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To help developers rapidly build world models, which help physical AI systems understand and simulate the real world, NVIDIA has expanded the Cosmos platform with new training tools, simulation checkpoints and Cosmos Data Factory blueprints. Ranking top five on six different open models leaderboards, the NVIDIA Cosmos platform gives world model builders the frontier open […]
European retailers are using open models and physical intelligence across use cases — from a commerce platform cutting inference costs by 90% to to a fulfillment center where collaboration of different robotic fleets is simulated inside a digital twin. Frontier Results With Open Models Retail leaders and technology companies across Europe are using NVIDIA-accelerated open […]
Multimodal agents (MMAs) sustain interaction through reasoning, memory, tools, and feedback, most visibly as computer-use agents, while robotic systems (RSs) couple sensing and actuation under physical dynamics. We define multimodal embodied agents (MMEAs) as goal-directed systems that couple multimodal task reasoning with physical action and revise decisions from the resulting feedback. This raises a central question: what changes when a multimodal agent moves from computer-use to robot-use? We introduce PAPAV, a unified capability-centric framework of five recurring functions: Perceive the current state, Anticipate action effects, Plan a feasible course, Act through an interface or body, and Verify the outcome. Defined by function rather than architecture, these capabilities let PAPAV identify what all three share and then compare MMEAs with MMAs and with RSs. Five physical constraints, from partial observability to unverifiable outcomes, leave fewer choices fixed in advance and less room to reverse errors. Across 64 benchmarks, explicit evaluation centers on Act; only 5 assess Anticipate and 3 assess Verify, leaving both largely hidden behind task success. These constraints also frame the open challenges we identify. PAPAV therefore provides a common basis for designing reliable physical agents and measuring progress across all five capabilities rather than task success alone.
Sequential decision-making under partial observability is difficult because agents must explore to infer hidden, task-relevant information before acting effectively. Learning such information-gathering behaviors tabula rasa via online reinforcement learning is sample-inefficient, whereas offline imitation averages expert actions across hidden states and fails to learn exploration. In this work, we propose ASTEROID, a simple and effective student--teacher supervised learning framework that can learn test-time exploration. Although a privileged expert never needs to explore, we demonstrate that a history-conditioned student can learn to do so when trained with on-policy contexts: the student first collects on-policy context under partial observability, and the privileged expert provides action labels conditioned on that context. By distilling expert actions directly conditioned on the student's on-policy history, the student learns to systematically resolve partial observability, i.e., search while uncertain and exploit once the hidden state is revealed. This enables efficient test-time exploration (similar to Bayesian posterior sampling) without incurring the impractical training-data costs of reinforcement learning. Across a diverse range of eleven different environments, including discrete exploration benchmarks, robotic manipulation, navigation, and Procgen environments, ASTEROID achieves ~2x higher returns under fixed exploration budgets, uses ~100x fewer interactions than RL baselines, and outperforms frontier models at exploration. Finally, our method transfers policies trained in simulation to vision-denied real-world robot manipulation, exhibiting efficient exploration and increasing success by +40% over standard distillation. Overall, it provides a simple yet surprisingly effective framework to learn efficient test-time exploration.
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promise in robotic manipulation, but imitation learning (IL) alone often struggles to master complex long-horizon skills. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers an effective avenue for further improving VLA policies. However, existing VLA-RL methods typically suffer from delayed and biased credit assignment due to trajectory-level sparse rewards, while imbalanced subtask mastery creates bottlenecks that limit overall performance. To address these challenges, we propose AtomicRL, an RL post-training framework that leverages atomic task structures for reliable credit assignment and adaptive exploration. AtomicRL introduces Semantic-Aware Policy Optimization (SAPO), which uses semantic-aware gating to constrain TD residuals from failed atomic subtasks from propagating across task boundaries, mitigating credit contamination while preserving intra-subtask credit assignment and value bootstrapping. In addition, Bottleneck-Adaptive Target Exploration (BATE) dynamically coordinates task sampling and local exploration incentives based on the mastery of individual atomic subtasks, directing learning toward the remaining bottlenecks. Finally, we develop a Real2Sim2Real pipeline that bridges online RL in simulation with real-world deployment, facilitating practical transfer to physical robots. On LIBERO-LONG, AtomicRL achieves absolute performance gains of 3.6% and 4.0% over PPO across two VLA architectures. On CALVIN ABC-D, it improves full-task performance by up to 9.5% over PPO. Combined with the Real2Sim2Real pipeline, AtomicRL further improves real-world task performance by an average of 21.3%. These results demonstrate that AtomicRL effectively improves the learning efficiency and manipulation performance of VLA policies on long-horizon tasks.
