on three domains, including simulated and real table top rearrangement tasks and long-horizon mobile manipulation tasks in a kitchen environment in the real world.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show promising results as decision-making engines for embodied agents operating in complex, physical environments. However, existing benchmarks often prioritize high-level planning or spatial reasoning, leaving the fine-grained action intelligence required for embodied physical interaction underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce CFG-Bench, a new benchmark designed to systematically evaluate this crucial capability. CFG-Bench consists of 1,368 curated videos paired with 19,562 three-modalities question-answer pairs targeting four cognitive abilities: 1) Physical Interaction, 2) Temporal-Causal Relation, 3) Intentional Understanding, and 4) Evaluative Judgment. Together, these dimensions provide a systematic framework for assessing a model's ability to translate visual observations into actionable knowledge, moving beyond mere surface-level recognition. Our comprehensive evaluation on CFG-Bench reveals that leading MLLMs struggle to produce detailed instructions for physical interactions and exhibit profound limitations in the higher-order reasoning of intention and evaluation. Moreover, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on our data demonstrates that teaching an MLLMs to articulate fine-grained actions directly translates to significant performance gains on established embodied benchmarks. Our analysis highlights these limitations and offers insights for developing more capable and grounded embodied agents.

AI agents today are mostly siloed - they either retrieve and reason over vast amount of digital information and knowledge obtained online; or interact with the physical world through embodied perception, planning and action - but rarely both. This separation limits their ability to solve tasks that require integrated physical and digital intelligence, such as cooking from online recipes, navigating with dynamic map data, or interpreting real-world landmarks using web knowledge. We introduce Embodied Web Agents, a novel paradigm for AI agents that fluidly bridge embodiment and web-scale reasoning. To operationalize this concept, we first develop the Embodied Web Agents task environments, a unified simulation platform that tightly integrates realistic 3D indoor and outdoor environments with functional web interfaces. Building upon this platform, we construct and release the Embodied Web Agents Benchmark, which encompasses a diverse suite of tasks including cooking, navigation, shopping, tourism, and geolocation - all requiring coordinated reasoning across physical and digital realms for systematic assessment of cross-domain intelligence. Experimental results reveal significant performance gaps between state-of-the-art AI systems and human capabilities, establishing both challenges and opportunities at the intersection of embodied cognition and web-scale knowledge access. All datasets, codes and websites are publicly available at our project page https://embodied-web-agent.github.io/.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have powered Graphical User Interface (GUI) Agents, showing promise in automating tasks on computing devices. Recent works have begun exploring reasoning in GUI tasks with encouraging results. However, many current approaches rely on manually designed reasoning templates, which may result in reasoning that is not sufficiently robust and adaptive for complex GUI environments. Meanwhile, some existing agents continue to operate as Reactive Actors, relying primarily on implicit reasoning that may lack sufficient depth for GUI tasks demanding planning and error recovery. We argue that advancing these agents requires a shift from reactive acting towards acting based on deliberate reasoning. To facilitate this transformation, we introduce InfiGUI-R1, an MLLM-based GUI agent developed through our Actor2Reasoner framework, a reasoning-centric, two-stage training approach designed to progressively evolve agents from Reactive Actors to Deliberative Reasoners. The first stage, Reasoning Injection, focuses on establishing a basic reasoner. We employ Spatial Reasoning Distillation to transfer cross-modal spatial reasoning capabilities from teacher models to MLLMs through trajectories with explicit reasoning steps, enabling models to integrate GUI visual-spatial information with logical reasoning before action generation. The second stage, Deliberation Enhancement, refines the basic reasoner into a deliberative one using Reinforcement Learning. This stage introduces two approaches: Sub-goal Guidance, which rewards models for generating accurate intermediate sub-goals, and Error Recovery Scenario Construction, which creates failure-and-recovery training scenarios from identified prone-to-error steps. Experimental results show InfiGUI-R1 achieves strong performance in GUI grounding and trajectory tasks. Resources at https://github.com/Reallm-Labs/InfiGUI-R1.

Grounding the common-sense reasoning of Large Language Models in physical domains remains a pivotal yet unsolved problem for embodied AI. Whereas prior works have focused on leveraging LLMs directly for planning in symbolic spaces, this work uses LLMs to guide the search of task structures and constraints implicit in multi-step demonstrations. Specifically, we borrow from manipulation planning literature the concept of mode families, which group robot configurations by specific motion constraints, to serve as an abstraction layer between the high-level language representations of an LLM and the low-level physical trajectories of a robot. By replaying a few human demonstrations with synthetic perturbations, we generate coverage over the demonstrations' state space with additional successful executions as well as counterfactuals that fail the task. Our explanation-based learning framework trains an end-to-end differentiable neural network to predict successful trajectories from failures and as a by-product learns classifiers that ground low-level states and images in mode families without dense labeling. The learned grounding classifiers can further be used to translate language plans into reactive policies in the physical domain in an interpretable manner. We show our approach improves the interpretability and reactivity of imitation learning through 2D navigation and simulated and real robot manipulation tasks. Website: https://sites.google.com/view/grounding-plans

Embodied agents often struggle with efficient navigation because they rely primarily on partial egocentric observations, which restrict global foresight and lead to inefficient exploration. In contrast, humans plan using maps: we reason globally first, then act locally. We introduce ReasonNavi, a human-inspired framework that operationalizes this reason-then-act paradigm by coupling Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with deterministic planners. ReasonNavi converts a top-down map into a discrete reasoning space by room segmentation and candidate target nodes sampling. An MLLM is then queried in a multi-stage process to identify the candidate most consistent with the instruction (object, image, or text goal), effectively leveraging the model's semantic reasoning ability while sidestepping its weakness in continuous coordinate prediction. The selected waypoint is grounded into executable trajectories using a deterministic action planner over an online-built occupancy map, while pretrained object detectors and segmenters ensure robust recognition at the goal. This yields a unified zero-shot navigation framework that requires no MLLM fine-tuning, circumvents the brittleness of RL-based policies and scales naturally with foundation model improvements. Across three navigation tasks, ReasonNavi consistently outperforms prior methods that demand extensive training or heavy scene modeling, offering a scalable, interpretable, and globally grounded solution to embodied navigation. Project page: https://reasonnavi.github.io/

Visual reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has primarily been studied in static, fully observable settings, limiting their effectiveness in real-world environments where information is often incomplete due to occlusion or limited field of view. Humans, in contrast, actively explore and interact with their environment-moving, examining, and manipulating objects-to gather information through a closed-loop process integrating perception, reasoning, and action. Inspired by this human capability, we introduce the Active Visual Reasoning (AVR) task, extending visual reasoning to partially observable, interactive environments. AVR necessitates agents to: (1) actively acquire information via sequential physical actions, (2) integrate observations across multiple steps for coherent reasoning, and (3) dynamically adjust decisions based on evolving visual feedback. To rigorously evaluate AVR, we introduce CLEVR-AVR, a simulation benchmark featuring multi-round interactive environments designed to assess both reasoning correctness and information-gathering efficiency. We present AVR-152k, a large-scale dataset that offers rich Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotations detailing iterative reasoning for uncertainty identification, action-conditioned information gain prediction, and information-maximizing action selection, crucial for training agents in a higher-order Markov Decision Process. Building on this, we develop PhysVLM-AVR, an MLLM achieving state-of-the-art performance on CLEVR-AVR, embodied reasoning (OpenEQA, RoboVQA), and passive visual reasoning (GeoMath, Geometry30K). Our analysis also reveals that current embodied MLLMs, despite detecting information incompleteness, struggle to actively acquire and integrate new information through interaction, highlighting a fundamental gap in active reasoning capabilities.

Humans possess spatial reasoning abilities that enable them to understand spaces through multimodal observations, such as vision and sound. Large multimodal reasoning models extend these abilities by learning to perceive and reason, showing promising performance across diverse spatial tasks. However, systematic reviews and publicly available benchmarks for these models remain limited. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of multimodal spatial reasoning tasks with large models, categorizing recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and introducing open benchmarks for evaluation. We begin by outlining general spatial reasoning, focusing on post-training techniques, explainability, and architecture. Beyond classical 2D tasks, we examine spatial relationship reasoning, scene and layout understanding, as well as visual question answering and grounding in 3D space. We also review advances in embodied AI, including vision-language navigation and action models. Additionally, we consider emerging modalities such as audio and egocentric video, which contribute to novel spatial understanding through new sensors. We believe this survey establishes a solid foundation and offers insights into the growing field of multimodal spatial reasoning. Updated information about this survey, codes and implementation of the open benchmarks can be found at https://github.com/zhengxuJosh/Awesome-Spatial-Reasoning.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is often envisioned as inherently embodied. With recent advances in robotics and foundational AI models, we stand at the threshold of a new era-one marked by increasingly generalized embodied AI systems. This paper contributes to the discourse by introducing a systematic taxonomy of Embodied AGI spanning five levels (L1-L5). We review existing research and challenges at the foundational stages (L1-L2) and outline the key components required to achieve higher-level capabilities (L3-L5). Building on these insights and existing technologies, we propose a conceptual framework for an L3+ robotic brain, offering both a technical outlook and a foundation for future exploration.

Large language models excel at abstract reasoning but their capacity for embodied agent reasoning remains largely unexplored. We present OmniEAR, a comprehensive framework for evaluating how language models reason about physical interactions, tool usage, and multi-agent coordination in embodied tasks. Unlike existing benchmarks that provide predefined tool sets or explicit collaboration directives, OmniEAR requires agents to dynamically acquire capabilities and autonomously determine coordination strategies based on task demands. Through text-based environment representation, we model continuous physical properties and complex spatial relationships across 1,500 scenarios spanning household and industrial domains. Our systematic evaluation reveals severe performance degradation when models must reason from constraints: while achieving 85-96% success with explicit instructions, performance drops to 56-85% for tool reasoning and 63-85% for implicit collaboration, with compound tasks showing over 50% failure rates. Surprisingly, complete environmental information degrades coordination performance, indicating models cannot filter task-relevant constraints. Fine-tuning improves single-agent tasks dramatically (0.6% to 76.3%) but yields minimal multi-agent gains (1.5% to 5.5%), exposing fundamental architectural limitations. These findings demonstrate that embodied reasoning poses fundamentally different challenges than current models can address, establishing OmniEAR as a rigorous benchmark for evaluating and advancing embodied AI systems. Our code and data are included in the supplementary materials and will be open-sourced upon acceptance.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have empowered embodied agents with remarkable capabilities in planning and reasoning. However, when facing ambiguous natural language instructions (e.g., "fetch the tool" in a cluttered room), current agents often fail to balance the high cost of physical exploration against the cognitive cost of human interaction. They typically treat disambiguation as a passive perception problem, lacking the strategic reasoning to minimize total task execution costs. To bridge this gap, we propose ESearch-R1, a cost-aware embodied reasoning framework that unifies interactive dialogue (Ask), episodic memory retrieval (GetMemory), and physical navigation (Navigate) into a single decision process. We introduce HC-GRPO (Heterogeneous Cost-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization). Unlike traditional PPO which relies on a separate value critic, HC-GRPO optimizes the MLLM by sampling groups of reasoning trajectories and reinforcing those that achieve the optimal trade-off between information gain and heterogeneous costs (e.g., navigate time, and human attention). Extensive experiments in AI2-THOR demonstrate that ESearch-R1 significantly outperforms standard ReAct-based agents. It improves task success rates while reducing total operational costs by approximately 50\%, validating the effectiveness of GRPO in aligning MLLM agents with physical world constraints.

Leveraging Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to create embodied agents offers a promising avenue for tackling real-world tasks. While language-centric embodied agents have garnered substantial attention, MLLM-based embodied agents remain underexplored due to the lack of comprehensive evaluation frameworks. To bridge this gap, we introduce EmbodiedBench, an extensive benchmark designed to evaluate vision-driven embodied agents. EmbodiedBench features: (1) a diverse set of 1,128 testing tasks across four environments, ranging from high-level semantic tasks (e.g., household) to low-level tasks involving atomic actions (e.g., navigation and manipulation); and (2) six meticulously curated subsets evaluating essential agent capabilities like commonsense reasoning, complex instruction understanding, spatial awareness, visual perception, and long-term planning. Through extensive experiments, we evaluated 13 leading proprietary and open-source MLLMs within EmbodiedBench. Our findings reveal that: MLLMs excel at high-level tasks but struggle with low-level manipulation, with the best model, GPT-4o, scoring only 28.9% on average. EmbodiedBench provides a multifaceted standardized evaluation platform that not only highlights existing challenges but also offers valuable insights to advance MLLM-based embodied agents. Our code is available at https://embodiedbench.github.io.

Large language models excel at a wide range of complex tasks. However, enabling general inference in the real world, e.g., for robotics problems, raises the challenge of grounding. We propose embodied language models to directly incorporate real-world continuous sensor modalities into language models and thereby establish the link between words and percepts. Input to our embodied language model are multi-modal sentences that interleave visual, continuous state estimation, and textual input encodings. We train these encodings end-to-end, in conjunction with a pre-trained large language model, for multiple embodied tasks including sequential robotic manipulation planning, visual question answering, and captioning. Our evaluations show that PaLM-E, a single large embodied multimodal model, can address a variety of embodied reasoning tasks, from a variety of observation modalities, on multiple embodiments, and further, exhibits positive transfer: the model benefits from diverse joint training across internet-scale language, vision, and visual-language domains. Our largest model, PaLM-E-562B with 562B parameters, in addition to being trained on robotics tasks, is a visual-language generalist with state-of-the-art performance on OK-VQA, and retains generalist language capabilities with increasing scale.

