Drive-KD: Multi-Teacher Distillation for VLMs in Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving is an important and safety-critical task, and recent advances in LLMs/VLMs have opened new possibilities for reasoning and planning in this domain. However, large models demand substantial GPU memory and exhibit high inference latency, while conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often struggles to bridge the capability gaps of small models. To address these limitations, we propose Drive-KD, a framework that decomposes autonomous driving into a "perception-reasoning-planning" triad and transfers these capabilities via knowledge distillation. We identify layer-specific attention as the distillation signal to construct capability-specific single-teacher models that outperform baselines. Moreover, we unify these single-teacher settings into a multi-teacher distillation framework and introduce asymmetric gradient projection to mitigate cross-capability gradient conflicts. Extensive evaluations validate the generalization of our method across diverse model families and scales. Experiments show that our distilled InternVL3-1B model, with ~42 times less GPU memory and ~11.4 times higher throughput, achieves better overall performance than the pretrained 78B model from the same family on DriveBench, and surpasses GPT-5.1 on the planning dimension, providing insights toward efficient autonomous driving VLMs.

Advances and Innovations in the Multi-Agent Robotic System (MARS) Challenge

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models and vision-languageaction models have significantly driven progress in Embodied AI. As the field transitions toward more complex task scenarios, multi-agent system frameworks are becoming essential for achieving scalable, efficient, and collaborative solutions. This shift is fueled by three primary factors: increasing agent capabilities, enhancing system efficiency through task delegation, and enabling advanced human-agent interactions. To address the challenges posed by multi-agent collaboration, we propose the Multi-Agent Robotic System (MARS) Challenge, held at the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on SpaVLE. The competition focuses on two critical areas: planning and control, where participants explore multi-agent embodied planning using vision-language models (VLMs) to coordinate tasks and policy execution to perform robotic manipulation in dynamic environments. By evaluating solutions submitted by participants, the challenge provides valuable insights into the design and coordination of embodied multi-agent systems, contributing to the future development of advanced collaborative AI systems.

CubeBench: Diagnosing Interactive, Long-Horizon Spatial Reasoning Under Partial Observations

Large Language Model (LLM) agents, while proficient in the digital realm, face a significant gap in physical-world deployment due to the challenge of forming and maintaining a robust spatial mental model. We identify three core cognitive challenges hindering this transition: spatial reasoning, long-horizon state tracking via mental simulation, and active exploration under partial observation. To isolate and evaluate these faculties, we introduce CubeBench, a novel generative benchmark centered on the Rubik's Cube. CubeBench uses a three-tiered diagnostic framework that progressively assesses agent capabilities, from foundational state tracking with full symbolic information to active exploration with only partial visual data. Our experiments on leading LLMs reveal critical limitations, including a uniform 0.00% pass rate on all long-horizon tasks, exposing a fundamental failure in long-term planning. We also propose a diagnostic framework to isolate these cognitive bottlenecks by providing external solver tools. By analyzing the failure modes, we provide key insights to guide the development of more physically-grounded intelligent agents.

FieldGen: From Teleoperated Pre-Manipulation Trajectories to Field-Guided Data Generation

Large-scale and diverse datasets are vital for training robust robotic manipulation policies, yet existing data collection methods struggle to balance scale, diversity, and quality. Simulation offers scalability but suffers from sim-to-real gaps, while teleoperation yields high-quality demonstrations with limited diversity and high labor cost. We introduce FieldGen, a field-guided data generation framework that enables scalable, diverse, and high-quality real-world data collection with minimal human supervision. FieldGen decomposes manipulation into two stages: a pre-manipulation phase, allowing trajectory diversity, and a fine manipulation phase requiring expert precision. Human demonstrations capture key contact and pose information, after which an attraction field automatically generates diverse trajectories converging to successful configurations. This decoupled design combines scalable trajectory diversity with precise supervision. Moreover, FieldGen-Reward augments generated data with reward annotations to further enhance policy learning. Experiments demonstrate that policies trained with FieldGen achieve higher success rates and improved stability compared to teleoperation-based baselines, while significantly reducing human effort in long-term real-world data collection. Webpage is available at https://fieldgen.github.io/.

SimpleVLA-RL: Scaling VLA Training via Reinforcement Learning

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for robotic manipulation. Despite substantial progress enabled by large-scale pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), these models face two fundamental challenges: (i) the scarcity and high cost of large-scale human-operated robotic trajectories required for SFT scaling, and (ii) limited generalization to tasks involving distribution shift. Recent breakthroughs in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate that reinforcement learning (RL) can dramatically enhance step-by-step reasoning capabilities, raising a natural question: Can RL similarly improve the long-horizon step-by-step action planning of VLA? In this work, we introduce SimpleVLA-RL, an efficient RL framework tailored for VLA models. Building upon veRL, we introduce VLA-specific trajectory sampling, scalable parallelization, multi-environment rendering, and optimized loss computation. When applied to OpenVLA-OFT, SimpleVLA-RL achieves SoTA performance on LIBERO and even outperforms $\pi_0$ on RoboTwin 1.0\&2.0 with the exploration-enhancing strategies we introduce. SimpleVLA-RL not only reduces dependence on large-scale data and enables robust generalization, but also remarkably surpasses SFT in real-world tasks. Moreover, we identify a novel phenomenon ``pushcut'' during RL training, wherein the policy discovers previously unseen patterns beyond those seen in the previous training process. Github: https://github.com/PRIME-RL/SimpleVLA-RL

AutoBio: A Simulation and Benchmark for Robotic Automation in Digital Biology Laboratory

