Topic 12 of 17

Foundation models & pretraining in robotics

Foundation models for robotics are policies pretrained across many robots, tasks and datasets, betting that scale and diversity produce transfer the way they did in language. Cross-embodiment training, scaling-law studies and generalist policies all live here.

73papers in 2026-07

6.24%of all cs.RO that month

+1.89ppshare change, last 6 vs prior 12 months

24-month volume

arXiv query: cat:cs.RO AND (abs:"foundation model" OR abs:"cross-embodiment" OR abs:"generalist policy")

Presented at reading clubs

These already have a slide kit, so they are the fastest ones to pick up and present.

2026-03-24

VTAM: Video-Tactile-Action Models for Complex Physical Interaction Beyond VLAs

Haoran Yuan, Weigang Yi, Zhenyu Zhang +9 · 12 citations

club pickWorld models Tactile & force sensing

2026-02-18

EgoScale: Scaling Dexterous Manipulation with Diverse Egocentric Human Data

Ruijie Zheng, Dantong Niu, Yuqi Xie +12 · 71 citations

club pickVision-language-action Dexterous manipulation

2026-02-06

DreamDojo: A Generalist Robot World Model from Large-Scale Human Videos

Shenyuan Gao, William Liang, Kaiyuan Zheng +27 · 96 citations

club pickWorld models Dexterous manipulation

2025-12-27

Emergence of Human to Robot Transfer in Vision-Language-Action Models

Simar Kareer, Karl Pertsch, James Darpinian +5 · 39 citations

club pickVision-language-action Egocentric & human data

2025-09-23

EgoBridge: Domain Adaptation for Generalizable Imitation from Egocentric Human Data

Ryan Punamiya, Dhruv Patel, Patcharapong Aphiwetsa +5 · 30 citations

club pickNeurIPSEgocentric & human data Imitation & diffusion policies

2025-08-13

DINOv3

Oriane Siméoni, Huy V. Vo, Maximilian Seitzer +23 · 1,312 citations

club pickFoundation models & pretraining Data collection & teleoperation

2025-05-16

EgoDex: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from Large-Scale Egocentric Video

Ryan Hoque, Peide Huang, David J. Yoon +2 · 193 citations

club pickICLR 2026Dexterous manipulation Egocentric & human data

Recent work

2026-09-09

Show-Harness: Just a VLM Agent Can Play Robots

Yanzhe Chen, Zechen Bai, Zhijun Cao +7

Vision-language-action Foundation models & pretraining

2026-09-09

RoboDrop: Curating VLA Post-Training Data via Local Gradient Compatibility

Runze Xu, Yuanfan Xu, Cuijie Xu +4

Vision-language-action Foundation models & pretraining

2026-09-08

CALIPER: Clean Scenes Cannot Rank Physical Inference in Pretrained Visual Representations

Aman Mehta, Riya Baviskar

World models Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-07

Foundation Models for Generalizable Semantic and Goal-Oriented Communication

Boliang Liu, Wint Yi Poe, Riccardo Trivisonno +1 · 2 citations

Foundation models & pretraining Video & generative modeling

2026-09-07

Harnessing CLIP and DINO: An Uncertainty-Aware Cascaded Fusion Network for Generalizable Deepfake Image Detection

Xuechao Zou, Yi Zhou, Kai Li +4

Foundation models & pretraining

2026-09-07

Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Contact-Rich Assembly via Proprioception-Anchored Cross-Modal Pretraining

Yuhan Wang, Yurou Chen, Hongye Jiang +1

Tactile & force sensing Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-07

Measuring Language Transfer in Robot Policies: Adding Greek to a Cosmos3 Vision-Language-Action Policy

Ayoub Kirouane, Georgios Giaples, Christos Petrocheilos

World models Vision-language-action

2026-09-07

OpenWAM: An Open, Modular Exploration Towards Systematic World-Action Model Pretraining

Yuran Wang, Siqiao Huang, Mingleyang Li +21

Dexterous manipulation Egocentric & human data

2026-09-07

Phase-and-First-Arrival VLM Feedback for Sparse-Reward Reinforcement Learning in Surgical Manipulation

Wanli Liuchen, Fangyuan Wang, Bin Li +4

Dexterous manipulation Reinforcement learning & control

2026-09-07

GIFT: Goal-Injected Fine-Tuning for Efficient Manipulation Policy Adaptation

Xiaoyuan Fang, Shuo Feng, Yuxuan Wang +3

Vision-language-action Foundation models & pretraining

2026-09-05

GIF: Agentic Generation of Interactive and Functional Object Compositions for Robot Learning

Long Xu, Zhiqi Zhang, Mi Yan +8

Foundation models & pretraining

2026-09-05

A4A: Cross-Embodiment Transfer of Action-Oriented 4D Affordances from Human Demonstrations

Yifan Han, Litao Liu, Yuqi Gu +7

Vision-language-action Egocentric & human data

2026-09-04

GE-Act 2.0: Pretraining and Scaling a World-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation

AgiBot Research Team, Renhang Liu, Wenzhi Zhao +42

Foundation models & pretraining Safety & evaluation

2026-09-04

MINT: A Unified Model for World-Space Camera and Hand Motion Estimation from Scalable Egocentric Pipeline Supervision

Zijie Zhu, Weiren Cai, Yizhou Wang +4

Egocentric & human data 3D & spatial reasoning

2026-09-04

Reasoning Without Inference Cost: Latent Semantic Scaffolding for Robot VLA Policies