Recent years have seen an increasing amount of work on embodied AI agents that can perform tasks by following human language instructions. However, most of these agents are reactive, meaning that they simply learn and imitate behaviors encountered in the training data. These reactive agents are insufficient for long-horizon complex tasks. To address this limitation, we propose a neuro-symbolic deliberative agent that, while following language instructions, proactively applies reasoning and planning based on its neural and symbolic representations acquired from past experience (e.g., natural language and egocentric vision). We show that our deliberative agent achieves greater than 70% improvement over reactive baselines on the challenging TEACh benchmark. Moreover, the underlying reasoning and planning processes, together with our modular framework, offer impressive transparency and explainability to the behaviors of the agent. This enables an in-depth understanding of the agent's capabilities, which shed light on challenges and opportunities for future embodied agents for instruction following. The code is available at https://github.com/sled-group/DANLI.

Embodied navigation requires agents to integrate perception, reasoning, and action for robust interaction in complex 3D environments. Existing approaches often suffer from incoherent and unstable reasoning traces that hinder generalization across diverse environments, and difficulty balancing long-horizon semantic reasoning with low-latency control for real-time navigation. To address these challenges, we propose Nav-R1, an embodied foundation model that unifies reasoning in embodied environments. We first construct Nav-CoT-110K, a large-scale dataset of step-by-step Chains-of-Thought (CoT) for embodied tasks, which enables cold-start initialization with structured reasoning. Building on this foundation, we design a GRPO-based reinforcement learning framework with three complementary rewards: format, understanding, and navigation, to improve structural adherence, semantic grounding, and path fidelity. Furthermore, we introduce a Fast-in-Slow reasoning paradigm, decoupling deliberate semantic reasoning from low-latency reactive control for efficient yet coherent navigation. Extensive evaluations on embodied AI benchmarks demonstrate that Nav-R1 consistently outperforms strong baselines, with over 8% average improvement in reasoning and navigation performance. Real-world deployment on a mobile robot further validates its robustness under limited onboard resources. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/Nav-R1. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/Nav-R1.

Humans act with context and intention, with reasoning playing a central role. While internet-scale data has enabled broad reasoning capabilities in AI systems, grounding these abilities in physical action remains a major challenge. We introduce Lumo-1, a generalist vision-language-action (VLA) model that unifies robot reasoning ("mind") with robot action ("hand"). Our approach builds upon the general multi-modal reasoning capabilities of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), progressively extending them to embodied reasoning and action prediction, and ultimately towards structured reasoning and reasoning-action alignment. This results in a three-stage pre-training pipeline: (1) Continued VLM pre-training on curated vision-language data to enhance embodied reasoning skills such as planning, spatial understanding, and trajectory prediction; (2) Co-training on cross-embodiment robot data alongside vision-language data; and (3) Action training with reasoning process on trajectories collected on Astribot S1, a bimanual mobile manipulator with human-like dexterity and agility. Finally, we integrate reinforcement learning to further refine reasoning-action consistency and close the loop between semantic inference and motor control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Lumo-1 achieves significant performance improvements in embodied vision-language reasoning, a critical component for generalist robotic control. Real-world evaluations further show that Lumo-1 surpasses strong baselines across a wide range of challenging robotic tasks, with strong generalization to novel objects and environments, excelling particularly in long-horizon tasks and responding to human-natural instructions that require reasoning over strategy, concepts and space.

The remarkable reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) stems from cognitive behaviors that emerge through reinforcement with verifiable rewards. This work investigates how to transfer this principle to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) to unlock advanced visual reasoning. We introduce a two-stage paradigm built on Qwen2.5-VL-7B: a massive linguistic cold-start fine-tuning, followed by multimodal reinforcement learning (RL) spanning nearly 1,000 steps, surpassing all previous open-source efforts in scale. This pioneering work reveals three fundamental insights: 1) Behavior transfer emerges surprisingly early in cold start due to linguistic mental imagery. 2) Cold start broadly memorizes visual behaviors, while RL critically discerns and scales up effective patterns. 3) Transfer strategically favors high-utility behaviors such as visual reflection. Our resulting model, Open-Vision-Reasoner (OVR), achieves state-of-the-art performance on a suite of reasoning benchmarks, including 95.3% on MATH500, 51.8% on MathVision and 54.6% on MathVerse. We release our model, data, and training dynamics to catalyze the development of more capable, behavior-aligned multimodal reasoners.

Improving embodied reasoning in multimodal-large-language models (MLLMs) is essential for building vision-language-action models (VLAs) on top of them to readily translate multimodal understanding into low-level actions. Accordingly, recent work has explored enhancing embodied reasoning in MLLMs through supervision of vision-question-answering type. However, these approaches have been reported to result in unstable VLA performance, often yielding only marginal or even negative gains. In this paper, we propose a more systematic MLLM training framework RoboAlign that reliably improves VLA performance. Our key idea is to sample action tokens via zero-shot natural language reasoning and refines this reasoning using reinforcement learning (RL) to improve action accuracy. As a result, RoboAlign bridges the modality gap between language and low-level actions in MLLMs, and facilitate knowledge transfer from MLLM to VLA. To validate the effectiveness of RoboAlign, we train VLAs by adding a diffusion-based action head on top of an MLLM backbone and evaluate them on major robotics benchmarks. Remarkably, by performing RL-based alignment after SFT using less than 1\% of the data, RoboAlign achieves performance improvements of 17.5\%, 18.9\%, and 106.6\% over SFT baselines on LIBERO, CALVIN, and real-world environments, respectively.

We present an online method for embodied agents to learn and accomplish diverse user goals. While offline methods like RLHF can represent various goals but require large datasets, our approach achieves similar flexibility with online efficiency. We extract natural language goal representations from conversations with Large Language Models (LLMs). We prompt an LLM to role play as a human with different goals and use the corresponding likelihoods to run Bayesian inference over potential goals. As a result, our method can represent uncertainty over complex goals based on unrestricted dialog. We evaluate our method in grocery shopping and home robot assistance domains using a text-based interface and AI2Thor simulation respectively. Results show our method outperforms ablation baselines that lack either explicit goal representation or probabilistic inference.

Generalization in embodied AI is hindered by the "seeing-to-doing gap," which stems from data scarcity and embodiment heterogeneity. To address this, we pioneer "pointing" as a unified, embodiment-agnostic intermediate representation, defining four core embodied pointing abilities that bridge high-level vision-language comprehension with low-level action primitives. We introduce Embodied-R1, a 3B Vision-Language Model (VLM) specifically designed for embodied reasoning and pointing. We use a wide range of embodied and general visual reasoning datasets as sources to construct a large-scale dataset, Embodied-Points-200K, which supports key embodied pointing capabilities. We then train Embodied-R1 using a two-stage Reinforced Fine-tuning (RFT) curriculum with a specialized multi-task reward design. Embodied-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on 11 embodied spatial and pointing benchmarks. Critically, it demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization by achieving a 56.2% success rate in the SIMPLEREnv and 87.5% across 8 real-world XArm tasks without any task-specific fine-tuning, representing a 62% improvement over strong baselines. Furthermore, the model exhibits high robustness against diverse visual disturbances. Our work shows that a pointing-centric representation, combined with an RFT training paradigm, offers an effective and generalizable pathway to closing the perception-action gap in robotics.

When large vision-language models are applied to the field of robotics, they encounter problems that are simple for humans yet error-prone for models. Such issues include confusion between third-person and first-person perspectives and a tendency to overlook information in video endings during temporal reasoning. To address these challenges, we propose Thinker, a large vision-language foundation model designed for embodied intelligence. We tackle the aforementioned issues from two perspectives. Firstly, we construct a large-scale dataset tailored for robotic perception and reasoning, encompassing ego-view videos, visual grounding, spatial understanding, and chain-of-thought data. Secondly, we introduce a simple yet effective approach that substantially enhances the model's capacity for video comprehension by jointly incorporating key frames and full video sequences as inputs. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on two of the most commonly used benchmark datasets in the field of task planning.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown significant advancements, providing a promising future for embodied agents. Existing benchmarks for evaluating MLLMs primarily utilize static images or videos, limiting assessments to non-interactive scenarios. Meanwhile, existing embodied AI benchmarks are task-specific and not diverse enough, which do not adequately evaluate the embodied capabilities of MLLMs. To address this, we propose EmbodiedEval, a comprehensive and interactive evaluation benchmark for MLLMs with embodied tasks. EmbodiedEval features 328 distinct tasks within 125 varied 3D scenes, each of which is rigorously selected and annotated. It covers a broad spectrum of existing embodied AI tasks with significantly enhanced diversity, all within a unified simulation and evaluation framework tailored for MLLMs. The tasks are organized into five categories: navigation, object interaction, social interaction, attribute question answering, and spatial question answering to assess different capabilities of the agents. We evaluated the state-of-the-art MLLMs on EmbodiedEval and found that they have a significant shortfall compared to human level on embodied tasks. Our analysis demonstrates the limitations of existing MLLMs in embodied capabilities, providing insights for their future development. We open-source all evaluation data and simulation framework at https://github.com/thunlp/EmbodiedEval.

Building generalist embodied agents requires a unified system that can interpret multimodal goals, model environment dynamics, and execute reliable actions across diverse real-world tasks. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer strong semantic priors and cross-modal generalization, while world models (WMs) provide actionable latent dynamics for prediction and control. Their combination holds promise for open-ended embodied intelligence, yet introduces two key challenges: (1) establishing a tight coupling between the semantic intent from MLLMs and the dynamic state representations within the WM's latent space, and (2) achieving task-aware adaptability that supports multi-task learning and cross-environment generalization. To address these limitations, we propose BiTAgent, a task-aware dynamic joint framework that enables bidirectional coupling between MLLMs and WMs. BiTAgent establishes two complementary pathways: a forward path that injects MLLM representations into the WM's latent space for semantically guided imagination, and a backward path where WM-generated feedback refines the MLLM's semantic space via dense text-conditioned rewards. This bidirectional interaction is realized through three synergistic components: Task-Aware Dynamic Joint Learning, Task-Aware Behavior Learning, and MLLM-WM Joint Optimization, which together harmonize semantic reasoning and dynamic prediction. Extensive experiments across multi-task and cross-environment settings demonstrate superior stability and generalization over state-of-the-art baselines, marking a step toward open-ended embodied learning.

Despite advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), their integration into language-grounded, human-like embodied agents remains incomplete, hindering complex real-life task performance in physical environments. Existing integrations often feature limited open sourcing, challenging collective progress in this field. We introduce LEGENT, an open, scalable platform for developing embodied agents using LLMs and LMMs. LEGENT offers a dual approach: a rich, interactive 3D environment with communicable and actionable agents, paired with a user-friendly interface, and a sophisticated data generation pipeline utilizing advanced algorithms to exploit supervision from simulated worlds at scale. In our experiments, an embryonic vision-language-action model trained on LEGENT-generated data surpasses GPT-4V in embodied tasks, showcasing promising generalization capabilities.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks, yet they face significant challenges in embodied task planning scenarios that require continuous environmental understanding and action generation. Existing approaches generate open-loop action scripts based on static knowledge, making it difficult to learn causal relationships between actions and environmental feedback, particularly in partially observable environments. We introduce Embodied Planner-R1, a novel outcome-driven reinforcement learning framework that enables LLMs to develop interactive capabilities through autonomous exploration with minimal supervision. Our framework incorporates three key innovations: (1) Without human annotations, we employ pure reinforcement learning with group rollout, incorporating in-environment interaction through parallel exploration; (2) completion-driven sparse reward; and (3) Interactive Policy Optimization (IPO) for efficient learning from grouped trajectories. Across two challenging text-based Embodied planning benchmarks, Embodied Planner-R1 achieves impressive completion rates of 97.78% on ALFWorld and 79.92% on ScienceWorld, surpassing prior methods by a large margin, and suffers only a -3.66% drop in previously unseen environments, evidencing strong generalization.

Recent advances in embodied agents with multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities based on large vision-language models (LVLMs), excel in autonomously interacting either real or cyber worlds, helping people make intelligent decisions in complex environments. However, the current works are normally optimized by golden action trajectories or ideal task-oriented solutions toward a definitive goal. This paradigm considers limited user-oriented factors, which could be the reason for their performance reduction in a wide range of personal assistant applications. To address this, we propose Chain-of-User-Thought (COUT), a novel embodied reasoning paradigm that takes a chain of thought from basic action thinking to explicit and implicit personalized preference thought to incorporate personalized factors into autonomous agent learning. To target COUT, we introduce SmartAgent, an agent framework perceiving cyber environments and reasoning personalized requirements as 1) interacting with GUI to access an item pool, 2) generating users' explicit requirements implied by previous actions, and 3) recommending items to fulfill users' implicit requirements. To demonstrate SmartAgent's capabilities, we also create a brand-new dataset SmartSpot that offers a full-stage personalized action-involved environment. To our best knowledge, our work is the first to formulate the COUT process, serving as a preliminary attempt towards embodied personalized agent learning. Our extensive experiments on SmartSpot illuminate SmartAgent's functionality among a series of embodied and personalized sub-tasks. We will release code and data upon paper notification at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/SmartAgent.