Recent advances in frontier AI models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual understanding, reasoning, planning, and tool use, raising the possibility of using general-purpose AI models for robot manipulation without task-specific training. However, their manipulation capabilities have not been systematically evaluated on standardized robotics benchmarks. In this report, we present a unified closed-loop manipulation framework for evaluating frontier AI models on the LIBERO-10 benchmark. Our framework enables models to control a robot directly through visual observations, robot proprioception, and structured tool calls, primarily by specifying target end-effector poses and gripper commands, without task-specific fine-tuning or pretrained manipulation skills. We evaluate six frontier AI models, including GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, Claude Opus 5, Claude Opus 5.5, and Gemini-4 Argon, across three reasoning effort levels, resulting in 18 configurations and 1,800 evaluation episodes. Our results show that GPT-6 Astra achieves the highest success rate of 44%, followed by Gemini-4 Argon at 43%. Increasing reasoning effort generally improves manipulation performance, but the benefits vary across models and come at additional inference cost. We also observe substantial differences across tasks, with models performing relatively well on object placement tasks but struggling with precise spatial arrangements and complex multi-step interactions. These findings demonstrate both the potential and limitations of frontier AI models for robot manipulation, highlighting the challenges of translating reasoning capabilities into reliable physical actions. We release our evaluation framework and experimental results to support reproducible benchmarking and future research on reasoning-based robot manipulation.
Humanoid loco-manipulation requires an effective interface between high-level task policies and whole-body control. Existing interfaces typically rely on a single action representation for both task intent and whole-body coordination. This may burden the high-level policy or leave one aspect underspecified. We present SP-HLM, a framework built on a sparse-pose-driven interface. The interface combines five task-critical body poses with a learned latent motion prior to represent spatial intent and whole-body coordination in complementary forms. SP-VLA, a vision-language-action model, first predicts task-relevant sparse poses and finger joint positions from multimodal observations and language instructions using asynchronous action-chunk inference. Given these sparse targets, SP-MGM, a motion generation model trained through two-stage distillation, reconstructs coordinated full-body motion in real time. A pretrained motion encoder maps this motion to a compact latent representation. SP-GMT, a general motion tracker, then integrates the explicit sparse targets with this implicit motion prior for whole-body control. Experiments in simulation and on a real humanoid robot demonstrate improved motion tracking, whole-body coordination, and loco-manipulation success over existing approaches. Additional results and videos are available on our {https://sp-hlm.github.io/}{{blue}{project page}}.
At GTC Berlin, NVIDIA is showcasing its full lineup of local AI hardware. RTX Spark, which launched last week, powers personal agents on Windows PCs; DGX Spark supports developers building and scaling applications on Linux; and DGX Station serves enterprise teams running frontier workloads on Linux, with a Windows version arriving in December. Announcements include: […]
To increase productivity, accelerate innovation and create new opportunities for economic growth, Europe’s industrial leaders are tapping NVIDIA CUDA-X and Omniverse libraries, as well as NVIDIA Cosmos and Nemotron open models, across the engineering and manufacturing lifecycle. Bringing those capabilities together on the factory floor, the NVIDIA Factory Operations Blueprint (FOX) is now available in […]
NVIDIA is expanding its family of open models across language, robotics, biology, and quantum computing, giving developers, researchers and enterprises what they need to build applications tailored to local languages and industries The portfolio includes the new NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super VL and Nemotron 3.5 Bolt models; new NVIDIA Nemotron Retriever models for embedding, reranking […]
Founded in a tent near the Berlin Wall in 1980, the Tempodrom moved several times before settling near Anhalter Bahnhof in 2001. Its permanent home has since hosted concerts, galas and political events. Today, it hosts a different kind of spectacle. GTC Berlin runs three days, with more than 100 sessions on agentic AI, robotics, […]
Video generation models can now depict remarkably realistic motion. Yet it is unclear how to use this motion beyond pixels: to animate a specific 3D asset and replay the animation in its 3D scene. For instance, a video model can show a monkey jumping over a crossbar, but it cannot return that jump as replayable 3D motion placed in the 3D scene. Here we present a model that directly co-generates the video and 3D motion for any supplied rig, along with a camera that registers this motion to the scene. Prior video-motion models either handle only human skeletons, often adding billions of parameters, or triangulate 3D motion from generated 2D pose maps. We instead keep 3D motion in a separate model that supports arbitrary skeletons, and connect it to a pretrained video model through a small set of cross-attention layers. This separation lets the motion model first learn how skeletons move from motion-only data, which is easier to obtain and augment than paired video. Additionally, our model learns to locate each joint in the video frames, which lets us recover the camera and place the 3D motion in the scene. To train across many skeletons, we use a generative video editor to place animated 3D assets in scenes suited to their actions, curating the edits so their known motion remains valid. Together with human and robot video, this yields nearly 200K training pairs. Our evaluations demonstrate that our model animates diverse rigs from text more faithfully than video-first pipelines, and its motion responds to the surrounding scene. It also turns video into rig motion, rig motion into video, and enables keyframe-based control of the 3D motion. Videos and additional results are available on our project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/par/projects/jca/.
