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Robots might learn better from video than from language! 📼 Most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models learn what to do from text, but still struggle with how things move in the real world. That makes them data-hungry and slow to train. mimic video takes a different route. Instead of grounding robot...

50,090 views • 8 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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JUST IN: Dyna Robotics just published one of the most important research papers in robotics this year. It could fundamentally change how robot foundation models are trained. A scaling law that transfers from human video to robot performance. Dyna-2 is out and it's 🔥 Here's what that means in plain terms. Dyna-2 was pre-trained on ONE MILLION hours of egocentric human video, 170 years of continuous human experience, cooking, folding, assembling, cleaning. And as that human data scaled, robot performance improved. Predictably. Monotonically. Across 39 tasks on two different robot embodiments the model had never seen. → 1,000 hours pre-training → 20% normalised task performance → 10,000 hours → 28% → 100,000 hours → 45% → 1,000,000 hours → 53% Human video exists at effectively unlimited scale. Every cook, every factory worker, every craftsperson wearing a camera is generating training data for future robots. But the finding that stunned even the researchers, world modeling is what makes the transfer work. A model trained to predict future video AND actions massively outperforms one trained on actions alone. Video is the new scaling axis for robotics. One more jaw-dropping data point. 13 minutes of teleoperation data was enough to fine-tune Dyna-2 to open a bottle cap using two five-fingered robot hands. The robots are coming, and they're learning from us directly :D Read more here: Congrats Jason Ma and team! ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Lukas Ziegler

23,576 views • 1 month ago

🚨 BREAKING: Microsoft's first robotics foundation model! 🤯 Microsoft just announced Rho-alpha (ρα), their first robotics model derived from the Phi series of vision-language models. Rho-alpha translates natural language commands into control signals for robotic systems performing bimanual manipulation tasks. Commands like "push the green button with the right gripper," "pull out the red wire," "flip the top switch on," or "turn the knob to position 5" get executed directly by dual-arm robots. What makes this different from standard vision-language-action (VLA) models is the additional modalities. Rho-alpha is a VLA+ model that adds tactile sensing to the perceptual mix, with plans to incorporate force feedback. On the learning side, the model is designed to continually improve during deployment by learning from human feedback. The training approach combines trajectories from physical demonstrations and simulated tasks with web-scale visual question answering data. Since teleoperation data is scarce and expensive, Microsoft is using NVIDIA Isaac Sim on Azure to generate physically accurate synthetic datasets via reinforcement learning. These simulated trajectories get combined with commercial and open physical demonstration datasets. The model is currently under evaluation on dual-arm setups and humanoid robots. Microsoft is opening an Early Access Program for organizations interested in evaluating Rho-alpha. Robots that can adapt to dynamic situations and human preferences are more useful in real environments and more trusted by the people operating them. Read more here: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Lukas Ziegler

60,985 views • 7 months ago

Robots don’t learn the physical world from clean datasets. They learn from messy decisions, different movements, and thousands of possible ways a task can go wrong. That’s why I think the data problem in Physical AI is much bigger than simply collecting more examples. A robot can look impressive in a controlled demonstration and still struggle when the environment changes. A different angle. A different object. A slightly different position. A movement that doesn’t go exactly as expected. Humans handle these variations naturally because we have years of physical experience to draw from. Robots don’t. They need enormous amounts of training experience to learn how to perceive situations, choose actions, recover from mistakes, and repeat successful behavior. This is where Axis Robotics is taking an interesting approach. Instead of treating simulation as just a place to test robots, Axis is turning it into a data-generation environment for physical intelligence. More than 200K people are now contributing demonstrations in simulation, creating examples of how tasks can be performed. But the important part isn’t simply the number of contributors. It’s what happens to those demonstrations afterward. The interactions are recorded, validated, and written to Base, creating a verifiable trail around the data being generated. That gives the whole process a different structure: Humans demonstrate → simulations capture → data gets validated → training signals accumulate → robots get more experience. And that feedback loop is what interests me. Because scaling Physical AI may not come from finding one perfect algorithm. It may come from building a system capable of producing millions of useful experiences that algorithms can actually learn from. The robot is only as good as the experience available to train it. And if Axis can keep scaling the quality and volume of that experience, it could become one of the important infrastructure layers behind the next generation of capable robots. The race in Physical AI isn’t only about building smarter models. It’s about giving those models enough real-world experience to become smart in the first place. Axis Robotics.

ABBA

90,854 views • 1 day ago

Excited to announce GR00T N1, the world’s first open foundation model for humanoid robots! We are on a mission to democratize Physical AI. The power of general robot brain, in the palm of your hand - with only 2B parameters, N1 learns from the most diverse physical action dataset ever compiled and punches above its weight: - Real humanoid teleoperation data. - Large-scale simulation data: we are open-sourcing 300K+ trajectories! - Neural trajectories: we apply SOTA video generation models to “hallucinate” new synthetic data that features accurate physics in pixels. Using Jensen’s words, “systematically infinite data”! - Latent actions: we develop novel algorithms to extract action tokens from in-the-wild human videos and neural generated videos. GR00T N1 is a single end-to-end neural net, from photons to actions: - Vision-Language Model (System 2) that interprets the physical world through vision and language instructions, enabling robots to reason about their environment and instructions, and plan the right actions. - Diffusion Transformer (System 1) that “renders” smooth and precise motor actions at 120 Hz, executing the latent plan made by System 2. We deploy N1 on GR1 robot, 1X Neo robot, and a large collection of simulation benchmarks. N1 achieves up to +30% boost in diverse manipulation tasks for household and industrial settings. While humanoid robots are the main focus of N1, our model also supports cross-embodiment. We finetune it to work on the $110 HuggingFace LeRobot SO100 robot arm! Open robot brain runs on open hardware. Sounds just right. Let’s solve robotics, together, one token at a time. Links to our Whitepaper, Github repo, HuggingFace model, and open dataset page in the thread: 🧵

