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Jan 13

Embodied Executable Policy Learning with Language-based Scene Summarization

Large Language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success in assisting robot learning tasks, i.e., complex household planning. However, the performance of pretrained LLMs heavily relies on domain-specific templated text data, which may be infeasible in real-world robot learning tasks with image-based observations. Moreover, existing LLMs with text inputs lack the capability to evolve with non-expert interactions with environments. In this work, we introduce a novel learning paradigm that generates robots' executable actions in the form of text, derived solely from visual observations, using language-based summarization of these observations as the connecting bridge between both domains. Our proposed paradigm stands apart from previous works, which utilized either language instructions or a combination of language and visual data as inputs. Moreover, our method does not require oracle text summarization of the scene, eliminating the need for human involvement in the learning loop, which makes it more practical for real-world robot learning tasks. Our proposed paradigm consists of two modules: the SUM module, which interprets the environment using visual observations and produces a text summary of the scene, and the APM module, which generates executable action policies based on the natural language descriptions provided by the SUM module. We demonstrate that our proposed method can employ two fine-tuning strategies, including imitation learning and reinforcement learning approaches, to adapt to the target test tasks effectively. We conduct extensive experiments involving various SUM/APM model selections, environments, and tasks across 7 house layouts in the VirtualHome environment. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses existing baselines, confirming the effectiveness of this novel learning paradigm.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 9, 2023

QUAR-VLA: Vision-Language-Action Model for Quadruped Robots

The important manifestation of robot intelligence is the ability to naturally interact and autonomously make decisions. Traditional approaches to robot control often compartmentalize perception, planning, and decision-making, simplifying system design but limiting the synergy between different information streams. This compartmentalization poses challenges in achieving seamless autonomous reasoning, decision-making, and action execution. To address these limitations, a novel paradigm, named Vision-Language-Action tasks for QUAdruped Robots (QUAR-VLA), has been introduced in this paper. This approach tightly integrates visual information and instructions to generate executable actions, effectively merging perception, planning, and decision-making. The central idea is to elevate the overall intelligence of the robot. Within this framework, a notable challenge lies in aligning fine-grained instructions with visual perception information. This emphasizes the complexity involved in ensuring that the robot accurately interprets and acts upon detailed instructions in harmony with its visual observations. Consequently, we propose QUAdruped Robotic Transformer (QUART), a family of VLA models to integrate visual information and instructions from diverse modalities as input and generates executable actions for real-world robots and present QUAdruped Robot Dataset (QUARD), a large-scale multi-task dataset including navigation, complex terrain locomotion, and whole-body manipulation tasks for training QUART models. Our extensive evaluation (4000 evaluation trials) shows that our approach leads to performant robotic policies and enables QUART to obtain a range of emergent capabilities.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 22, 2023

MapAgent: Trajectory-Constructed Memory-Augmented Planning for Mobile Task Automation

The recent advancement of autonomous agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) has demonstrated significant potential for automating tasks on mobile devices through graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Despite initial progress, these agents still face challenges when handling complex real-world tasks. These challenges arise from a lack of knowledge about real-life mobile applications in LLM-based agents, which may lead to ineffective task planning and even cause hallucinations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel LLM-based agent framework called MapAgent that leverages memory constructed from historical trajectories to augment current task planning. Specifically, we first propose a trajectory-based memory mechanism that transforms task execution trajectories into a reusable and structured page-memory database. Each page within a trajectory is extracted as a compact yet comprehensive snapshot, capturing both its UI layout and functional context. Secondly, we introduce a coarse-to-fine task planning approach that retrieves relevant pages from the memory database based on similarity and injects them into the LLM planner to compensate for potential deficiencies in understanding real-world app scenarios, thereby achieving more informed and context-aware task planning. Finally, planned tasks are transformed into executable actions through a task executor supported by a dual-LLM architecture, ensuring effective tracking of task progress. Experimental results in real-world scenarios demonstrate that MapAgent achieves superior performance to existing methods. The code will be open-sourced to support further research.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 29, 2025

Vid2Robot: End-to-end Video-conditioned Policy Learning with Cross-Attention Transformers