This letter introduces ERRA, an embodied learning architecture that enables robots to jointly obtain three fundamental capabilities (reasoning, planning, and interaction) for solving long-horizon language-conditioned manipulation tasks. ERRA is based on tightly-coupled probabilistic inferences at two granularity levels. Coarse-resolution inference is formulated as sequence generation through a large language model, which infers action language from natural language instruction and environment state. The robot then zooms to the fine-resolution inference part to perform the concrete action corresponding to the action language. Fine-resolution inference is constructed as a Markov decision process, which takes action language and environmental sensing as observations and outputs the action. The results of action execution in environments provide feedback for subsequent coarse-resolution reasoning. Such coarse-to-fine inference allows the robot to decompose and achieve long-horizon tasks interactively. In extensive experiments, we show that ERRA can complete various long-horizon manipulation tasks specified by abstract language instructions. We also demonstrate successful generalization to the novel but similar natural language instructions.

Embodied artificial intelligence emphasizes the role of an agent's body in generating human-like behaviors. The recent efforts on EmbodiedAI pay a lot of attention to building up machine learning models to possess perceiving, planning, and acting abilities, thereby enabling real-time interaction with the world. However, most works focus on bounded indoor environments, such as navigation in a room or manipulating a device, with limited exploration of embodying the agents in open-world scenarios. That is, embodied intelligence in the open and outdoor environment is less explored, for which one potential reason is the lack of high-quality simulators, benchmarks, and datasets. To address it, in this paper, we construct a benchmark platform for embodied intelligence evaluation in real-world city environments. Specifically, we first construct a highly realistic 3D simulation environment based on the real buildings, roads, and other elements in a real city. In this environment, we combine historically collected data and simulation algorithms to conduct simulations of pedestrian and vehicle flows with high fidelity. Further, we designed a set of evaluation tasks covering different EmbodiedAI abilities. Moreover, we provide a complete set of input and output interfaces for access, enabling embodied agents to easily take task requirements and current environmental observations as input and then make decisions and obtain performance evaluations. On the one hand, it expands the capability of existing embodied intelligence to higher levels. On the other hand, it has a higher practical value in the real world and can support more potential applications for artificial general intelligence. Based on this platform, we evaluate some popular large language models for embodied intelligence capabilities of different dimensions and difficulties.

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (Embodied AI) is an emerging frontier in robotics, driven by the need for autonomous systems that can perceive, reason, and act in complex physical environments. While single-arm systems have shown strong task performance, collaborative dual-arm systems are essential for handling more intricate tasks involving rigid, deformable, and tactile-sensitive objects. To advance this goal, we launched the RoboTwin Dual-Arm Collaboration Challenge at the 2nd MEIS Workshop, CVPR 2025. Built on the RoboTwin Simulation platform (1.0 and 2.0) and the AgileX COBOT-Magic Robot platform, the competition consisted of three stages: Simulation Round 1, Simulation Round 2, and a final Real-World Round. Participants totally tackled 17 dual-arm manipulation tasks, covering rigid, deformable, and tactile-based scenarios. The challenge attracted 64 global teams and over 400 participants, producing top-performing solutions like SEM and AnchorDP3 and generating valuable insights into generalizable bimanual policy learning. This report outlines the competition setup, task design, evaluation methodology, key findings and future direction, aiming to support future research on robust and generalizable bimanual manipulation policies. The Challenge Webpage is available at https://robotwin-benchmark.github.io/cvpr-2025-challenge/.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown inspiring achievements in constructing autonomous agents that rely on language descriptions as inputs. However, it remains unclear how well LLMs can function as few-shot or zero-shot embodied agents in dynamic interactive environments. To address this gap, we introduce LangSuitE, a versatile and simulation-free testbed featuring 6 representative embodied tasks in textual embodied worlds. Compared with previous LLM-based testbeds, LangSuitE (i) offers adaptability to diverse environments without multiple simulation engines, (ii) evaluates agents' capacity to develop ``internalized world knowledge'' with embodied observations, and (iii) allows easy customization of communication and action strategies. To address the embodiment challenge, we devise a novel chain-of-thought (CoT) schema, EmMem, which summarizes embodied states w.r.t. history information. Comprehensive benchmark results illustrate challenges and insights of embodied planning. LangSuitE represents a significant step toward building embodied generalists in the context of language models.

Embodied AI is a crucial frontier in robotics, capable of planning and executing action sequences for robots to accomplish long-horizon tasks in physical environments. In this work, we introduce EmbodiedGPT, an end-to-end multi-modal foundation model for embodied AI, empowering embodied agents with multi-modal understanding and execution capabilities. To achieve this, we have made the following efforts: (i) We craft a large-scale embodied planning dataset, termed EgoCOT. The dataset consists of carefully selected videos from the Ego4D dataset, along with corresponding high-quality language instructions. Specifically, we generate a sequence of sub-goals with the "Chain of Thoughts" mode for effective embodied planning. (ii) We introduce an efficient training approach to EmbodiedGPT for high-quality plan generation, by adapting a 7B large language model (LLM) to the EgoCOT dataset via prefix tuning. (iii) We introduce a paradigm for extracting task-related features from LLM-generated planning queries to form a closed loop between high-level planning and low-level control. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of EmbodiedGPT on embodied tasks, including embodied planning, embodied control, visual captioning, and visual question answering. Notably, EmbodiedGPT significantly enhances the success rate of the embodied control task by extracting more effective features. It has achieved a remarkable 1.6 times increase in success rate on the Franka Kitchen benchmark and a 1.3 times increase on the Meta-World benchmark, compared to the BLIP-2 baseline fine-tuned with the Ego4D dataset.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) automation holds significant promise for assisting users with complex tasks, thereby boosting human productivity. Existing works leveraging Large Language Model (LLM) or LLM-based AI agents have shown capabilities in automating tasks on Android and Web platforms. However, these tasks are primarily aimed at simple device usage and entertainment operations. This paper presents a novel benchmark, AssistGUI, to evaluate whether models are capable of manipulating the mouse and keyboard on the Windows platform in response to user-requested tasks. We carefully collected a set of 100 tasks from nine widely-used software applications, such as, After Effects and MS Word, each accompanied by the necessary project files for better evaluation. Moreover, we propose an advanced Actor-Critic Embodied Agent framework, which incorporates a sophisticated GUI parser driven by an LLM-agent and an enhanced reasoning mechanism adept at handling lengthy procedural tasks. Our experimental results reveal that our GUI Parser and Reasoning mechanism outshine existing methods in performance. Nevertheless, the potential remains substantial, with the best model attaining only a 46% success rate on our benchmark. We conclude with a thorough analysis of the current methods' limitations, setting the stage for future breakthroughs in this domain.

When writing and talking, people sometimes pause to think. Although reasoning-focused works have often framed reasoning as a method of answering questions or completing agentic tasks, reasoning is implicit in almost all written text. For example, this applies to the steps not stated between the lines of a proof or to the theory of mind underlying a conversation. In the Self-Taught Reasoner (STaR, Zelikman et al. 2022), useful thinking is learned by inferring rationales from few-shot examples in question-answering and learning from those that lead to a correct answer. This is a highly constrained setting -- ideally, a language model could instead learn to infer unstated rationales in arbitrary text. We present Quiet-STaR, a generalization of STaR in which LMs learn to generate rationales at each token to explain future text, improving their predictions. We address key challenges, including 1) the computational cost of generating continuations, 2) the fact that the LM does not initially know how to generate or use internal thoughts, and 3) the need to predict beyond individual next tokens. To resolve these, we propose a tokenwise parallel sampling algorithm, using learnable tokens indicating a thought's start and end, and an extended teacher-forcing technique. Encouragingly, generated rationales disproportionately help model difficult-to-predict tokens and improve the LM's ability to directly answer difficult questions. In particular, after continued pretraining of an LM on a corpus of internet text with Quiet-STaR, we find zero-shot improvements on GSM8K (5.9%rightarrow10.9%) and CommonsenseQA (36.3%rightarrow47.2%) and observe a perplexity improvement of difficult tokens in natural text. Crucially, these improvements require no fine-tuning on these tasks. Quiet-STaR marks a step towards LMs that can learn to reason in a more general and scalable way.

There is a growing interest in Universal Multimodal Embeddings (UME), where models are required to generate task-specific representations. While recent studies show that Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) perform well on such tasks, they treat MLLMs solely as encoders, overlooking their generative capacity. However, such an encoding paradigm becomes less effective as instructions become more complex and require compositional reasoning. Inspired by the proven effectiveness of chain-of-thought reasoning, we propose a general Think-Then-Embed (TTE) framework for UME, composed of a reasoner and an embedder. The reasoner MLLM first generates reasoning traces that explain complex queries, followed by an embedder that produces representations conditioned on both the original query and the intermediate reasoning. This explicit reasoning step enables more nuanced understanding of complex multimodal instructions. Our contributions are threefold. First, by leveraging a powerful MLLM reasoner, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the MMEB-V2 benchmark, surpassing proprietary models trained on massive in-house datasets. Second, to reduce the dependency on large MLLM reasoners, we finetune a smaller MLLM reasoner using high-quality embedding-centric reasoning traces, achieving the best performance among open-source models with a 7% absolute gain over recently proposed models. Third, we investigate strategies for integrating the reasoner and embedder into a unified model for improved efficiency without sacrificing performance.

Reasoning in a complex and ambiguous environment is a key goal for Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents. While some sophisticated RL agents can successfully solve difficult tasks, they require a large amount of training data and often struggle to generalize to new unseen environments and new tasks. On the other hand, Large Scale Language Models (LSLMs) have exhibited strong reasoning ability and the ability to to adapt to new tasks through in-context learning. However, LSLMs do not inherently have the ability to interrogate or intervene on the environment. In this work, we investigate how to combine these complementary abilities in a single system consisting of three parts: a Planner, an Actor, and a Reporter. The Planner is a pre-trained language model that can issue commands to a simple embodied agent (the Actor), while the Reporter communicates with the Planner to inform its next command. We present a set of tasks that require reasoning, test this system's ability to generalize zero-shot and investigate failure cases, and demonstrate how components of this system can be trained with reinforcement-learning to improve performance.

Embodied agents designed to assist users with tasks must engage in natural language interactions, interpret instructions, execute actions, and communicate effectively to resolve issues. However, collecting large-scale, diverse datasets of situated human-robot dialogues to train and evaluate such agents is expensive, labor-intensive, and time-consuming. To address this challenge, we propose building a large language model (LLM)-based user agent that can simulate user behavior during interactions with an embodied agent in a virtual environment. Given a user goal (e.g., make breakfast), at each time step, the user agent may observe" the robot actions or speak" to either intervene with the robot or answer questions. Such a user agent assists in improving the scalability and efficiency of embodied dialogues dataset generation and is critical for enhancing and evaluating the robot's interaction and task completion ability, as well as for research in reinforcement learning using AI feedback. We evaluate our user agent's ability to generate human-like behaviors by comparing its simulated dialogues with the TEACh dataset. We perform three experiments: zero-shot prompting to predict dialogue acts, few-shot prompting, and fine-tuning on the TEACh training subset. Results show the LLM-based user agent achieves an F-measure of 42% with zero-shot prompting and 43.4% with few-shot prompting in mimicking human speaking behavior. Through fine-tuning, performance in deciding when to speak remained stable, while deciding what to say improved from 51.1% to 62.5%. These findings showcase the feasibility of the proposed approach for assessing and enhancing the effectiveness of robot task completion through natural language communication.

Despite rapid progress in multimodal foundation models, embodied intelligence community still lacks a unified, physically grounded foundation model that integrates perception, reasoning, and planning within real-world spatial-temporal dynamics. We introduce RynnBrain, an open-source spatiotemporal foundation model for embodied intelligence. RynnBrain strengthens four core capabilities in a unified framework: comprehensive egocentric understanding, diverse spatiotemporal localization, physically grounded reasoning, and physics-aware planning. The RynnBrain family comprises three foundation model scales (2B, 8B, and 30B-A3B MoE) and four post-trained variants tailored for downstream embodied tasks (i.e., RynnBrain-Nav, RynnBrain-Plan, and RynnBrain-VLA) or complex spatial reasoning tasks (i.e., RynnBrain-CoP). In terms of extensive evaluations on 20 embodied benchmarks and 8 general vision understanding benchmarks, our RynnBrain foundation models largely outperform existing embodied foundation models by a significant margin. The post-trained model suite further substantiates two key potentials of the RynnBrain foundation model: (i) enabling physically grounded reasoning and planning, and (ii) serving as a strong pretrained backbone that can be efficiently adapted to diverse embodied tasks.