Jim Fan

467,141 views • 1 year ago

Most video-action robot models are a content-creation video generator with an action module attached. LingBot-VA 2.0 from Robbyant, a video-action foundation model, throws that starting point out and trains the whole stack natively for control. And it runs closed-loop at a peak 225 Hz. It's so important because A robot cannot move responsively when its controller pauses to imagine the next few frames. LingBot-VA 2.0 predicts during execution, then corrects using each real observation. And it carries only about 13B video parameters while activating roughly 1.9B per token. Bigger robot models usually mean slower reactions, creating a direct conflict between intelligence and control. LingBot-VA 2.0 is trained from scratch for robot control rather than adapted from a video generator built for content creation. Robbyant, an embodied AI company under Ant Group, built it to learn how scenes change under actions, predict what should happen next, and turn those predictions into real-time robot movements. Most video-action systems inherit a tokenizer and video backbone trained mainly to reproduce visual appearance. LingBot-VA 2.0 rebuilds both parts around physical control. Its semantic visual-action tokenizer maps observations toward features from a frozen vision foundation model and learns compact latent actions from frame-to-frame changes using self-supervised inverse and forward dynamics. Unlabeled web video can therefore carry action-relevant training signals without robot action labels. The policy is causal from the start, so every prediction can use only past observations. Its sparse Mixture-of-Experts video backbone has about 13B total parameters, while about 1.9B are active per token, keeping the compute lower during each step. A high-level vision-language planner breaks long tasks into smaller instructions, while the low-level video-action policy handles continuous movement. Foresight Reasoning predicts future visual states while the robot is already acting, then replaces imagined states with every new real observation. Combined with few-step distillation and systems acceleration, the paper reports a peak asynchronous execution frequency of 225 Hz. The model adapts from 10–15 demonstrations, transfers across robot embodiments, and handles some new tasks zero-shot. In the paper’s own evaluations, it reaches 93.6 average on RoboTwin 2.0 and reports stronger real-world results than LingBot-VA and π0.5 across the tested tasks. 🧵 1.

Rohan Paul

11,253 views • 2 months ago

I don’t know if we live in a Matrix, but I know for sure that robots will spend most of their lives in simulation. Let machines train machines. I’m excited to introduce DexMimicGen, a massive-scale synthetic data generator that enables a humanoid robot to learn complex skills from only a handful of human demonstrations. Yes, as few as 5! DexMimicGen addresses the biggest pain point in robotics: where do we get data? Unlike with LLMs, where vast amounts of texts are readily available, you cannot simply download motor control signals from the internet. So researchers teleoperate the robots to collect motion data via XR headsets. They have to repeat the same skill over and over and over again, because neural nets are data hungry. This is a very slow and uncomfortable process. At NVIDIA, we believe the majority of high-quality tokens for robot foundation models will come from simulation. What DexMimicGen does is to trade GPU compute time for human time. It takes one motion trajectory from human, and multiplies into 1000s of new trajectories. A robot brain trained on this augmented dataset will generalize far better in the real world. Think of DexMimicGen as a learning signal amplifier. It maps a small dataset to a large (de facto infinite) dataset, using physics simulation in the loop. In this way, we free humans from babysitting the bots all day. The future of robot data is generative. The future of the entire robot learning pipeline will also be generative. 🧵

Jim Fan

165,246 views • 1 year ago

Chinese robotics company Astribot released their latest World-Action Model (WAM), Lumo-2. Technical breakdown: - based on a frozen 🥶 Qwen-3.5 4B VLM - trained in 3 progressive stages: 1. Action is aligned with latent world dynamics (an abstract representation of action). Real-world actions are anchored to physical constraints, while the latent space is guided to focus on motion-relevant changes. This bidirectional relationship makes the model physically grounded -> critical for a world model. 2. Action is aligned with vision and language. Reusing the vision backbone and action encoder from the frozen VLM, the authors add a custom vocabulary (for new actions), a semantic module, an action decoder, and an action projector. This aligns the (new) action representations with the (existing) vision-language semantic space. Most importantly: it builds a direct mapping from natural-language instructions to motor execution. 3. End-to-end training on language, video, and robot data. Only the new modules (everything outside the frozen backbone) are trained end-to-end across temporal reasoning, physical understanding, long-horizon, and dexterous manipulation. At the end of the day, Lumo-2 is not the best on benchmarks, but that's not the point. What's genuinely new: - a way to combine latent world modeling and action generation through progressive alignment - a physically-grounded latent dynamics space - it lifts performance on unseen objects using un-annotated human egocentric video + Vision Pro captures, no special transfer algorithm needed Why it matters: - the whole model is thin trainable adapters (semantic module, action decoder/projector) on a frozen 4B backbone (cheap) - that scale is suited for real-time embedded inference (~2.71× decode speedup, no accuracy loss) - its real moat is long-horizon execution, where the added temporal memory pays off far more than on any other task As a result, this robot can now make your latte (5x sped up video):

Léo

32,331 views • 1 month ago