While large-scale robotic systems typically rely on textual instructions for tasks, this work explores a different approach: can robots infer the task directly from observing humans? This shift necessitates the robot's ability to decode human intent and translate it into executable actions within its physical constraints and environment. We introduce Vid2Robot, a novel end-to-end video-based learning framework for robots. Given a video demonstration of a manipulation task and current visual observations, Vid2Robot directly produces robot actions. This is achieved through a unified representation model trained on a large dataset of human video and robot trajectory. The model leverages cross-attention mechanisms to fuse prompt video features to the robot's current state and generate appropriate actions that mimic the observed task. To further improve policy performance, we propose auxiliary contrastive losses that enhance the alignment between human and robot video representations. We evaluate Vid2Robot on real-world robots, demonstrating a 20% improvement in performance compared to other video-conditioned policies when using human demonstration videos. Additionally, our model exhibits emergent capabilities, such as successfully transferring observed motions from one object to another, and long-horizon composition, thus showcasing its potential for real-world applications. Project website: vid2robot.github.io

  • 13 authors
·
Mar 19, 2024 1

HiAgent: Hierarchical Working Memory Management for Solving Long-Horizon Agent Tasks with Large Language Model

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents exhibit significant potential across various domains, operating as interactive systems that process environmental observations to generate executable actions for target tasks. The effectiveness of these agents is significantly influenced by their memory mechanism, which records historical experiences as sequences of action-observation pairs. We categorize memory into two types: cross-trial memory, accumulated across multiple attempts, and in-trial memory (working memory), accumulated within a single attempt. While considerable research has optimized performance through cross-trial memory, the enhancement of agent performance through improved working memory utilization remains underexplored. Instead, existing approaches often involve directly inputting entire historical action-observation pairs into LLMs, leading to redundancy in long-horizon tasks. Inspired by human problem-solving strategies, this paper introduces HiAgent, a framework that leverages subgoals as memory chunks to manage the working memory of LLM-based agents hierarchically. Specifically, HiAgent prompts LLMs to formulate subgoals before generating executable actions and enables LLMs to decide proactively to replace previous subgoals with summarized observations, retaining only the action-observation pairs relevant to the current subgoal. Experimental results across five long-horizon tasks demonstrate that HiAgent achieves a twofold increase in success rate and reduces the average number of steps required by 3.8. Additionally, our analysis shows that HiAgent consistently improves performance across various steps, highlighting its robustness and generalizability. Project Page: https://github.com/HiAgent2024/HiAgent .

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 18, 2024

IGen: Scalable Data Generation for Robot Learning from Open-World Images

The rise of generalist robotic policies has created an exponential demand for large-scale training data. However, on-robot data collection is labor-intensive and often limited to specific environments. In contrast, open-world images capture a vast diversity of real-world scenes that naturally align with robotic manipulation tasks, offering a promising avenue for low-cost, large-scale robot data acquisition. Despite this potential, the lack of associated robot actions hinders the practical use of open-world images for robot learning, leaving this rich visual resource largely unexploited. To bridge this gap, we propose IGen, a framework that scalably generates realistic visual observations and executable actions from open-world images. IGen first converts unstructured 2D pixels into structured 3D scene representations suitable for scene understanding and manipulation. It then leverages the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models to transform scene-specific task instructions into high-level plans and generate low-level actions as SE(3) end-effector pose sequences. From these poses, it synthesizes dynamic scene evolution and renders temporally coherent visual observations. Experiments validate the high quality of visuomotor data generated by IGen, and show that policies trained solely on IGen-synthesized data achieve performance comparable to those trained on real-world data. This highlights the potential of IGen to support scalable data generation from open-world images for generalist robotic policy training.