Recent methods for embodied instruction following are typically trained end-to-end using imitation learning. This often requires the use of expert trajectories and low-level language instructions. Such approaches assume that neural states will integrate multimodal semantics to perform state tracking, building spatial memory, exploration, and long-term planning. In contrast, we propose a modular method with structured representations that (1) builds a semantic map of the scene and (2) performs exploration with a semantic search policy, to achieve the natural language goal. Our modular method achieves SOTA performance (24.46 %) with a substantial (8.17 % absolute) gap from previous work while using less data by eschewing both expert trajectories and low-level instructions. Leveraging low-level language, however, can further increase our performance (26.49 %). Our findings suggest that an explicit spatial memory and a semantic search policy can provide a stronger and more general representation for state-tracking and guidance, even in the absence of expert trajectories or low-level instructions.

While significant research has focused on developing embodied reasoning capabilities using Vision-Language Models (VLMs) or integrating advanced VLMs into Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for end-to-end robot control, few studies directly address the critical gap between upstream VLM-based reasoning and downstream VLA policy learning. In this work, we take an initial step toward bridging embodied reasoning with VLA policy learning by introducing Vlaser - a Vision-Language-Action Model with synergistic embodied reasoning capability, which is a foundational vision-language model designed to integrate high-level reasoning with low-level control for embodied agents. Built upon the high-quality Vlaser-6M dataset, Vlaser achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of embodied reasoning benchmarks - including spatial reasoning, embodied grounding, embodied QA, and task planning. Furthermore, we systematically examine how different VLM initializations affect supervised VLA fine-tuning, offering novel insights into mitigating the domain shift between internet-scale pre-training data and embodied-specific policy learning data. Based on these insights, our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the WidowX benchmark and competitive performance on the Google Robot benchmark.

We examine the capability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to tackle diverse domains that extend beyond the traditional language and vision tasks these models are typically trained on. Specifically, our focus lies in areas such as Embodied AI, Games, UI Control, and Planning. To this end, we introduce a process of adapting an MLLM to a Generalist Embodied Agent (GEA). GEA is a single unified model capable of grounding itself across these varied domains through a multi-embodiment action tokenizer. GEA is trained with supervised learning on a large dataset of embodied experiences and with online RL in interactive simulators. We explore the data and algorithmic choices necessary to develop such a model. Our findings reveal the importance of training with cross-domain data and online RL for building generalist agents. The final GEA model achieves strong generalization performance to unseen tasks across diverse benchmarks compared to other generalist models and benchmark-specific approaches.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) can solve many NLP tasks in zero-shot settings, applications involving embodied agents remain problematic. In particular, complex plans that require multi-step reasoning become difficult and too costly as the context window grows. Planning requires understanding the likely effects of one's actions and identifying whether the current environment satisfies the goal state. While symbolic planners find optimal solutions quickly, they require a complete and accurate representation of the planning problem, severely limiting their use in practical scenarios. In contrast, modern LLMs cope with noisy observations and high levels of uncertainty when reasoning about a task. Our work presents LLM Dynamic Planner (LLM-DP): a neuro-symbolic framework where an LLM works hand-in-hand with a traditional planner to solve an embodied task. Given action-descriptions, LLM-DP solves Alfworld faster and more efficiently than a naive LLM ReAct baseline.

With the power of large language models (LLMs), open-ended embodied agents can flexibly understand human instructions, generate interpretable guidance strategies, and output executable actions. Nowadays, Multi-modal Language Models~(MLMs) integrate multi-modal signals into LLMs, further bringing richer perception to entity agents and allowing embodied agents to perceive world-understanding tasks more delicately. However, existing works: 1) operate independently by agents, each containing multiple LLMs, from perception to action, resulting in gaps between complex tasks and execution; 2) train MLMs on static data, struggling with dynamics in open-ended scenarios; 3) input prior knowledge directly as prompts, suppressing application flexibility. We propose STEVE-2, a hierarchical knowledge distillation framework for open-ended embodied tasks, characterized by 1) a hierarchical system for multi-granular task division, 2) a mirrored distillation method for parallel simulation data, and 3) an extra expert model for bringing additional knowledge into parallel simulation. After distillation, embodied agents can complete complex, open-ended tasks without additional expert guidance, utilizing the performance and knowledge of a versatile MLM. Extensive evaluations on navigation and creation tasks highlight the superior performance of STEVE-2 in open-ended tasks, with 1.4 times - 7.3 times in performance.

The human ability to seamlessly perform multimodal reasoning and physical interaction in the open world is a core goal for general-purpose embodied intelligent systems. Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models, which are co-trained on large-scale robot and visual-text data, have demonstrated notable progress in general robot control. However, they still fail to achieve human-level flexibility in interleaved reasoning and interaction. In this work, introduce EO-Robotics, consists of EO-1 model and EO-Data1.5M dataset. EO-1 is a unified embodied foundation model that achieves superior performance in multimodal embodied reasoning and robot control through interleaved vision-text-action pre-training. The development of EO-1 is based on two key pillars: (i) a unified architecture that processes multimodal inputs indiscriminately (image, text, video, and action), and (ii) a massive, high-quality multimodal embodied reasoning dataset, EO-Data1.5M, which contains over 1.5 million samples with emphasis on interleaved vision-text-action comprehension. EO-1 is trained through synergies between auto-regressive decoding and flow matching denoising on EO-Data1.5M, enabling seamless robot action generation and multimodal embodied reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of interleaved vision-text-action learning for open-world understanding and generalization, validated through a variety of long-horizon, dexterous manipulation tasks across multiple embodiments. This paper details the architecture of EO-1, the data construction strategy of EO-Data1.5M, and the training methodology, offering valuable insights for developing advanced embodied foundation models.

Embodied intelligence, a grand challenge in artificial intelligence, is fundamentally constrained by the limited spatial understanding and reasoning capabilities of current models. Prevailing efforts to address this through enhancing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are trapped in a dilemma: template-based datasets are scalable but structurally rigid, while manual annotation is linguistically diverse but unscalable and, critically, computationally imprecise. We introduce SPRITE, a novel framework that overcomes this dilemma by leveraging simulators and large models to programmatically synthesize scalable, diverse, and high-quality spatial reasoning data. The core innovation of SPRITE is to reframe ground-truth generation as a code-generation task. We utilize LLMs to compile complex spatial questions into executable programs, which are then verified against high-precision scene meta-information extracted from simulators. This ensures our ground truth is both computationally precise and verifiable, while the generative power of LLMs provides vast linguistic diversity. Leveraging this pipeline, we have curated a dataset encompassing 3 simulators, 11k+ scenes, and 300k+ image/video instruction-tuning pairs. We demonstrate that a VLM trained on our data achieves significant performance gains on multiple spatial benchmarks and outperforms other open-source datasets of equivalent size. Furthermore, a scalability analysis confirms our hypothesis that overcoming the low-diversity nature of traditional template methods is essential for building robust, generalizable spatial intelligence. We will make the SPRITE framework code and the full 300k+ dataset publicly available to facilitate future research in spatial intelligence.

Embodied Instruction Following (EIF) is a crucial task in embodied learning, requiring agents to interact with their environment through egocentric observations to fulfill natural language instructions. Recent advancements have seen a surge in employing large language models (LLMs) within a framework-centric approach to enhance performance in embodied learning tasks, including EIF. Despite these efforts, there exists a lack of a unified understanding regarding the impact of various components-ranging from visual perception to action execution-on task performance. To address this gap, we introduce OPEx, a comprehensive framework that delineates the core components essential for solving embodied learning tasks: Observer, Planner, and Executor. Through extensive evaluations, we provide a deep analysis of how each component influences EIF task performance. Furthermore, we innovate within this space by deploying a multi-agent dialogue strategy on a TextWorld counterpart, further enhancing task performance. Our findings reveal that LLM-centric design markedly improves EIF outcomes, identify visual perception and low-level action execution as critical bottlenecks, and demonstrate that augmenting LLMs with a multi-agent framework further elevates performance.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently shown great promise in advancing robotics by combining embodied reasoning with robot control. A common approach involves training on embodied reasoning tasks related to robot control using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). However, SFT datasets are often heuristically constructed and not explicitly optimized for improving robot control. Furthermore, SFT often leads to issues such as catastrophic forgetting and reduced generalization performance. To address these limitations, we introduce Robot-R1, a novel framework that leverages reinforcement learning to enhance embodied reasoning specifically for robot control. Robot-R1 learns to predict the next keypoint state required for task completion, conditioned on the current scene image and environment metadata derived from expert demonstrations. Inspired by the DeepSeek-R1 learning approach, Robot-R1 samples reasoning-based responses and reinforces those that lead to more accurate predictions. Our experiments show that models trained with Robot-R1 outperform SFT methods on embodied reasoning tasks. Despite having only 7B parameters, Robot-R1 even surpasses GPT-4o on reasoning tasks related to low-level action control, such as spatial and primitive movement reasoning.

Rationality is the quality of being guided by reason, characterized by decision-making that aligns with evidence and logical principles. It plays a crucial role in reliable problem-solving by ensuring well-grounded and consistent solutions. While large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in generating human-like text, they still exhibit limitations such as bounded knowledge space and inconsistent outputs. In response, recent efforts have shifted toward developing multimodal and multi-agent systems, as well as integrating modules like external tools, programming codes, symbolic reasoners, utility function, and conformal risk controls rather than relying solely on a single LLM for decision-making. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art advancements in language and multimodal agents, evaluates how they contribute to make intelligent agents more rational, and identifies open challenges and future research directions. We maintain an open repository at https://github.com/bowen-upenn/Agent_Rationality.

Leveraging massive knowledge and learning schemes from large language models (LLMs), recent machine learning models show notable successes in building generalist agents that exhibit the capability of general-purpose task solving in diverse domains, including natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics. However, a significant challenge remains as these models exhibit limited ability in understanding and interacting with the 3D world. We argue this limitation significantly hinders the current models from performing real-world tasks and further achieving general intelligence. To this end, we introduce an embodied multi-modal and multi-task generalist agent that excels in perceiving, grounding, reasoning, planning, and acting in the 3D world. Our proposed agent, referred to as LEO, is trained with shared LLM-based model architectures, objectives, and weights in two stages: (i) 3D vision-language alignment and (ii) 3D vision-language-action instruction tuning. To facilitate the training, we meticulously curate and generate an extensive dataset comprising object-level and scene-level multi-modal tasks with exceeding scale and complexity, necessitating a deep understanding of and interaction with the 3D world. Through rigorous experiments, we demonstrate LEO's remarkable proficiency across a wide spectrum of tasks, including 3D captioning, question answering, embodied reasoning, embodied navigation, and robotic manipulation. Our ablation results further provide valuable insights for the development of future embodied generalist agents.

While the exploration for embodied AI has spanned multiple decades, it remains a persistent challenge to endow agents with human-level intelligence, including perception, learning, reasoning, decision-making, control, and generalization capabilities, so that they can perform general-purpose tasks in open, unstructured, and dynamic environments. Recent advances in computer vision, natural language processing, and multi-modality learning have shown that the foundation models have superhuman capabilities for specific tasks. They not only provide a solid cornerstone for integrating basic modules into embodied AI systems but also shed light on how to scale up robot learning from a methodological perspective. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of foundation models in robotics, focusing on autonomous manipulation and encompassing high-level planning and low-level control. Moreover, we showcase their commonly used datasets, simulators, and benchmarks. Importantly, we emphasize the critical challenges intrinsic to this field and delineate potential avenues for future research, contributing to advancing the frontier of academic and industrial discourse.

Building robots that can perceive, reason, and act in dynamic, unstructured environments remains a core challenge. Recent embodied systems often adopt a dual-system paradigm, where System 2 handles high-level reasoning while System 1 executes low-level control. In this work, we refer to System 2 as the embodied brain, emphasizing its role as the cognitive core for reasoning and decision-making in manipulation tasks. Given this role, systematic evaluation of the embodied brain is essential. Yet existing benchmarks emphasize execution success, or when targeting high-level reasoning, suffer from incomplete dimensions and limited task realism, offering only a partial picture of cognitive capability. To bridge this gap, we introduce RoboBench, a benchmark that systematically evaluates multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as embodied brains. Motivated by the critical roles across the full manipulation pipeline, RoboBench defines five dimensions-instruction comprehension, perception reasoning, generalized planning, affordance prediction, and failure analysis-spanning 14 capabilities, 25 tasks, and 6092 QA pairs. To ensure realism, we curate datasets across diverse embodiments, attribute-rich objects, and multi-view scenes, drawing from large-scale real robotic data. For planning, RoboBench introduces an evaluation framework, MLLM-as-world-simulator. It evaluate embodied feasibility by simulating whether predicted plans can achieve critical object-state changes. Experiments on 14 MLLMs reveal fundamental limitations: difficulties with implicit instruction comprehension, spatiotemporal reasoning, cross-scenario planning, fine-grained affordance understanding, and execution failure diagnosis. RoboBench provides a comprehensive scaffold to quantify high-level cognition, and guide the development of next-generation embodied MLLMs. The project page is in https://robo-bench.github.io.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong zero-shot reasoning capabilities, their deployment as embodied agents still faces fundamental challenges in long-horizon planning. Unlike open-ended text generation, embodied agents must decompose high-level intent into actionable sub-goals while strictly adhering to the logic of a dynamic, observed environment. Standard LLM planners frequently fail to maintain strategy coherence over extended horizons due to context window limitation or hallucinate transitions that violate constraints. We propose GiG, a novel planning framework that structures embodied agents' memory using a Graph-in-Graph architecture. Our approach employs a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to encode environmental states into embeddings, organizing these embeddings into action-connected execution trace graphs within an experience memory bank. By clustering these graph embeddings, the framework enables retrieval of structure-aware priors, allowing agents to ground current decisions in relevant past structural patterns. Furthermore, we introduce a novel bounded lookahead module that leverages symbolic transition logic to enhance the agents' planning capabilities through the grounded action projection. We evaluate our framework on three embodied planning benchmarks-Robotouille Synchronous, Robotouille Asynchronous, and ALFWorld. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving Pass@1 performance gains of up to 22% on Robotouille Synchronous, 37% on Asynchronous, and 15% on ALFWorld with comparable or lower computational cost.

