Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI into the Physical World

Recent advancements in large multimodal models have led to the emergence of remarkable generalist capabilities in digital domains, yet their translation to physical agents such as robots remains a significant challenge. This report introduces a new family of AI models purposefully designed for robotics and built upon the foundation of Gemini 2.0. We present Gemini Robotics, an advanced Vision-Language-Action (VLA) generalist model capable of directly controlling robots. Gemini Robotics executes smooth and reactive movements to tackle a wide range of complex manipulation tasks while also being robust to variations in object types and positions, handling unseen environments as well as following diverse, open vocabulary instructions. We show that with additional fine-tuning, Gemini Robotics can be specialized to new capabilities including solving long-horizon, highly dexterous tasks, learning new short-horizon tasks from as few as 100 demonstrations and adapting to completely novel robot embodiments. This is made possible because Gemini Robotics builds on top of the Gemini Robotics-ER model, the second model we introduce in this work. Gemini Robotics-ER (Embodied Reasoning) extends Gemini's multimodal reasoning capabilities into the physical world, with enhanced spatial and temporal understanding. This enables capabilities relevant to robotics including object detection, pointing, trajectory and grasp prediction, as well as multi-view correspondence and 3D bounding box predictions. We show how this novel combination can support a variety of robotics applications. We also discuss and address important safety considerations related to this new class of robotics foundation models. The Gemini Robotics family marks a substantial step towards developing general-purpose robots that realizes AI's potential in the physical world.

Is Your Imitation Learning Policy Better than Mine? Policy Comparison with Near-Optimal Stopping

Imitation learning has enabled robots to perform complex, long-horizon tasks in challenging dexterous manipulation settings. As new methods are developed, they must be rigorously evaluated and compared against corresponding baselines through repeated evaluation trials. However, policy comparison is fundamentally constrained by a small feasible sample size (e.g., 10 or 50) due to significant human effort and limited inference throughput of policies. This paper proposes a novel statistical framework for rigorously comparing two policies in the small sample size regime. Prior work in statistical policy comparison relies on batch testing, which requires a fixed, pre-determined number of trials and lacks flexibility in adapting the sample size to the observed evaluation data. Furthermore, extending the test with additional trials risks inducing inadvertent p-hacking, undermining statistical assurances. In contrast, our proposed statistical test is sequential, allowing researchers to decide whether or not to run more trials based on intermediate results. This adaptively tailors the number of trials to the difficulty of the underlying comparison, saving significant time and effort without sacrificing probabilistic correctness. Extensive numerical simulation and real-world robot manipulation experiments show that our test achieves near-optimal stopping, letting researchers stop evaluation and make a decision in a near-minimal number of trials. Specifically, it reduces the number of evaluation trials by up to 40% as compared to state-of-the-art baselines, while preserving the probabilistic correctness and statistical power of the comparison. Moreover, our method is strongest in the most challenging comparison instances (requiring the most evaluation trials); in a multi-task comparison scenario, we save the evaluator more than 200 simulation rollouts.

Generating Robot Constitutions & Benchmarks for Semantic Safety

Until recently, robotics safety research was predominantly about collision avoidance and hazard reduction in the immediate vicinity of a robot. Since the advent of large vision and language models (VLMs), robots are now also capable of higher-level semantic scene understanding and natural language interactions with humans. Despite their known vulnerabilities (e.g. hallucinations or jail-breaking), VLMs are being handed control of robots capable of physical contact with the real world. This can lead to dangerous behaviors, making semantic safety for robots a matter of immediate concern. Our contributions in this paper are two fold: first, to address these emerging risks, we release the ASIMOV Benchmark, a large-scale and comprehensive collection of datasets for evaluating and improving semantic safety of foundation models serving as robot brains. Our data generation recipe is highly scalable: by leveraging text and image generation techniques, we generate undesirable situations from real-world visual scenes and human injury reports from hospitals. Secondly, we develop a framework to automatically generate robot constitutions from real-world data to steer a robot's behavior using Constitutional AI mechanisms. We propose a novel auto-amending process that is able to introduce nuances in written rules of behavior; this can lead to increased alignment with human preferences on behavior desirability and safety. We explore trade-offs between generality and specificity across a diverse set of constitutions of different lengths, and demonstrate that a robot is able to effectively reject unconstitutional actions. We measure a top alignment rate of 84.3% on the ASIMOV Benchmark using generated constitutions, outperforming no-constitution baselines and human-written constitutions. Data is available at asimov-benchmark.github.io

SIREN: Semantic, Initialization-Free Registration of Multi-Robot Gaussian Splatting Maps

We present SIREN for registration of multi-robot Gaussian Splatting (GSplat) maps, with zero access to camera poses, images, and inter-map transforms for initialization or fusion of local submaps. To realize these capabilities, SIREN harnesses the versatility and robustness of semantics in three critical ways to derive a rigorous registration pipeline for multi-robot GSplat maps. First, SIREN utilizes semantics to identify feature-rich regions of the local maps where the registration problem is better posed, eliminating the need for any initialization which is generally required in prior work. Second, SIREN identifies candidate correspondences between Gaussians in the local maps using robust semantic features, constituting the foundation for robust geometric optimization, coarsely aligning 3D Gaussian primitives extracted from the local maps. Third, this key step enables subsequent photometric refinement of the transformation between the submaps, where SIREN leverages novel-view synthesis in GSplat maps along with a semantics-based image filter to compute a high-accuracy non-rigid transformation for the generation of a high-fidelity fused map. We demonstrate the superior performance of SIREN compared to competing baselines across a range of real-world datasets, and in particular, across the most widely-used robot hardware platforms, including a manipulator, drone, and quadruped. In our experiments, SIREN achieves about 90x smaller rotation errors, 300x smaller translation errors, and 44x smaller scale errors in the most challenging scenes, where competing methods struggle. We will release the code and provide a link to the project page after the review process.