  • 13 authors
·
Dec 1, 2025

Do We Really Need a Complex Agent System? Distill Embodied Agent into a Single Model

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.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 6, 2024

Manual2Skill: Learning to Read Manuals and Acquire Robotic Skills for Furniture Assembly Using Vision-Language Models

Humans possess an extraordinary ability to understand and execute complex manipulation tasks by interpreting abstract instruction manuals. For robots, however, this capability remains a substantial challenge, as they cannot interpret abstract instructions and translate them into executable actions. In this paper, we present Manual2Skill, a novel framework that enables robots to perform complex assembly tasks guided by high-level manual instructions. Our approach leverages a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to extract structured information from instructional images and then uses this information to construct hierarchical assembly graphs. These graphs represent parts, subassemblies, and the relationships between them. To facilitate task execution, a pose estimation model predicts the relative 6D poses of components at each assembly step. At the same time, a motion planning module generates actionable sequences for real-world robotic implementation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Manual2Skill by successfully assembling several real-world IKEA furniture items. This application highlights its ability to manage long-horizon manipulation tasks with both efficiency and precision, significantly enhancing the practicality of robot learning from instruction manuals. This work marks a step forward in advancing robotic systems capable of understanding and executing complex manipulation tasks in a manner akin to human capabilities.

  • 10 authors
·
Feb 14, 2025

A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models: An Action Tokenization Perspective

The remarkable advancements of vision and language foundation models in multimodal understanding, reasoning, and generation has sparked growing efforts to extend such intelligence to the physical world, fueling the flourishing of vision-language-action (VLA) models. Despite seemingly diverse approaches, we observe that current VLA models can be unified under a single framework: vision and language inputs are processed by a series of VLA modules, producing a chain of action tokens that progressively encode more grounded and actionable information, ultimately generating executable actions. We further determine that the primary design choice distinguishing VLA models lies in how action tokens are formulated, which can be categorized into language description, code, affordance, trajectory, goal state, latent representation, raw action, and reasoning. However, there remains a lack of comprehensive understanding regarding action tokens, significantly impeding effective VLA development and obscuring future directions. Therefore, this survey aims to categorize and interpret existing VLA research through the lens of action tokenization, distill the strengths and limitations of each token type, and identify areas for improvement. Through this systematic review and analysis, we offer a synthesized outlook on the broader evolution of VLA models, highlight underexplored yet promising directions, and contribute guidance for future research, hoping to bring the field closer to general-purpose intelligence.

  • 14 authors
·
Jul 2, 2025 1

Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agents

Large Language Model (LLM) agents, capable of performing a broad range of actions, such as invoking tools and controlling robots, show great potential in tackling real-world challenges. LLM agents are typically prompted to produce actions by generating JSON or text in a pre-defined format, which is usually limited by constrained action space (e.g., the scope of pre-defined tools) and restricted flexibility (e.g., inability to compose multiple tools). This work proposes to use executable Python code to consolidate LLM agents' actions into a unified action space (CodeAct). Integrated with a Python interpreter, CodeAct can execute code actions and dynamically revise prior actions or emit new actions upon new observations through multi-turn interactions. Our extensive analysis of 17 LLMs on API-Bank and a newly curated benchmark shows that CodeAct outperforms widely used alternatives (up to 20% higher success rate). The encouraging performance of CodeAct motivates us to build an open-source LLM agent that interacts with environments by executing interpretable code and collaborates with users using natural language. To this end, we collect an instruction-tuning dataset CodeActInstruct that consists of 7k multi-turn interactions using CodeAct. We show that it can be used with existing data to improve models in agent-oriented tasks without compromising their general capability. CodeActAgent, finetuned from Llama2 and Mistral, is integrated with Python interpreter and uniquely tailored to perform sophisticated tasks (e.g., model training) using existing libraries and autonomously self-debug.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 1, 2024 5

One to rule them all: natural language to bind communication, perception and action

In recent years, research in the area of human-robot interaction has focused on developing robots capable of understanding complex human instructions and performing tasks in dynamic and diverse environments. These systems have a wide range of applications, from personal assistance to industrial robotics, emphasizing the importance of robots interacting flexibly, naturally and safely with humans. This paper presents an advanced architecture for robotic action planning that integrates communication, perception, and planning with Large Language Models (LLMs). Our system is designed to translate commands expressed in natural language into executable robot actions, incorporating environmental information and dynamically updating plans based on real-time feedback. The Planner Module is the core of the system where LLMs embedded in a modified ReAct framework are employed to interpret and carry out user commands. By leveraging their extensive pre-trained knowledge, LLMs can effectively process user requests without the need to introduce new knowledge on the changing environment. The modified ReAct framework further enhances the execution space by providing real-time environmental perception and the outcomes of physical actions. By combining robust and dynamic semantic map representations as graphs with control components and failure explanations, this architecture enhances a robot adaptability, task execution, and seamless collaboration with human users in shared and dynamic environments. Through the integration of continuous feedback loops with the environment the system can dynamically adjusts the plan to accommodate unexpected changes, optimizing the robot ability to perform tasks. Using a dataset of previous experience is possible to provide detailed feedback about the failure. Updating the LLMs context of the next iteration with suggestion on how to overcame the issue.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 22, 2024 2