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promise as generalist robotic policies by jointly leveraging visual, linguistic, and proprioceptive modalities to generate action trajectories. While recent benchmarks have advanced VLA research in domestic tasks, professional science-oriented domains remain underexplored. We introduce AutoBio, a simulation framework and benchmark designed to evaluate robotic automation in biology laboratory environments--an application domain that combines structured protocols with demanding precision and multimodal interaction. AutoBio extends existing simulation capabilities through a pipeline for digitizing real-world laboratory instruments, specialized physics plugins for mechanisms ubiquitous in laboratory workflows, and a rendering stack that support dynamic instrument interfaces and transparent materials through physically based rendering. Our benchmark comprises biologically grounded tasks spanning three difficulty levels, enabling standardized evaluation of language-guided robotic manipulation in experimental protocols. We provide infrastructure for demonstration generation and seamless integration with VLA models. Baseline evaluations with two SOTA VLA models reveal significant gaps in precision manipulation, visual reasoning, and instruction following in scientific workflows. By releasing AutoBio, we aim to catalyze research on generalist robotic systems for complex, high-precision, and multimodal professional environments. The simulator and benchmark are publicly available to facilitate reproducible research.

AVR: Active Vision-Driven Robotic Precision Manipulation with Viewpoint and Focal Length Optimization

Robotic manipulation within dynamic environments presents challenges to precise control and adaptability. Traditional fixed-view camera systems face challenges adapting to change viewpoints and scale variations, limiting perception and manipulation precision. To tackle these issues, we propose the Active Vision-driven Robotic (AVR) framework, a teleoperation hardware solution that supports dynamic viewpoint and dynamic focal length adjustments to continuously center targets and maintain optimal scale, accompanied by a corresponding algorithm that effectively enhances the success rates of various operational tasks. Using the RoboTwin platform with a real-time image processing plugin, AVR framework improves task success rates by 5%-16% on five manipulation tasks. Physical deployment on a dual-arm system demonstrates in collaborative tasks and 36% precision in screwdriver insertion, outperforming baselines by over 25%. Experimental results confirm that AVR framework enhances environmental perception, manipulation repeatability (40% $\le $1 cm error), and robustness in complex scenarios, paving the way for future robotic precision manipulation methods in the pursuit of human-level robot dexterity and precision.

Text2World: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Symbolic World Model Generation

Recently, there has been growing interest in leveraging large language models (LLMs) to generate symbolic world models from textual descriptions. Although LLMs have been extensively explored in the context of world modeling, prior studies encountered several challenges, including evaluation randomness, dependence on indirect metrics, and a limited domain scope. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel benchmark, Text2World, based on planning domain definition language (PDDL), featuring hundreds of diverse domains and employing multi-criteria, execution-based metrics for a more robust evaluation. We benchmark current LLMs using Text2World and find that reasoning models trained with large-scale reinforcement learning outperform others. However, even the best-performing model still demonstrates limited capabilities in world modeling. Building on these insights, we examine several promising strategies to enhance the world modeling capabilities of LLMs, including test-time scaling, agent training, and more. We hope that Text2World can serve as a crucial resource, laying the groundwork for future research in leveraging LLMs as world models. The project page is available at https://text-to-world.github.io/.

CordViP: Correspondence-based Visuomotor Policy for Dexterous Manipulation in Real-World

Achieving human-level dexterity in robots is a key objective in the field of robotic manipulation. Recent advancements in 3D-based imitation learning have shown promising results, providing an effective pathway to achieve this goal. However, obtaining high-quality 3D representations presents two key problems: (1) the quality of point clouds captured by a single-view camera is significantly affected by factors such as camera resolution, positioning, and occlusions caused by the dexterous hand; (2) the global point clouds lack crucial contact information and spatial correspondences, which are necessary for fine-grained dexterous manipulation tasks. To eliminate these limitations, we propose CordViP, a novel framework that constructs and learns correspondences by leveraging the robust 6D pose estimation of objects and robot proprioception. Specifically, we first introduce the interaction-aware point clouds, which establish correspondences between the object and the hand. These point clouds are then used for our pre-training policy, where we also incorporate object-centric contact maps and hand-arm coordination information, effectively capturing both spatial and temporal dynamics. Our method demonstrates exceptional dexterous manipulation capabilities with an average success rate of 90\% in four real-world tasks, surpassing other baselines by a large margin. Experimental results also highlight the superior generalization and robustness of CordViP to different objects, viewpoints, and scenarios. Code and videos are available on https://aureleopku.github.io/CordViP.

DexHandDiff: Interaction-aware Diffusion Planning for Adaptive Dexterous Manipulation

Dexterous manipulation with contact-rich interactions is crucial for advanced robotics. While recent diffusion-based planning approaches show promise for simpler manipulation tasks, they often produce unrealistic ghost states (e.g., the object automatically moves without hand contact) or lack adaptability when handling complex sequential interactions. In this work, we introduce DexHandDiff, an interaction-aware diffusion planning framework for adaptive dexterous manipulation. DexHandDiff models joint state-action dynamics through a dual-phase diffusion process which consists of pre-interaction contact alignment and post-contact goal-directed control, enabling goal-adaptive generalizable dexterous manipulation. Additionally, we incorporate dynamics model-based dual guidance and leverage large language models for automated guidance function generation, enhancing generalizability for physical interactions and facilitating diverse goal adaptation through language cues. Experiments on physical interaction tasks such as door opening, pen and block re-orientation, and hammer striking demonstrate DexHandDiff's effectiveness on goals outside training distributions, achieving over twice the average success rate (59.2% vs. 29.5%) compared to existing methods. Our framework achieves 70.0% success on 30-degree door opening, 40.0% and 36.7% on pen and block half-side re-orientation respectively, and 46.7% on hammer nail half drive, highlighting its robustness and flexibility in contact-rich manipulation.