New model: your robot can now pack your suitcase 🧳 Xiaomi has released a new robot foundation model. Called Xiaomi-Robotics-1, it is designed to have a robot pick things up and move them around. But first, DEFINITIONS: - Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT): An architecture where separate transformer "experts" (e.g., one for... vision-language, one for actions) share a single attention stream, so each modality gets specialized parameters without losing joint reasoning. - Vision-language model (VLM): A model that jointly understands images and text. - Diffusion transformer: A transformer trained to turn noise into structured outputs by iterative denoising, here generating robot actions rather than images. - Action chunks: Short sequences of future actions (e.g., the next ~50 motor commands) predicted in one shot instead of one step at a time. - Flow matching: A faster version of diffusion. The model learns a straight-line velocity field from noise to the target action, so it needs only a few integration steps instead of many denoising ones. Its peculiarity comes from its two stage training: 1. 100,000 hours of video shot through a UMI rig: a handheld 3D-printed gripper with a camera, worn by humans doing ordinary tasks in homes, shops, factories and offices. 2. Adapt to actual robot bodies with ~10,000 hours of real-robot data. It replaces the standard approach of teleoperating a real robot for every hour of training data. Its architecture is a Mixture-of-Transformers pairing a pre-trained Qwen3-VL vision-language model with a diffusion transformer that emits action chunks via flow matching, released in 2.6B, 5.1B and 10.5B parameter variants. However, if you read the entire paper ("Scaling VLA Models with over 100K Hours"), you realize that all of the scaling experiments on 20k hours. Therefore the headline "out-of-the-box success climbing 26% → 75% as pre-training data grows" tops out at 100% of 20k hours! What the full corpus does to that curve is never shown -> and this where things would become interesting! Xiaomi's own conclusion is that model size has stopped mattering and data is the binding constraint. The performance gap among different model sizes are less pronounced than those observed across different data scales. This result suggests that model capacity at the billions-parameter scale may already be sufficient to capture the current dataset's distribution. Which further asks the same question: why not use the 100k video hours? Anyway, I would definitely love to have a couple robots at home that can cooperate to pack my suitcase with items relevant to my next destination:show more

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