GeoSketch: A Neural-Symbolic Approach to Geometric Multimodal Reasoning with Auxiliary Line Construction and Affine Transformation

Geometric Problem Solving (GPS) poses a unique challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), requiring not only the joint interpretation of text and diagrams but also iterative visuospatial reasoning. While existing approaches process diagrams as static images, they lack the capacity for dynamic manipulation - a core aspect of human geometric reasoning involving auxiliary line construction and affine transformations. We present GeoSketch, a neural-symbolic framework that recasts geometric reasoning as an interactive perception-reasoning-action loop. GeoSketch integrates: (1) a Perception module that abstracts diagrams into structured logic forms, (2) a Symbolic Reasoning module that applies geometric theorems to decide the next deductive step, and (3) a Sketch Action module that executes operations such as drawing auxiliary lines or applying transformations, thereby updating the diagram in a closed loop. To train this agent, we develop a two-stage pipeline: supervised fine-tuning on 2,000 symbolic-curated trajectories followed by reinforcement learning with dense, symbolic rewards to enhance robustness and strategic exploration. To evaluate this paradigm, we introduce the GeoSketch Benchmark, a high-quality set of 390 geometry problems requiring auxiliary construction or affine transformations. Experiments on strong MLLM baselines demonstrate that GeoSketch significantly improves stepwise reasoning accuracy and problem-solving success over static perception methods. By unifying hierarchical decision-making, executable visual actions, and symbolic verification, GeoSketch advances multimodal reasoning from static interpretation to dynamic, verifiable interaction, establishing a new foundation for solving complex visuospatial problems.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 26, 2025

WoW: Towards a World omniscient World model Through Embodied Interaction

Humans develop an understanding of intuitive physics through active interaction with the world. This approach is in stark contrast to current video models, such as Sora, which rely on passive observation and therefore struggle with grasping physical causality. This observation leads to our central hypothesis: authentic physical intuition of the world model must be grounded in extensive, causally rich interactions with the real world. To test this hypothesis, we present WoW, a 14-billion-parameter generative world model trained on 2 million robot interaction trajectories. Our findings reveal that the model's understanding of physics is a probabilistic distribution of plausible outcomes, leading to stochastic instabilities and physical hallucinations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this emergent capability can be actively constrained toward physical realism by SOPHIA, where vision-language model agents evaluate the DiT-generated output and guide its refinement by iteratively evolving the language instructions. In addition, a co-trained Inverse Dynamics Model translates these refined plans into executable robotic actions, thus closing the imagination-to-action loop. We establish WoWBench, a new benchmark focused on physical consistency and causal reasoning in video, where WoW achieves state-of-the-art performance in both human and autonomous evaluation, demonstrating strong ability in physical causality, collision dynamics, and object permanence. Our work provides systematic evidence that large-scale, real-world interaction is a cornerstone for developing physical intuition in AI. Models, data, and benchmarks will be open-sourced.

  • 36 authors
·
Sep 26, 2025 2

StaMo: Unsupervised Learning of Generalizable Robot Motion from Compact State Representation

A fundamental challenge in embodied intelligence is developing expressive and compact state representations for efficient world modeling and decision making. However, existing methods often fail to achieve this balance, yielding representations that are either overly redundant or lacking in task-critical information. We propose an unsupervised approach that learns a highly compressed two-token state representation using a lightweight encoder and a pre-trained Diffusion Transformer (DiT) decoder, capitalizing on its strong generative prior. Our representation is efficient, interpretable, and integrates seamlessly into existing VLA-based models, improving performance by 14.3% on LIBERO and 30% in real-world task success with minimal inference overhead. More importantly, we find that the difference between these tokens, obtained via latent interpolation, naturally serves as a highly effective latent action, which can be further decoded into executable robot actions. This emergent capability reveals that our representation captures structured dynamics without explicit supervision. We name our method StaMo for its ability to learn generalizable robotic Motion from compact State representation, which is encoded from static images, challenging the prevalent dependence to learning latent action on complex architectures and video data. The resulting latent actions also enhance policy co-training, outperforming prior methods by 10.4% with improved interpretability. Moreover, our approach scales effectively across diverse data sources, including real-world robot data, simulation, and human egocentric video.