Predictive Red Teaming: Breaking Policies Without Breaking Robots

Visuomotor policies trained via imitation learning are capable of performing challenging manipulation tasks, but are often extremely brittle to lighting, visual distractors, and object locations. These vulnerabilities can depend unpredictably on the specifics of training, and are challenging to expose without time-consuming and expensive hardware evaluations. We propose the problem of predictive red teaming: discovering vulnerabilities of a policy with respect to environmental factors, and predicting the corresponding performance degradation without hardware evaluations in off-nominal scenarios. In order to achieve this, we develop RoboART: an automated red teaming (ART) pipeline that (1) modifies nominal observations using generative image editing to vary different environmental factors, and (2) predicts performance under each variation using a policy-specific anomaly detector executed on edited observations. Experiments across 500+ hardware trials in twelve off-nominal conditions for visuomotor diffusion policies demonstrate that RoboART predicts performance degradation with high accuracy (less than 0.19 average difference between predicted and real success rates). We also demonstrate how predictive red teaming enables targeted data collection: fine-tuning with data collected under conditions predicted to be adverse boosts baseline performance by 2-7x.

A Survey on Uncertainty Quantification of Large Language Models: Taxonomy, Open Research Challenges, and Future Directions

The remarkable performance of large language models (LLMs) in content generation, coding, and common-sense reasoning has spurred widespread integration into many facets of society. However, integration of LLMs raises valid questions on their reliability and trustworthiness, given their propensity to generate hallucinations: plausible, factually-incorrect responses, which are expressed with striking confidence. Previous work has shown that hallucinations and other non-factual responses generated by LLMs can be detected by examining the uncertainty of the LLM in its response to the pertinent prompt, driving significant research efforts devoted to quantifying the uncertainty of LLMs. This survey seeks to provide an extensive review of existing uncertainty quantification methods for LLMs, identifying their salient features, along with their strengths and weaknesses. We present existing methods within a relevant taxonomy, unifying ostensibly disparate methods to aid understanding of the state of the art. Furthermore, we highlight applications of uncertainty quantification methods for LLMs, spanning chatbot and textual applications to embodied artificial intelligence applications in robotics. We conclude with open research challenges in uncertainty quantification of LLMs, seeking to motivate future research.

Thinking Forward and Backward: Effective Backward Planning with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable reasoning and planning capabilities. Most prior work in this area has used LLMs to reason through steps from an initial to a goal state or criterion, thereby effectively reasoning in a forward direction. Nonetheless, many planning problems exhibit an inherent asymmetry such that planning backward from the goal is significantly easier -- for example, if there are bottlenecks close to the goal. We take inspiration from this observation and demonstrate that this bias holds for LLM planning as well: planning performance in one direction correlates with the planning complexity of the problem in that direction. However, our experiments also reveal systematic biases which lead to poor planning in the backward direction. With this knowledge, we propose a backward planning algorithm for LLMs that first flips the problem and then plans forward in the flipped problem. This helps avoid the backward bias, generate more diverse candidate plans, and exploit asymmetries between the forward and backward directions in planning problems -- we find that combining planning in both directions with self-verification improves the overall planning success rates by 4-24% in three planning domains.

Run-time Observation Interventions Make Vision-Language-Action Models More Visually Robust

Vision-language-action (VLA) models trained on large-scale internet data and robot demonstrations have the potential to serve as generalist robot policies. However, despite their large-scale training, VLAs are often brittle to task-irrelevant visual details such as distractor objects or background colors. We introduce Bring Your Own VLA (BYOVLA): a run-time intervention scheme that (1) dynamically identifies regions of the input image that the model is sensitive to, and (2) minimally alters task-irrelevant regions to reduce the model's sensitivity using automated image editing tools. Our approach is compatible with any off the shelf VLA without model fine-tuning or access to the model's weights. Hardware experiments on language-instructed manipulation tasks demonstrate that BYOVLA enables state-of-the-art VLA models to nearly retain their nominal performance in the presence of distractor objects and backgrounds, which otherwise degrade task success rates by up to 40%. Website with additional information, videos, and code: https://aasherh.github.io/byovla/ .

Flash STU: Fast Spectral Transform Units

This paper describes an efficient, open source PyTorch implementation of the Spectral Transform Unit. We investigate sequence prediction tasks over several modalities including language, robotics, and simulated dynamical systems. We find that for the same parameter count, the STU and its variants outperform the Transformer as well as other leading state space models across various modalities.

Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization

We introduce Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization, DPPO, an algorithmic framework including best practices for fine-tuning diffusion-based policies (e.g. Diffusion Policy) in continuous control and robot learning tasks using the policy gradient (PG) method from reinforcement learning (RL). PG methods are ubiquitous in training RL policies with other policy parameterizations; nevertheless, they had been conjectured to be less efficient for diffusion-based policies. Surprisingly, we show that DPPO achieves the strongest overall performance and efficiency for fine-tuning in common benchmarks compared to other RL methods for diffusion-based policies and also compared to PG fine-tuning of other policy parameterizations. Through experimental investigation, we find that DPPO takes advantage of unique synergies between RL fine-tuning and the diffusion parameterization, leading to structured and on-manifold exploration, stable training, and strong policy robustness. We further demonstrate the strengths of DPPO in a range of realistic settings, including simulated robotic tasks with pixel observations, and via zero-shot deployment of simulation-trained policies on robot hardware in a long-horizon, multi-stage manipulation task. Website with code: diffusion-ppo.github.io