Recent progress in using machine learning models for reasoning tasks has been driven by novel model architectures, large-scale pre-training protocols, and dedicated reasoning datasets for fine-tuning. In this work, to further pursue these advances, we introduce a new data generator for machine reasoning that integrates with an embodied agent. The generated data consists of templated text queries and answers, matched with world-states encoded into a database. The world-states are a result of both world dynamics and the actions of the agent. We show the results of several baseline models on instantiations of train sets. These include pre-trained language models fine-tuned on a text-formatted representation of the database, and graph-structured Transformers operating on a knowledge-graph representation of the database. We find that these models can answer some questions about the world-state, but struggle with others. These results hint at new research directions in designing neural reasoning models and database representations. Code to generate the data will be released at github.com/facebookresearch/neuralmemory

Automated rationale generation is an approach for real-time explanation generation whereby a computational model learns to translate an autonomous agent's internal state and action data representations into natural language. Training on human explanation data can enable agents to learn to generate human-like explanations for their behavior. In this paper, using the context of an agent that plays Frogger, we describe (a) how to collect a corpus of explanations, (b) how to train a neural rationale generator to produce different styles of rationales, and (c) how people perceive these rationales. We conducted two user studies. The first study establishes the plausibility of each type of generated rationale and situates their user perceptions along the dimensions of confidence, humanlike-ness, adequate justification, and understandability. The second study further explores user preferences between the generated rationales with regard to confidence in the autonomous agent, communicating failure and unexpected behavior. Overall, we find alignment between the intended differences in features of the generated rationales and the perceived differences by users. Moreover, context permitting, participants preferred detailed rationales to form a stable mental model of the agent's behavior.

There is no limit to how much a robot might explore and learn, but all of that knowledge needs to be searchable and actionable. Within language research, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) has become the workhouse of large-scale non-parametric knowledge, however existing techniques do not directly transfer to the embodied domain, which is multimodal, data is highly correlated, and perception requires abstraction. To address these challenges, we introduce Embodied-RAG, a framework that enhances the foundational model of an embodied agent with a non-parametric memory system capable of autonomously constructing hierarchical knowledge for both navigation and language generation. Embodied-RAG handles a full range of spatial and semantic resolutions across diverse environments and query types, whether for a specific object or a holistic description of ambiance. At its core, Embodied-RAG's memory is structured as a semantic forest, storing language descriptions at varying levels of detail. This hierarchical organization allows the system to efficiently generate context-sensitive outputs across different robotic platforms. We demonstrate that Embodied-RAG effectively bridges RAG to the robotics domain, successfully handling over 200 explanation and navigation queries across 19 environments, highlighting its promise for general-purpose non-parametric system for embodied agents.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in complex reasoning tasks, yet they remain fundamentally limited by their reliance on static internal knowledge and text-only reasoning. Real-world problem solving often demands dynamic, multi-step reasoning, adaptive decision making, and the ability to interact with external tools and environments. In this work, we introduce ARTIST (Agentic Reasoning and Tool Integration in Self-improving Transformers), a unified framework that tightly couples agentic reasoning, reinforcement learning, and tool integration for LLMs. ARTIST enables models to autonomously decide when, how, and which tools to invoke within multi-turn reasoning chains, leveraging outcome-based RL to learn robust strategies for tool use and environment interaction without requiring step-level supervision. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning and multi-turn function calling benchmarks show that ARTIST consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with up to 22% absolute improvement over base models and strong gains on the most challenging tasks. Detailed studies and metric analyses reveal that agentic RL training leads to deeper reasoning, more effective tool use, and higher-quality solutions. Our results establish agentic RL with tool integration as a powerful new frontier for robust, interpretable, and generalizable problem-solving in LLMs.

Language models (LMs) have demonstrated their capability in possessing commonsense knowledge of the physical world, a crucial aspect of performing tasks in everyday life. However, it remains unclear whether they have the capacity to generate grounded, executable plans for embodied tasks. This is a challenging task as LMs lack the ability to perceive the environment through vision and feedback from the physical environment. In this paper, we address this important research question and present the first investigation into the topic. Our novel problem formulation, named G-PlanET, inputs a high-level goal and a data table about objects in a specific environment, and then outputs a step-by-step actionable plan for a robotic agent to follow. To facilitate the study, we establish an evaluation protocol and design a dedicated metric, KAS, to assess the quality of the plans. Our experiments demonstrate that the use of tables for encoding the environment and an iterative decoding strategy can significantly enhance the LMs' ability in grounded planning. Our analysis also reveals interesting and non-trivial findings.

An ideal embodied agent should possess lifelong learning capabilities to handle long-horizon and complex tasks, enabling continuous operation in general environments. This not only requires the agent to accurately accomplish given tasks but also to leverage long-term episodic memory to optimize decision-making. However, existing mainstream one-shot embodied tasks primarily focus on task completion results, neglecting the crucial process of exploration and memory utilization. To address this, we propose Long-term Memory Embodied Exploration (LMEE), which aims to unify the agent's exploratory cognition and decision-making behaviors to promote lifelong learning.We further construct a corresponding dataset and benchmark, LMEE-Bench, incorporating multi-goal navigation and memory-based question answering to comprehensively evaluate both the process and outcome of embodied exploration. To enhance the agent's memory recall and proactive exploration capabilities, we propose MemoryExplorer, a novel method that fine-tunes a multimodal large language model through reinforcement learning to encourage active memory querying. By incorporating a multi-task reward function that includes action prediction, frontier selection, and question answering, our model achieves proactive exploration. Extensive experiments against state-of-the-art embodied exploration models demonstrate that our approach achieves significant advantages in long-horizon embodied tasks.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as essential generalist robot policies for diverse manipulation tasks, conventionally relying on directly translating multimodal inputs into actions via Vision-Language Model (VLM) embeddings. Recent advancements have introduced explicit intermediary reasoning, such as sub-task prediction (language) or goal image synthesis (vision), to guide action generation. However, these intermediate reasoning are often indirect and inherently limited in their capacity to convey the full, granular information required for precise action execution. Instead, we posit that the most effective form of reasoning is one that deliberates directly in the action space. We introduce Action Chain-of-Thought (ACoT), a paradigm where the reasoning process itself is formulated as a structured sequence of coarse action intents that guide the final policy. In this paper, we propose ACoT-VLA, a novel architecture that materializes the ACoT paradigm. Specifically, we introduce two complementary components: an Explicit Action Reasoner (EAR) and Implicit Action Reasoner (IAR). The former proposes coarse reference trajectories as explicit action-level reasoning steps, while the latter extracts latent action priors from internal representations of multimodal input, co-forming an ACoT that conditions the downstream action head to enable grounded policy learning. Extensive experiments in real-world and simulation environments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, which achieves 98.5%, 84.1%, and 47.4% on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus and VLABench, respectively.

Large language models (LLMs) have undergone significant expansion and have been increasingly integrated across various domains. Notably, in the realm of robot task planning, LLMs harness their advanced reasoning and language comprehension capabilities to formulate precise and efficient action plans based on natural language instructions. However, for embodied tasks, where robots interact with complex environments, text-only LLMs often face challenges due to a lack of compatibility with robotic visual perception. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging integration of LLMs and multimodal LLMs into various robotic tasks. Additionally, we propose a framework that utilizes multimodal GPT-4V to enhance embodied task planning through the combination of natural language instructions and robot visual perceptions. Our results, based on diverse datasets, indicate that GPT-4V effectively enhances robot performance in embodied tasks. This extensive survey and evaluation of LLMs and multimodal LLMs across a variety of robotic tasks enriches the understanding of LLM-centric embodied intelligence and provides forward-looking insights toward bridging the gap in Human-Robot-Environment interaction.

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated the ability to learn and leverage Internet-scale knowledge through pre-training with autoregressive models. Unfortunately, applying such models to settings with embodied agents, such as robots, is challenging due to their lack of experience with the physical world, inability to parse non-language observations, and ignorance of rewards or safety constraints that robots may require. On the other hand, language-conditioned robotic policies that learn from interaction data can provide the necessary grounding that allows the agent to be correctly situated in the real world, but such policies are limited by the lack of high-level semantic understanding due to the limited breadth of the interaction data available for training them. Thus, if we want to make use of the semantic knowledge in a language model while still situating it in an embodied setting, we must construct an action sequence that is both likely according to the language model and also realizable according to grounded models of the environment. We frame this as a problem similar to probabilistic filtering: decode a sequence that both has high probability under the language model and high probability under a set of grounded model objectives. We demonstrate this guided decoding strategy is able to solve complex, long-horizon embodiment tasks in a robotic setting by leveraging the knowledge of both models. The project's website can be found at grounded-decoding.github.io.

A recent trend in vision-language models (VLMs) has been to enhance their spatial cognition for embodied domains. Despite progress, existing evaluations have been limited both in paradigm and in coverage, hindering rapid, iterative model development. To address these limitations, we propose ESPIRE, a diagnostic benchmark for embodied spatial reasoning. ESPIRE offers a simulated world that physically grounds VLMs and evaluates them on spatial-reasoning-centric robotic tasks, thus narrowing the gap between evaluation and real-world deployment. To adapt VLMs to robotic tasks, we decompose each task into localization and execution, and frame both as generative problems, in stark contrast to predominant discriminative evaluations (e.g., via visual-question answering) that rely on distractors and discard execution. This decomposition further enables a fine-grained analysis beyond passive spatial reasoning toward reasoning to act. We systematically design ESPIRE both at the instruction level and at the environment level, ensuring broad coverage of spatial reasoning scenarios. We use ESPIRE to diagnose a range of frontier VLMs and provide in-depth analysis of their spatial reasoning behaviors.

Visual reasoning -- the ability to interpret the visual world -- is crucial for embodied agents that operate within three-dimensional scenes. Progress in AI has led to vision and language models capable of answering questions from images. However, their performance declines when tasked with 3D spatial reasoning. To tackle the complexity of such reasoning problems, we introduce an agentic program synthesis approach where LLM agents collaboratively generate a Pythonic API with new functions to solve common subproblems. Our method overcomes limitations of prior approaches that rely on a static, human-defined API, allowing it to handle a wider range of queries. To assess AI capabilities for 3D understanding, we introduce a new benchmark of queries involving multiple steps of grounding and inference. We show that our method outperforms prior zero-shot models for visual reasoning in 3D and empirically validate the effectiveness of our agentic framework for 3D spatial reasoning tasks. Project website: https://glab-caltech.github.io/vadar/

The convergence of embodied agents and large language models (LLMs) has brought significant advancements to embodied instruction following. Particularly, the strong reasoning capabilities of LLMs make it possible for robots to perform long-horizon tasks without expensive annotated demonstrations. However, public benchmarks for testing the long-horizon reasoning capabilities of language-conditioned robots in various scenarios are still missing. To fill this gap, this work focuses on the tabletop manipulation task and releases a simulation benchmark, LoHoRavens, which covers various long-horizon reasoning aspects spanning color, size, space, arithmetics and reference. Furthermore, there is a key modality bridging problem for long-horizon manipulation tasks with LLMs: how to incorporate the observation feedback during robot execution for the LLM's closed-loop planning, which is however less studied by prior work. We investigate two methods of bridging the modality gap: caption generation and learnable interface for incorporating explicit and implicit observation feedback to the LLM, respectively. These methods serve as the two baselines for our proposed benchmark. Experiments show that both methods struggle to solve some tasks, indicating long-horizon manipulation tasks are still challenging for current popular models. We expect the proposed public benchmark and baselines can help the community develop better models for long-horizon tabletop manipulation tasks.

Humans can perform complex tasks with long-term objectives by planning, reasoning, and forecasting outcomes of actions. For embodied agents to achieve similar capabilities, they must gain knowledge of the environment transferable to novel scenarios with a limited budget of additional trial and error. Learning-based approaches, such as deep RL, can discover and take advantage of inherent regularities and characteristics of the application domain from data, and continuously improve their performances, however at a cost of large amounts of training data. This thesis explores the development of data-driven techniques for spatial reasoning and planning tasks, focusing on enhancing learning efficiency, interpretability, and transferability across novel scenarios. Four key contributions are made. 1) CALVIN, a differential planner that learns interpretable models of the world for long-term planning. It successfully navigated partially observable 3D environments, such as mazes and indoor rooms, by learning the rewards and state transitions from expert demonstrations. 2) SOAP, an RL algorithm that discovers options unsupervised for long-horizon tasks. Options segment a task into subtasks and enable consistent execution of the subtask. SOAP showed robust performances on history-conditional corridor tasks as well as classical benchmarks such as Atari. 3) LangProp, a code optimisation framework using LLMs to solve embodied agent problems that require reasoning by treating code as learnable policies. The framework successfully generated interpretable code with comparable or superior performance to human-written experts in the CARLA autonomous driving benchmark. 4) Voggite, an embodied agent with a vision-to-action transformer backend that solves complex tasks in Minecraft. It achieved third place in the MineRL BASALT Competition by identifying action triggers to segment tasks into multiple stages.