Zhejiang University
·
Oct 6, 2025 3

Large Video Planner Enables Generalizable Robot Control

General-purpose robots require decision-making models that generalize across diverse tasks and environments. Recent works build robot foundation models by extending multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with action outputs, creating vision-language-action (VLA) systems. These efforts are motivated by the intuition that MLLMs' large-scale language and image pretraining can be effectively transferred to the action output modality. In this work, we explore an alternative paradigm of using large-scale video pretraining as a primary modality for building robot foundation models. Unlike static images and language, videos capture spatio-temporal sequences of states and actions in the physical world that are naturally aligned with robotic behavior. We curate an internet-scale video dataset of human activities and task demonstrations, and train, for the first time at a foundation-model scale, an open video model for generative robotics planning. The model produces zero-shot video plans for novel scenes and tasks, which we post-process to extract executable robot actions. We evaluate task-level generalization through third-party selected tasks in the wild and real-robot experiments, demonstrating successful physical execution. Together, these results show robust instruction following, strong generalization, and real-world feasibility. We release both the model and dataset to support open, reproducible video-based robot learning. Our website is available at https://www.boyuan.space/large-video-planner/.

  • 12 authors
·
Dec 17, 2025

DataLab: A Unifed Platform for LLM-Powered Business Intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) transforms large volumes of data within modern organizations into actionable insights for informed decision-making. Recently, large language model (LLM)-based agents have streamlined the BI workflow by automatically performing task planning, reasoning, and actions in executable environments based on natural language (NL) queries. However, existing approaches primarily focus on individual BI tasks such as NL2SQL and NL2VIS. The fragmentation of tasks across different data roles and tools lead to inefficiencies and potential errors due to the iterative and collaborative nature of BI. In this paper, we introduce DataLab, a unified BI platform that integrates a one-stop LLM-based agent framework with an augmented computational notebook interface. DataLab supports a wide range of BI tasks for different data roles by seamlessly combining LLM assistance with user customization within a single environment. To achieve this unification, we design a domain knowledge incorporation module tailored for enterprise-specific BI tasks, an inter-agent communication mechanism to facilitate information sharing across the BI workflow, and a cell-based context management strategy to enhance context utilization efficiency in BI notebooks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DataLab achieves state-of-the-art performance on various BI tasks across popular research benchmarks. Moreover, DataLab maintains high effectiveness and efficiency on real-world datasets from Tencent, achieving up to a 58.58% increase in accuracy and a 61.65% reduction in token cost on enterprise-specific BI tasks.

  • 21 authors
·
Dec 3, 2024

SafeAgentBench: A Benchmark for Safe Task Planning of Embodied LLM Agents

With the integration of large language models (LLMs), embodied agents have strong capabilities to understand and plan complicated natural language instructions. However, a foreseeable issue is that those embodied agents can also flawlessly execute some hazardous tasks, potentially causing damages in the real world. Existing benchmarks predominantly overlook critical safety risks, focusing solely on planning performance, while a few evaluate LLMs' safety awareness only on non-interactive image-text data. To address this gap, we present SafeAgentBench-the first benchmark for safety-aware task planning of embodied LLM agents in interactive simulation environments. SafeAgentBench includes: (1) an executable, diverse, and high-quality dataset of 750 tasks, rigorously curated to cover 10 potential hazards and 3 task types; (2) SafeAgentEnv, a universal embodied environment with a low-level controller, supporting multi-agent execution with 17 high-level actions for 8 state-of-the-art baselines; and (3) reliable evaluation methods from both execution and semantic perspectives. Experimental results show that, although agents based on different design frameworks exhibit substantial differences in task success rates, their overall safety awareness remains weak. The most safety-conscious baseline achieves only a 10\% rejection rate for detailed hazardous tasks. Moreover, simply replacing the LLM driving the agent does not lead to notable improvements in safety awareness. More details and code are available at https://github.com/shengyin1224/SafeAgentBench.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024