Andrew Ting Yan Li, Zhuo Li, Zhelin Yang +3

Vision-language-action Foundation models & pretraining

2026-09-03

Where Appearance Fails, Geometry Recognizes: A CAD-Free 3D Shape Prior That Complements Vision Foundation Models

Chenxi Tao, Seung-Kyum Choi

3D & spatial reasoning Foundation models & pretraining

2026-09-03

GIFT: Guided Intermediate Feature Training via Action-Oriented Structural Supervision for Robotic Manipulation

Yupeng Zheng, Xiang Li, Songen Gu +11

World models Vision-language-action

2026-09-03

Adaptive Vision-Language Grasping via Composable Foundation Priors and Generalizable Grasp Synthesis

Sixu Yan, Shikang Wang, Binhua Huang +11

Dexterous manipulation Foundation models & pretraining

2026-09-03

Toward Unified Robot Learning: Bridging Representation, Vision-Language-Action, and World Models

Shaunak A. Mehta, Ananya Hazarika, Haochen Zhang +5

Trans. Mach. Learn. Res.World models Vision-language-action

2026-09-02

MV-dVRK: A Multi-Viewpoint Benchmark for Spatial Surgical Perception

Guido Caccianiga, Sergey Prokudin, Yutong Chen +9

3D & spatial reasoning Foundation models & pretraining

2026-09-02

ZETA: A Controlled Study of Zero-Shot Cross-Embodiment VLA Transfer for Tabletop Manipulation

Mi Yan, Wenhao Zhang, Zhiqi Zhang +14

Vision-language-action Dexterous manipulation

2026-09-01

Facet-0: A Robotic Foundation Model for Contact-Rich Precise Manipulation

Haoyuan Deng, Haichao Liu, Wenkai Guo +6

Tactile & force sensing Reinforcement learning & control

2026-09-01

H3-World: Turning Language Understanding into World Control

Danze Chen, Zeqing Wang, Ziyue Lin +2

World models Foundation models & pretraining

2026-08-31

ZimaBlue: Evolving Generalizable World Action Models through Scalable Video Pre-training

Xionghao Wu, Yijun Yang, Shiyang Zhou +17

World models Egocentric & human data

2026-08-31

The Structure of Merging Turbulent Jets Beneath a Small Quadrotor

Anoop Kiran, Nora Ayanian, Kenneth Breuer

Foundation models & pretraining

2026-08-31

Zeva: In-Context Causal Learning for Generalizable Embodied Manipulation

Fu Chen, Xin Ding, Bingjia Huang +8

Foundation models & pretraining

2026-08-31

GAFT: Geo-Anchored Fine-Tuning for Hazard Identification from Rare Failures

Yanran Xu, Chuanhang Qiu, Yue Wang +2

Navigation & mobility Foundation models & pretraining

2026-08-31

Temporal Forcing: 4D Representation Alignment for Vision-Language-Action Models

Xingyu Ding, Yuzhong Zhao, Chunhai Zhao +3

Vision-language-action Foundation models & pretraining

2026-08-31

Scaffolding Foundation Models into Physical-World Agents Pushes the Frontier of Long-Horizon Navigation

Zixing Lei, Gengze Zhou, Xiong-Hui Chen +7

Navigation & mobility Foundation models & pretraining

2026-08-31

CometVLA: Co-Training on an Embodied Data Pyramid towards Physical Understanding

Hanwen Wan, Dafeng Chi, Linbo Zhai +6

Vision-language-action Egocentric & human data

2026-08-30

SmoothRL: Online Reinforcement Learning During Asynchronous Execution

Guang Gao, Yuxuan Nong, Baifu Huang +1

Imitation & diffusion policies Reinforcement learning & control

2026-08-30

AGM: Achievement-Grounded Memory for Closed-Loop Agents with Frozen VLA Policies

Hongbo Gao, Zeyu Ni, Xin Wen +2

Vision-language-action Foundation models & pretraining

2026-08-29

AnyWorld: Factorized Egocentric World Models for Cross-Embodiment Generalization

Cheng Chen, Jerry Bai, Jiacheng Wei +11

World models Humanoids & locomotion

2026-08-29

Chat-Edit-3D++: Interactive 3D and 4D Scene Editing via Large Language Models

Shuangkang Fang, Yufeng Wang, Yi-Hsuan Tsai +4

3D & spatial reasoning Foundation models & pretraining

2026-08-27

Beyond Data Scaling: Representation-Centric Continued Pre-training for Vision-Language-Action Models

Senqiao Yang, Chengyao Wang, Yuxin Chen +13

Vision-language-action Humanoids & locomotion

2026-08-27

CLAP: Cross-Embodiment Video World Models are Zero-Shot Physical Simulators

Kechen Liu, Ola Shorinwa

World models Humanoids & locomotion

2026-08-27

Riemann-1.0: An Embodied World Action Model for Physical AI

Haofeng Sun, Jiangbo Pei, Fei Kang +13

Egocentric & human data Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-27

PredVLA: Predictive Sensorimotor Modeling for Sub-Million-Parameter Robot Manipulation

Hiroki Sawada, Shunichi Kasahara

Vision-language-action Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-27

RTNav: Towards Real-Time Zero-Shot Object Navigation

Easop Lee, Lingyu Zhang, Boyuan Chen

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Navigation & mobility

2026-08-26

One Policy, Many Embodiments: Unified Camera-Centric Action Geometry Pre-training for Heterogeneous Embodied Manipulation

Xiaomi Embodied Intelligence Team, University of Macau, : +21

Vision-language-action Humanoids & locomotion

379 papers in this corpus carry the foundation models & pretraining tag. How tagging works.