Multi-modal AI systems will likely become a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives. A promising approach to making these systems more interactive is to embody them as agents within physical and virtual environments. At present, systems leverage existing foundation models as the basic building blocks for the creation of embodied agents. Embedding agents within such environments facilitates the ability of models to process and interpret visual and contextual data, which is critical for the creation of more sophisticated and context-aware AI systems. For example, a system that can perceive user actions, human behavior, environmental objects, audio expressions, and the collective sentiment of a scene can be used to inform and direct agent responses within the given environment. To accelerate research on agent-based multimodal intelligence, we define "Agent AI" as a class of interactive systems that can perceive visual stimuli, language inputs, and other environmentally-grounded data, and can produce meaningful embodied action with infinite agent. In particular, we explore systems that aim to improve agents based on next-embodied action prediction by incorporating external knowledge, multi-sensory inputs, and human feedback. We argue that by developing agentic AI systems in grounded environments, one can also mitigate the hallucinations of large foundation models and their tendency to generate environmentally incorrect outputs. The emerging field of Agent AI subsumes the broader embodied and agentic aspects of multimodal interactions. Beyond agents acting and interacting in the physical world, we envision a future where people can easily create any virtual reality or simulated scene and interact with agents embodied within the virtual environment.

General-purpose robotic systems operating in open-world environments must achieve both broad generalization and high-precision action execution, a combination that remains challenging for existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. While large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) improve semantic generalization, insufficient embodied reasoning leads to brittle behavior, and conversely, strong reasoning alone is inadequate without precise control. To provide a decoupled and quantitative assessment of this bottleneck, we introduce Embodied Reasoning Intelligence Quotient (ERIQ), a large-scale embodied reasoning benchmark in robotic manipulation, comprising 6K+ question-answer pairs across four reasoning dimensions. By decoupling reasoning from execution, ERIQ enables systematic evaluation and reveals a strong positive correlation between embodied reasoning capability and end-to-end VLA generalization. To bridge the gap from reasoning to precise execution, we propose FACT, a flow-matching-based action tokenizer that converts continuous control into discrete sequences while preserving high-fidelity trajectory reconstruction. The resulting GenieReasoner jointly optimizes reasoning and action in a unified space, outperforming both continuous-action and prior discrete-action baselines in real-world tasks. Together, ERIQ and FACT provide a principled framework for diagnosing and overcoming the reasoning-precision trade-off, advancing robust, general-purpose robotic manipulation.

This paper focuses on embodied task planning, where an agent acquires visual observations from the environment and executes atomic actions to accomplish a given task. Although recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive results in multimodal understanding and reasoning, their performance remains limited when applied to embodied planning that involves multi-turn interaction, long-horizon reasoning, and extended context analysis. To bridge this gap, we propose RoboAgent, a capability-driven planning pipeline in which the model actively invokes different sub-capabilities. Each capability maintains its own context, and produces intermediate reasoning results or interacts with the environment according to the query given by a scheduler. This framework decomposes complex planning into a sequence of basic vision-language problems that VLMs can better address, enabling a more transparent and controllable reasoning process. The scheduler and all capabilities are implemented with a single VLM, without relying on external tools. To train this VLM, we adopt a multi-stage paradigm that consists of: (1) behavior cloning with expert plans, (2) DAgger training using trajectories collected by the model, and (3) reinforcement learning guided by an expert policy. Across these stages, we exploit the internal information of the environment simulator to construct high-quality supervision for each capability, and we further introduce augmented and synthetic data to enhance the model's performance in more diverse scenarios. Extensive experiments on widely used embodied task planning benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Our codes will be available at https://github.com/woyut/RoboAgent_CVPR26.

Embodied capabilities refer to a suite of fundamental abilities for an agent to perceive, comprehend, and interact with the physical world. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promise as embodied agents, a thorough and systematic evaluation of their embodied capabilities remains underexplored, as existing benchmarks primarily focus on specific domains such as planning or spatial understanding. To bridge this gap, we introduce BEAR, a comprehensive and fine-grained benchmark that evaluates MLLMs on atomic embodied capabilities. BEAR comprises 4,469 interleaved image-video-text entries across 14 domains in 6 categories, including tasks from low-level pointing, trajectory understanding, spatial reasoning, to high-level planning. Extensive evaluation results of 20 representative MLLMs reveal their persistent limitations across all domains of embodied capabilities. To tackle the shortfall, we propose BEAR-Agent, a multimodal conversable agent that integrates pretrained vision models to strengthen MLLM perception, 3D understanding, and planning capabilities. It substantially enhances MLLM performance across diverse embodied capabilities on BEAR, yielding a 9.12% absolute gain and a relative improvement of 17.5% on GPT-5. Furthermore, our experiments indicate that improving MLLM embodied capabilities can benefit embodied tasks in simulated environments. Project website: https://bear-official66.github.io/

Large language models (LLMs) provide a promising tool that enable robots to perform complex robot reasoning tasks. However, the limited context window of contemporary LLMs makes reasoning over long time horizons difficult. Embodied tasks such as those that one might expect a household robot to perform typically require that the planner consider information acquired a long time ago (e.g., properties of the many objects that the robot previously encountered in the environment). Attempts to capture the world state using an LLM's implicit internal representation is complicated by the paucity of task- and environment-relevant information available in a robot's action history, while methods that rely on the ability to convey information via the prompt to the LLM are subject to its limited context window. In this paper, we propose Statler, a framework that endows LLMs with an explicit representation of the world state as a form of ``memory'' that is maintained over time. Integral to Statler is its use of two instances of general LLMs -- a world-model reader and a world-model writer -- that interface with and maintain the world state. By providing access to this world state ``memory'', Statler improves the ability of existing LLMs to reason over longer time horizons without the constraint of context length. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on three simulated table-top manipulation domains and a real robot domain, and show that it improves the state-of-the-art in LLM-based robot reasoning. Project website: https://statler-lm.github.io/

Equipping embodied agents with commonsense is important for robots to successfully complete complex human instructions in general environments. Recent large language models (LLM) can embed rich semantic knowledge for agents in plan generation of complex tasks, while they lack the information about the realistic world and usually yield infeasible action sequences. In this paper, we propose a TAsk Planing Agent (TaPA) in embodied tasks for grounded planning with physical scene constraint, where the agent generates executable plans according to the existed objects in the scene by aligning LLMs with the visual perception models. Specifically, we first construct a multimodal dataset containing triplets of indoor scenes, instructions and action plans, where we provide the designed prompts and the list of existing objects in the scene for GPT-3.5 to generate a large number of instructions and corresponding planned actions. The generated data is leveraged for grounded plan tuning of pre-trained LLMs. During inference, we discover the objects in the scene by extending open-vocabulary object detectors to multi-view RGB images collected in different achievable locations. Experimental results show that the generated plan from our TaPA framework can achieve higher success rate than LLaVA and GPT-3.5 by a sizable margin, which indicates the practicality of embodied task planning in general and complex environments.

Moving beyond the traditional paradigm of adapting internet-pretrained models to physical tasks, we present DM0, an Embodied-Native Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework designed for Physical AI. Unlike approaches that treat physical grounding as a fine-tuning afterthought, DM0 unifies embodied manipulation and navigation by learning from heterogeneous data sources from the onset. Our methodology follows a comprehensive three-stage pipeline: Pretraining, Mid-Training, and Post-Training. First, we conduct large-scale unified pretraining on the Vision-Language Model (VLM) using diverse corpora--seamlessly integrating web text, autonomous driving scenarios, and embodied interaction logs-to jointly acquire semantic knowledge and physical priors. Subsequently, we build a flow-matching action expert atop the VLM. To reconcile high-level reasoning with low-level control, DM0 employs a hybrid training strategy: for embodied data, gradients from the action expert are not backpropagated to the VLM to preserve generalized representations, while the VLM remains trainable on non-embodied data. Furthermore, we introduce an Embodied Spatial Scaffolding strategy to construct spatial Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, effectively constraining the action solution space. Experiments on the RoboChallenge benchmark demonstrate that DM0 achieves state-of-the-art performance in both Specialist and Generalist settings on Table30.

With the surge in the development of large language models, embodied intelligence has attracted increasing attention. Nevertheless, prior works on embodied intelligence typically encode scene or historical memory in an unimodal manner, either visual or linguistic, which complicates the alignment of the model's action planning with embodied control. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the Multimodal Embodied Interactive Agent (MEIA), capable of translating high-level tasks expressed in natural language into a sequence of executable actions. Specifically, we propose a novel Multimodal Environment Memory (MEM) module, facilitating the integration of embodied control with large models through the visual-language memory of scenes. This capability enables MEIA to generate executable action plans based on diverse requirements and the robot's capabilities. We conduct experiments in a dynamic virtual cafe environment, utilizing multiple large models through zero-shot learning, and carefully design scenarios for various situations. The experimental results showcase the promising performance of our MEIA in various embodied interactive tasks.

The ability to process information from multiple modalities and to reason through it step-by-step remains a critical challenge in advancing artificial intelligence. However, existing reasoning benchmarks focus on text-only reasoning, or employ multimodal questions that can be answered by directly retrieving information from a non-text modality. Thus, complex reasoning remains poorly understood in multimodal domains. Here, we present MARBLE, a challenging multimodal reasoning benchmark that is designed to scrutinize multimodal language models (MLLMs) in their ability to carefully reason step-by-step through complex multimodal problems and environments. MARBLE is composed of two highly challenging tasks, M-Portal and M-Cube, that require the crafting and understanding of multistep plans under spatial, visual, and physical constraints. We find that current MLLMs perform poorly on MARBLE -- all the 12 advanced models obtain near-random performance on M-Portal and 0% accuracy on M-Cube. Only in simplified subtasks some models outperform the random baseline, indicating that complex reasoning is still a challenge for existing MLLMs. Moreover, we show that perception remains a bottleneck, where MLLMs occasionally fail to extract information from the visual inputs. By shedding a light on the limitations of MLLMs, we hope that MARBLE will spur the development of the next generation of models with the ability to reason and plan across many, multimodal reasoning steps.

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have entered the commercialization stage, but their limited ability to interact and express intentions still poses challenges in interactions with Human-driven Vehicles (HVs). Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable bidirectional human-machine communication, but the conflict between slow inference speed and the need for real-time decision-making challenges practical deployment. To address these issues, this paper introduces a parallel Actor-Reasoner framework designed to enable explicit bidirectional AV-HV interactions across multiple scenarios. First, by facilitating interactions between the LLM-driven Reasoner and heterogeneous simulated HVs during training, an interaction memory database, referred to as the Actor, is established. Then, by introducing the memory partition module and the two-layer memory retrieval module, the Actor's ability to handle heterogeneous HVs is significantly enhanced. Ablation studies and comparisons with other decision-making methods demonstrate that the proposed Actor-Reasoner framework significantly improves safety and efficiency. Finally, with the combination of the external Human-Machine Interface (eHMI) information derived from Reasoner's reasoning and the feasible action solutions retrieved from the Actor, the effectiveness of the proposed Actor-Reasoner is confirmed in multi-scenario field interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/FanGShiYuu/Actor-Reasoner.

While large language models (LMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across numerous tasks, they often struggle with simple reasoning and planning in physical environments, such as understanding object permanence or planning household activities. The limitation arises from the fact that LMs are trained only on written text and miss essential embodied knowledge and skills. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm of enhancing LMs by finetuning them with world models, to gain diverse embodied knowledge while retaining their general language capabilities. Our approach deploys an embodied agent in a world model, particularly a simulator of the physical world (VirtualHome), and acquires a diverse set of embodied experiences through both goal-oriented planning and random exploration. These experiences are then used to finetune LMs to teach diverse abilities of reasoning and acting in the physical world, e.g., planning and completing goals, object permanence and tracking, etc. Moreover, it is desirable to preserve the generality of LMs during finetuning, which facilitates generalizing the embodied knowledge across tasks rather than being tied to specific simulations. We thus further introduce the classical elastic weight consolidation (EWC) for selective weight updates, combined with low-rank adapters (LoRA) for training efficiency. Extensive experiments show our approach substantially improves base LMs on 18 downstream tasks by 64.28% on average. In particular, the small LMs (1.3B and 6B) enhanced by our approach match or even outperform much larger LMs (e.g., ChatGPT).