OpenHA: A Series of Open-Source Hierarchical Agentic Models in Minecraft

The choice of action spaces is a critical yet unresolved challenge in developing capable, end-to-end trainable agents. This paper first presents a large-scale, systematic comparison of prominent abstracted action spaces and tokenizers for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) or hierarchical agent models in the open-ended Minecraft. Our analysis reveals that no single action space is universally optimal; instead, the most effective abstraction is highly task-dependent, creating a dilemma for building generalist agents. To resolve this, we introduce Chain of Action (CoA), a novel framework that unifies high-level planning and low-level control within a single, monolithic VLA model. CoA treats an abstracted action not as a command for a separate policy, but as an intermediate reasoning step--akin to a chain of thought--that guides the generation of the final, executable action. Furthermore, we demonstrate that an All-in-One agent trained on a diverse mixture of action spaces using the CoA paradigm learns a more robust and generalizable policy. This unified agent achieves a new state-of-the-art, improving the overall task success rate over strong, specialized baselines. To foster reproducible research, we release the OpenHA (Open Hierarchical Agents) suite, which includes our comprehensive benchmark of over 800 distinct tasks, curated datasets, source code, and all pretrained model checkpoints at https://github.com/CraftJarvis/OpenHA

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 12, 2025 1

From Watch to Imagine: Steering Long-horizon Manipulation via Human Demonstration and Future Envisionment

Generalizing to long-horizon manipulation tasks in a zero-shot setting remains a central challenge in robotics. Current multimodal foundation based approaches, despite their capabilities, typically fail to decompose high-level commands into executable action sequences from static visual input alone. To address this challenge, we introduce Super-Mimic, a hierarchical framework that enables zero-shot robotic imitation by directly inferring procedural intent from unscripted human demonstration videos. Our framework is composed of two sequential modules. First, a Human Intent Translator (HIT) parses the input video using multimodal reasoning to produce a sequence of language-grounded subtasks. These subtasks then condition a Future Dynamics Predictor (FDP), which employs a generative model that synthesizes a physically plausible video rollout for each step. The resulting visual trajectories are dynamics-aware, explicitly modeling crucial object interactions and contact points to guide the low-level controller. We validate this approach through extensive experiments on a suite of long-horizon manipulation tasks, where Super-Mimic significantly outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot methods by over 20%. These results establish that coupling video-driven intent parsing with prospective dynamics modeling is a highly effective strategy for developing general-purpose robotic systems.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 26, 2025

Robotic Visual Instruction

Recently, natural language has been the primary medium for human-robot interaction. However, its inherent lack of spatial precision introduces challenges for robotic task definition such as ambiguity and verbosity. Moreover, in some public settings where quiet is required, such as libraries or hospitals, verbal communication with robots is inappropriate. To address these limitations, we introduce the Robotic Visual Instruction (RoVI), a novel paradigm to guide robotic tasks through an object-centric, hand-drawn symbolic representation. RoVI effectively encodes spatial-temporal information into human-interpretable visual instructions through 2D sketches, utilizing arrows, circles, colors, and numbers to direct 3D robotic manipulation. To enable robots to understand RoVI better and generate precise actions based on RoVI, we present Visual Instruction Embodied Workflow (VIEW), a pipeline formulated for RoVI-conditioned policies. This approach leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to interpret RoVI inputs, decode spatial and temporal constraints from 2D pixel space via keypoint extraction, and then transform them into executable 3D action sequences. We additionally curate a specialized dataset of 15K instances to fine-tune small VLMs for edge deployment,enabling them to effectively learn RoVI capabilities. Our approach is rigorously validated across 11 novel tasks in both real and simulated environments, demonstrating significant generalization capability. Notably, VIEW achieves an 87.5% success rate in real-world scenarios involving unseen tasks that feature multi-step actions, with disturbances, and trajectory-following requirements. Project website: https://robotic-visual-instruction.github.io/

  • 7 authors
·
May 1, 2025