Embodied intelligence integrates multiple modalities, enabling agents to understand images, language, and actions simultaneously. However, existing models always depend on additional datasets or extensive pre-training to maximize performance improvements, consuming abundant training time and expensive hardware cost. To tackle this issue, we present RoboBERT, a novel end-to-end robotic manipulation model integrated with a unique training strategy. This model utilizes a CNN-based diffusion policy, enhancing and stabilizing the effectiveness of this model by separating training processes for different modalities. It also underscores the importance of data augmentation, verifying various techniques to significantly boost performance. Unlike models that depend on extra data or large foundation models, RoboBERT achieves a highly competitive success rate while using only language-labeled expert demonstrations and maintaining a relatively smaller model size. Specifically, RoboBERT achieves an average length of 4.52 on the CALVIN benchmark for \(ABCD \rightarrow D\) task, setting a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) record. Furthermore, when tested on a real robot, the model demonstrates superior performance, achieving a higher success rate than other methods trained with the same data. We propose that these concepts and methodologies of RoboBERT demonstrate extensive versatility and compatibility, contributing significantly to the development of lightweight multimodal robotic models. The code can be accessed on https://github.com/PeterWangsicheng/RoboBERT

Recent advances in foundation models, especially in large multi-modal models and conversational agents, have ignited interest in the potential of generally capable embodied agents. Such agents will require the ability to perform new tasks in many different real-world environments. However, current foundation models fail to accurately model physical interactions and are therefore insufficient for Embodied AI. The study of causality lends itself to the construction of veridical world models, which are crucial for accurately predicting the outcomes of possible interactions. This paper focuses on the prospects of building foundation world models for the upcoming generation of embodied agents and presents a novel viewpoint on the significance of causality within these. We posit that integrating causal considerations is vital to facilitating meaningful physical interactions with the world. Finally, we demystify misconceptions about causality in this context and present our outlook for future research.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive planning abilities in single-agent embodied tasks across various domains. However, their capacity for planning and communication in multi-agent cooperation remains unclear, even though these are crucial skills for intelligent embodied agents. In this paper, we present a novel framework that utilizes LLMs for multi-agent cooperation and tests it in various embodied environments. Our framework enables embodied agents to plan, communicate, and cooperate with other embodied agents or humans to accomplish long-horizon tasks efficiently. We demonstrate that recent LLMs, such as GPT-4, can surpass strong planning-based methods and exhibit emergent effective communication using our framework without requiring fine-tuning or few-shot prompting. We also discover that LLM-based agents that communicate in natural language can earn more trust and cooperate more effectively with humans. Our research underscores the potential of LLMs for embodied AI and lays the foundation for future research in multi-agent cooperation. Videos can be found on the project website https://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/Co-LLM-Agents/.

The ultimate goal of embodied agents is to create collaborators that can interact with humans, not mere executors that passively follow instructions. This requires agents to communicate, coordinate, and adapt their actions based on human feedback. Recently, advances in VLAs have offered a path toward this goal. However, most current VLA-based embodied agents operate in a one-way mode: they receive an instruction and execute it without feedback. This approach fails in real-world scenarios where instructions are often ambiguous. In this paper, we address this problem with the Ask-to-Clarify framework. Our framework first resolves ambiguous instructions by asking questions in a multi-turn dialogue. Then it generates low-level actions end-to-end. Specifically, the Ask-to-Clarify framework consists of two components, one VLM for collaboration and one diffusion for action. We also introduce a connection module that generates conditions for the diffusion based on the output of the VLM. This module adjusts the observation by instructions to create reliable conditions. We train our framework with a two-stage knowledge-insulation strategy. First, we fine-tune the collaboration component using ambiguity-solving dialogue data to handle ambiguity. Then, we integrate the action component while freezing the collaboration one. This preserves the interaction abilities while fine-tuning the diffusion to generate actions. The training strategy guarantees our framework can first ask questions, then generate actions. During inference, a signal detector functions as a router that helps our framework switch between asking questions and taking actions. We evaluate the Ask-to-Clarify framework in 8 real-world tasks, where it outperforms existing state-of-the-art VLAs. The results suggest that our proposed framework, along with the training strategy, provides a path toward collaborative embodied agents.

In human interaction, gestures serve various functions such as marking speech rhythm, highlighting key elements, and supplementing information. These gestures are also observed in explanatory contexts. However, the impact of gestures on explanations provided by virtual agents remains underexplored. A user study was carried out to investigate how different types of gestures influence perceived interaction quality and listener understanding. This study addresses the effect of gestures in explanation by developing an embodied virtual explainer integrating both beat gestures and iconic gestures to enhance its automatically generated verbal explanations. Our model combines beat gestures generated by a learned speech-driven synthesis module with manually captured iconic gestures, supporting the agent's verbal expressions about the board game Quarto! as an explanation scenario. Findings indicate that neither the use of iconic gestures alone nor their combination with beat gestures outperforms the baseline or beat-only conditions in terms of understanding. Nonetheless, compared to prior research, the embodied agent significantly enhances understanding.

Recent SOTA approaches for embodied learning via interaction directly employ large language models (LLMs) as agents to determine the next steps in an environment. Due to their world knowledge and reasoning capabilities, LLM agents achieve stronger performance than previous smaller agents based on reinforcement learning (RL); however, frequently calling LLMs is slow and expensive. Instead of directly employing LLMs as agents, can we use LLMs' reasoning capabilities to adaptively create training environments to help smaller embodied RL agents learn useful skills that they are weak at? We propose EnvGen, a novel framework to address this question. First, we prompt an LLM to generate training environments that allow agents to quickly learn different tasks in parallel. Concretely, the LLM is given the task description and simulator objectives that the agents should learn and is then asked to generate a set of environment configurations (e.g., different terrains, items given to agents, etc.). Next, we train a small RL agent in a mixture of the original and LLM-generated environments. Then, we enable the LLM to continuously adapt the generated environments to progressively improve the skills that the agent is weak at, by providing feedback to the LLM in the form of the agent's performance. We demonstrate the usefulness of EnvGen with comprehensive experiments in Crafter and Heist environments. We find that a small RL agent trained with EnvGen can outperform SOTA methods, including a GPT-4 agent, and learns long-horizon tasks significantly faster. We show qualitatively how the LLM adapts training environments to help improve RL agents' weaker skills over time. Additionally, EnvGen is substantially more efficient as it only uses a small number of LLM calls (e.g., 4 in total), whereas LLM agents require thousands of LLM calls. Lastly, we present detailed ablation studies for our design choices.

Traditional reinforcement learning-based robotic control methods are often task-specific and fail to generalize across diverse environments or unseen objects and instructions. Visual Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong scene understanding and planning capabilities but lack the ability to generate actionable policies tailored to specific robotic embodiments. To address this, Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged, yet they face challenges in long-horizon spatial reasoning and grounded task planning. In this work, we propose the Embodied Multimodal Action Model with Grounded Chain of Thought and Look-ahead Spatial Reasoning, Emma-X. Emma-X leverages our constructed hierarchical embodiment dataset based on BridgeV2, containing 60,000 robot manipulation trajectories auto-annotated with grounded task reasoning and spatial guidance. Additionally, we introduce a trajectory segmentation strategy based on gripper states and motion trajectories, which can help mitigate hallucination in grounding subtask reasoning generation. Experimental results demonstrate that Emma-X achieves superior performance over competitive baselines, particularly in real-world robotic tasks requiring spatial reasoning.

Despite significant progress in multimodal language models (LMs), it remains unclear whether visual grounding enhances their understanding of embodied knowledge compared to text-only models. To address this question, we propose a novel embodied knowledge understanding benchmark based on the perceptual theory from psychology, encompassing visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactory external senses, and interoception. The benchmark assesses the models' perceptual abilities across different sensory modalities through vector comparison and question-answering tasks with over 1,700 questions. By comparing 30 state-of-the-art LMs, we surprisingly find that vision-language models (VLMs) do not outperform text-only models in either task. Moreover, the models perform significantly worse in the visual dimension compared to other sensory dimensions. Further analysis reveals that the vector representations are easily influenced by word form and frequency, and the models struggle to answer questions involving spatial perception and reasoning. Our findings underscore the need for more effective integration of embodied knowledge in LMs to enhance their understanding of the physical world.

Large vision-language models have recently demonstrated impressive performance in planning and control tasks, driving interest in their application to real-world robotics. However, deploying these models for reasoning in embodied contexts is limited by their ability to incorporate long-term experience collected across multiple days and represented by vast collections of images. Current VLMs typically struggle to process more than a few hundred images concurrently, highlighting the need for more efficient mechanisms to handle long-term memory in embodied settings. To effectively evaluate these models for long-horizon control, a benchmark must specifically target scenarios where memory is crucial for success. Existing long-video QA benchmarks overlook embodied challenges like object manipulation and navigation, which demand low-level skills and fine-grained reasoning over past interactions. Moreover, effective memory integration in embodied agents involves both recalling relevant historical information and executing actions based on that information, making it essential to study these aspects together rather than in isolation. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark for long-range embodied tasks in the Habitat simulator. This benchmark evaluates memory-based capabilities across 60 tasks requiring sustained engagement and contextual awareness in an environment. The tasks can also be procedurally extended to longer and more challenging versions, enabling scalable evaluation of memory and reasoning. We also present baselines that integrate state-of-the-art VLMs with low level navigation policies, assessing their performance on these memory-intensive tasks and highlight areas for improvement.

In this study, we explore the potential of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in improving embodied decision-making processes for agents. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely used due to their advanced reasoning skills and vast world knowledge, MLLMs like GPT4-Vision offer enhanced visual understanding and reasoning capabilities. We investigate whether state-of-the-art MLLMs can handle embodied decision-making in an end-to-end manner and whether collaborations between LLMs and MLLMs can enhance decision-making. To address these questions, we introduce a new benchmark called PCA-EVAL, which evaluates embodied decision-making from the perspectives of Perception, Cognition, and Action. Additionally, we propose HOLMES, a multi-agent cooperation framework that allows LLMs to leverage MLLMs and APIs to gather multimodal information for informed decision-making. We compare end-to-end embodied decision-making and HOLMES on our benchmark and find that the GPT4-Vision model demonstrates strong end-to-end embodied decision-making abilities, outperforming GPT4-HOLMES in terms of average decision accuracy (+3%). However, this performance is exclusive to the latest GPT4-Vision model, surpassing the open-source state-of-the-art MLLM by 26%. Our results indicate that powerful MLLMs like GPT4-Vision hold promise for decision-making in embodied agents, offering new avenues for MLLM research.

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) aim to emulate human face-to-face interaction through speech, gestures, and facial expressions. Current large language model (LLM)-based conversational agents lack embodiment and the expressive gestures essential for natural interaction. Existing solutions for ECAs often produce rigid, low-diversity motions, that are unsuitable for human-like interaction. Alternatively, generative methods for co-speech gesture synthesis yield natural body gestures but depend on future speech context and require long run-times. To bridge this gap, we present MIBURI, the first online, causal framework for generating expressive full-body gestures and facial expressions synchronized with real-time spoken dialogue. We employ body-part aware gesture codecs that encode hierarchical motion details into multi-level discrete tokens. These tokens are then autoregressively generated by a two-dimensional causal framework conditioned on LLM-based speech-text embeddings, modeling both temporal dynamics and part-level motion hierarchy in real time. Further, we introduce auxiliary objectives to encourage expressive and diverse gestures while preventing convergence to static poses. Comparative evaluations demonstrate that our causal and real-time approach produces natural and contextually aligned gestures against recent baselines. We urge the reader to explore demo videos on https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/MIBURI/.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) tasks require reasoning over complex visual scenes and executing adaptive actions in dynamic environments. While recent studies on reasoning VLAs show that explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) can improve generalization, they suffer from high inference latency due to lengthy reasoning traces. We propose Fast-ThinkAct, an efficient reasoning framework that achieves compact yet performant planning through verbalizable latent reasoning. Fast-ThinkAct learns to reason efficiently with latent CoTs by distilling from a teacher, driven by a preference-guided objective to align manipulation trajectories that transfers both linguistic and visual planning capabilities for embodied control. This enables reasoning-enhanced policy learning that effectively connects compact reasoning to action execution. Extensive experiments across diverse embodied manipulation and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Fast-ThinkAct achieves strong performance with up to 89.3\% reduced inference latency over state-of-the-art reasoning VLAs, while maintaining effective long-horizon planning, few-shot adaptation, and failure recovery.

Embodied language comprehension emphasizes that language understanding is not solely a matter of mental processing in the brain but also involves interactions with the physical and social environment. With the explosive growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their already ubiquitous presence in our daily lives, it is becoming increasingly necessary to verify their real-world understanding. Inspired by cognitive theories, we propose POSQA: a Physical Object Size Question Answering dataset with simple size comparison questions to examine the extremity and analyze the potential mechanisms of the embodied comprehension of the latest LLMs. We show that even the largest LLMs today perform poorly under the zero-shot setting. We then push their limits with advanced prompting techniques and external knowledge augmentation. Furthermore, we investigate whether their real-world comprehension primarily derives from contextual information or internal weights and analyse the impact of prompt formats and report bias of different objects. Our results show that real-world understanding that LLMs shaped from textual data can be vulnerable to deception and confusion by the surface form of prompts, which makes it less aligned with human behaviours.

Vision-language-action (VLA) reasoning tasks require agents to interpret multimodal instructions, perform long-horizon planning, and act adaptively in dynamic environments. Existing approaches typically train VLA models in an end-to-end fashion, directly mapping inputs to actions without explicit reasoning, which hinders their ability to plan over multiple steps or adapt to complex task variations. In this paper, we propose ThinkAct, a dual-system framework that bridges high-level reasoning with low-level action execution via reinforced visual latent planning. ThinkAct trains a multimodal LLM to generate embodied reasoning plans guided by reinforcing action-aligned visual rewards based on goal completion and trajectory consistency. These reasoning plans are compressed into a visual plan latent that conditions a downstream action model for robust action execution on target environments. Extensive experiments on embodied reasoning and robot manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that ThinkAct enables few-shot adaptation, long-horizon planning, and self-correction behaviors in complex embodied AI tasks.

Language models~(LMs) gradually become general-purpose interfaces in the interactive and embodied world, where the understanding of physical concepts is an essential prerequisite. However, it is not yet clear whether LMs can understand physical concepts in the human world. To investigate this, we design a benchmark VEC that covers the tasks of (i) Visual concepts, such as the shape and material of objects, and (ii) Embodied Concepts, learned from the interaction with the world such as the temperature of objects. Our zero (few)-shot prompting results show that the understanding of certain visual concepts emerges as scaling up LMs, but there are still basic concepts to which the scaling law does not apply. For example, OPT-175B performs close to humans with a zero-shot accuracy of 85\% on the material concept, yet behaves like random guessing on the mass concept. Instead, vision-augmented LMs such as CLIP and BLIP achieve a human-level understanding of embodied concepts. Analysis indicates that the rich semantics in visual representation can serve as a valuable source of embodied knowledge. Inspired by this, we propose a distillation method to transfer embodied knowledge from VLMs to LMs, achieving performance gain comparable with that by scaling up the parameters of LMs 134x. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/TobiasLee/VEC

Embodied dialogue instruction following requires an agent to complete a complex sequence of tasks from a natural language exchange. The recent introduction of benchmarks (Padmakumar et al., 2022) raises the question of how best to train and evaluate models for this multi-turn, multi-agent, long-horizon task. This paper contributes to that conversation, by arguing that imitation learning (IL) and related low-level metrics are actually misleading and do not align with the goals of embodied dialogue research and may hinder progress. We provide empirical comparisons of metrics, analysis of three models, and make suggestions for how the field might best progress. First, we observe that models trained with IL take spurious actions during evaluation. Second, we find that existing models fail to ground query utterances, which are essential for task completion. Third, we argue evaluation should focus on higher-level semantic goals.

Large language models have enabled agents of all kinds to interact with users through natural conversation. Consequently, agents now have two jobs: conversing and planning/reasoning. Their conversational responses must be informed by all available information, and their actions must help to achieve goals. This dichotomy between conversing with the user and doing multi-step reasoning and planning can be seen as analogous to the human systems of "thinking fast and slow" as introduced by Kahneman. Our approach is comprised of a "Talker" agent (System 1) that is fast and intuitive, and tasked with synthesizing the conversational response; and a "Reasoner" agent (System 2) that is slower, more deliberative, and more logical, and is tasked with multi-step reasoning and planning, calling tools, performing actions in the world, and thereby producing the new agent state. We describe the new Talker-Reasoner architecture and discuss its advantages, including modularity and decreased latency. We ground the discussion in the context of a sleep coaching agent, in order to demonstrate real-world relevance.

We introduce RoboBrain 2.0, our latest generation of embodied vision-language foundation models, designed to unify perception, reasoning, and planning for complex embodied tasks in physical environments. It comes in two variants: a lightweight 7B model and a full-scale 32B model, featuring a heterogeneous architecture with a vision encoder and a language model. Despite its compact size, RoboBrain 2.0 achieves strong performance across a wide spectrum of embodied reasoning tasks. On both spatial and temporal benchmarks, the 32B variant achieves leading results, surpassing prior open-source and proprietary models. In particular, it supports key real-world embodied AI capabilities, including spatial understanding (e.g., affordance prediction, spatial referring, trajectory forecasting) and temporal decision-making (e.g., closed-loop interaction, multi-agent long-horizon planning, and scene graph updating). This report details the model architecture, data construction, multi-stage training strategies, infrastructure and practical applications. We hope RoboBrain 2.0 advances embodied AI research and serves as a practical step toward building generalist embodied agents. The code, checkpoint and benchmark are available at https://superrobobrain.github.io.

With strong capabilities of reasoning and a generic understanding of the world, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in building versatile embodied decision making agents capable of performing diverse tasks. However, when deployed to unfamiliar environments, we show that LLM agents face challenges in efficiently gathering necessary information, leading to suboptimal performance. On the other hand, in unfamiliar scenarios, human individuals often seek additional information from their peers before taking action, leveraging external knowledge to avoid unnecessary trial and error. Building upon this intuition, we propose Asking Before Action (ABA), a method that empowers the agent to proactively query external sources for pertinent information using natural language during their interactions in the environment. In this way, the agent is able to enhance its efficiency and performance by mitigating wasteful steps and circumventing the difficulties associated with exploration in unfamiliar environments. We empirically evaluate our method on an embodied decision making benchmark, ALFWorld, and demonstrate that despite modest modifications in prompts, our method exceeds baseline LLM agents by more than 40%. Further experiments on two variants of ALFWorld illustrate that by imitation learning, ABA effectively retains and reuses queried and known information in subsequent tasks, mitigating the need for repetitive inquiries. Both qualitative and quantitative results exhibit remarkable performance on tasks that previous methods struggle to solve.

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in integrating vision and language for complex reasoning. While most existing benchmarks evaluate models under offline settings with a fixed set of pre-recorded inputs, we introduce OST-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate Online Spatio-Temporal understanding from the perspective of an agent actively exploring a scene. The Online aspect emphasizes the need to process and reason over incrementally acquired observations, while the Spatio-Temporal component requires integrating current visual inputs with historical memory to support dynamic spatial reasoning. OST-Bench better reflects the challenges of real-world embodied perception. Built on an efficient data collection pipeline, OST-Bench consists of 1.4k scenes and 10k question-answer pairs collected from ScanNet, Matterport3D, and ARKitScenes. We evaluate several leading MLLMs on OST-Bench and observe that they fall short on tasks requiring complex spatio-temporal reasoning. Under the online setting, their accuracy declines as the exploration horizon extends and the memory grows. Through further experimental analysis, we identify common error patterns across models and find that both complex clue-based spatial reasoning demands and long-term memory retrieval requirements significantly drop model performance along two separate axes, highlighting the core challenges that must be addressed to improve online embodied reasoning. To foster further research and development in the field, our codes, dataset, and benchmark are available. Our project page is: https://rbler1234.github.io/OSTBench.github.io/

In recent years, the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) has attracted increasing attention due to their potential in a variety of practical applications. The application of LLMs with Embodied Intelligence has emerged as a significant area of focus. Among the myriad applications of LLMs, navigation tasks are particularly noteworthy because they demand a deep understanding of the environment and quick, accurate decision-making. LLMs can augment embodied intelligence systems with sophisticated environmental perception and decision-making support, leveraging their robust language and image-processing capabilities. This article offers an exhaustive summary of the symbiosis between LLMs and embodied intelligence with a focus on navigation. It reviews state-of-the-art models, research methodologies, and assesses the advantages and disadvantages of existing embodied navigation models and datasets. Finally, the article elucidates the role of LLMs in embodied intelligence, based on current research, and forecasts future directions in the field. A comprehensive list of studies in this survey is available at https://github.com/Rongtao-Xu/Awesome-LLM-EN

Despite the ubiquity of large language models (LLMs) in AI research, the question of embodiment in LLMs remains underexplored, distinguishing them from embodied systems in robotics where sensory perception directly informs physical action. Our investigation navigates the intriguing terrain of whether LLMs, despite their non-embodied nature, effectively capture implicit human intuitions about fundamental, spatial building blocks of language. We employ insights from spatial cognitive foundations developed through early sensorimotor experiences, guiding our exploration through the reproduction of three psycholinguistic experiments. Surprisingly, correlations between model outputs and human responses emerge, revealing adaptability without a tangible connection to embodied experiences. Notable distinctions include polarized language model responses and reduced correlations in vision language models. This research contributes to a nuanced understanding of the interplay between language, spatial experiences, and the computations made by large language models. More at https://cisnlp.github.io/Spatial_Schemas/

Embodied decision-making is fundamental for AI agents operating in real-world environments. While Visual Language Models (VLMs) have advanced this capability, they still struggle with complex decisions, particularly in human-centered situations that require deep reasoning about human needs and values. In this study, we systematically evaluate open-sourced VLMs on multimodal human-centered decision-making tasks. We find that LLMs receiving only textual descriptions unexpectedly outperform their VLM counterparts of similar scale that process actual images, suggesting that visual alignment may hinder VLM abilities. To address this challenge, we propose a novel text-only training approach with synthesized textual data. This method strengthens VLMs' language components and transfers the learned abilities to multimodal inference, eliminating the need for expensive image-text paired data. Furthermore, we show that VLMs can achieve substantial performance gains through self-improvement, using training data generated by their LLM counterparts rather than relying on larger teacher models like GPT-4. Our findings establish a more efficient and scalable approach to enhancing VLMs' human-centered decision-making capabilities, opening new avenues for optimizing VLMs through self-improvement mechanisms.

Embodied multimodal large models (EMLMs) have gained significant attention in recent years due to their potential to bridge the gap between perception, cognition, and action in complex, real-world environments. This comprehensive review explores the development of such models, including Large Language Models (LLMs), Large Vision Models (LVMs), and other models, while also examining other emerging architectures. We discuss the evolution of EMLMs, with a focus on embodied perception, navigation, interaction, and simulation. Furthermore, the review provides a detailed analysis of the datasets used for training and evaluating these models, highlighting the importance of diverse, high-quality data for effective learning. The paper also identifies key challenges faced by EMLMs, including issues of scalability, generalization, and real-time decision-making. Finally, we outline future directions, emphasizing the integration of multimodal sensing, reasoning, and action to advance the development of increasingly autonomous systems. By providing an in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art methods and identifying critical gaps, this paper aims to inspire future advancements in EMLMs and their applications across diverse domains.

Embodied cognition argues that intelligence arises from sensorimotor interaction rather than passive observation. It raises an intriguing question: do modern vision-language models (VLMs), trained largely in a disembodied manner, exhibit signs of embodied cognition? We introduce ENACT, a benchmark that casts evaluation of embodied cognition as world modeling from egocentric interaction in a visual question answering (VQA) format. Framed as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) whose actions are scene graph changes, ENACT comprises two complementary sequence reordering tasks: forward world modeling (reorder shuffled observations given actions) and inverse world modeling (reorder shuffled actions given observations). While conceptually simple, solving these tasks implicitly demands capabilities central to embodied cognition-affordance recognition, action-effect reasoning, embodied awareness, and interactive, long-horizon memory from partially observable egocentric input, while avoiding low-level image synthesis that could confound the evaluation. We provide a scalable pipeline that synthesizes QA pairs from robotics simulation (BEHAVIOR) and evaluates models on 8,972 QA pairs spanning long-horizon home-scale activities. Experiments reveal a performance gap between frontier VLMs and humans that widens with interaction horizon. Models consistently perform better on the inverse task than the forward one and exhibit anthropocentric biases, including a preference for right-handed actions and degradation when camera intrinsics or viewpoints deviate from human vision. Website at https://enact-embodied-cognition.github.io/.

Given a simple request like Put a washed apple in the kitchen fridge, humans can reason in purely abstract terms by imagining action sequences and scoring their likelihood of success, prototypicality, and efficiency, all without moving a muscle. Once we see the kitchen in question, we can update our abstract plans to fit the scene. Embodied agents require the same abilities, but existing work does not yet provide the infrastructure necessary for both reasoning abstractly and executing concretely. We address this limitation by introducing ALFWorld, a simulator that enables agents to learn abstract, text based policies in TextWorld (C\^ot\'e et al., 2018) and then execute goals from the ALFRED benchmark (Shridhar et al., 2020) in a rich visual environment. ALFWorld enables the creation of a new BUTLER agent whose abstract knowledge, learned in TextWorld, corresponds directly to concrete, visually grounded actions. In turn, as we demonstrate empirically, this fosters better agent generalization than training only in the visually grounded environment. BUTLER's simple, modular design factors the problem to allow researchers to focus on models for improving every piece of the pipeline (language understanding, planning, navigation, and visual scene understanding).

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities in the hierarchical decomposition of complex tasks through semantic reasoning. However, their application in embodied systems faces challenges in ensuring reliable execution of subtask sequences and achieving one-shot success in long-term task completion. To address these limitations in dynamic environments, we propose Closed-Loop Embodied Agent (CLEA) -- a novel architecture incorporating four specialized open-source LLMs with functional decoupling for closed-loop task management. The framework features two core innovations: (1) Interactive task planner that dynamically generates executable subtasks based on the environmental memory, and (2) Multimodal execution critic employing an evaluation framework to conduct a probabilistic assessment of action feasibility, triggering hierarchical re-planning mechanisms when environmental perturbations exceed preset thresholds. To validate CLEA's effectiveness, we conduct experiments in a real environment with manipulable objects, using two heterogeneous robots for object search, manipulation, and search-manipulation integration tasks. Across 12 task trials, CLEA outperforms the baseline model, achieving a 67.3% improvement in success rate and a 52.8% increase in task completion rate. These results demonstrate that CLEA significantly enhances the robustness of task planning and execution in dynamic environments.