Motivated by the human ability to integrate experience across language, perception, and action, we introduce UniWALM, a unified world-action-language model that learns video, action, and language in a single shared representation, where each modality is both a conditioning signal and a supervision target. We ask: can jointly generating language enrich this shared representation, improving manipulation and supporting memory-dependent behavior? Unlike prior approaches that attach a reasoning or vision-language model to a video-action backbone and run them as distinct stages, UniWALM unifies all three modalities inside a single mixture-of-transformers backbone whose per-modality diffusion heads co-denoise synchronously, decoding subtask and textual memory in the same pass as action with no separate planning stage; the generated language is re-consumed on the next step, closing a language-as-memory loop without an external planner or memory bank. To keep the action stream reliable under this richer objective, we further introduce Flow Matching with Correction (FMC), a training objective that teaches recovery from perturbed action trajectories at no inference-time cost. UniWALM consistently improves over same-backbone baselines (e.g., FastWAM) on compositional pick-and-place (MolmoSpaces) and across the memory-dependent subset of RMBench, where it reaches 34.5% without any pretrained language or reasoning model and exceeds Mem-0's keyframe-equipped setup (28.5%) using only a single anchor frame. On a real-world Find-the-Item task, generating textual memory lifts success from 11.1% to 61.1%, while state-of-the-art VLAs stay at or below chance (<=33.3%).
Warehouse robot fleets continuously observe operational conditions, but preserving these observations as reusable semantic memory incurs substantial computation, communication, and storage costs. For example, explaining recurring aisle blockages can require reviewing video from multiple robots across several shifts. We present IndustrialRemembr, a shared spatiotemporal memory system that extends NVIDIA ReMEmbR to robot fleets and reduces server-side computation by generating scene descriptions only on demand. On each robot, an NVIDIA Jetson encodes video clips into retrieval embeddings with Cosmos-Embed1, vision tokens with Cosmos3-Edge, and reconstruction latents with the Wan2.2 VAE, without uploading raw camera frames. The encoding models are re-used to detect people in image patches, zeroing them out to support PII abstraction for GDPR-compliant deployments. We split Cosmos3-Edge at its vision-language boundary, placing the vision encoder on the robot and the language decoder on an on-premises server. A Nemotron agent retrieves memories by content, position, and time and queries the decoder using cached vision tokens. This design eliminates caption generation at write time, while cached-token decoding reproduces the unsplit model's output in all 450 tested decodes.
Simulation is a powerful tool for robotics, but building diverse, simulation-ready scenes at scale remains difficult. Reconstructing scenes from single images is a promising alternative, but visual similarity alone is insufficient: objects must also be recovered, accurately placed, and physically grounded. Existing methods that rely on post-hoc physics settling often misplace objects, producing scenes that look correct but behave poorly under manipulation. We present SceneRig, an agentic system that turns a single image into an editable, simulation-ready scene. SceneRig combines geometric, visual, and physical tools to reconstruct a faithful 3D scene. An agent then performs edit-and-validate loops inside a physics simulator to achieve physical stability. Across diverse inputs, SceneRig improves instance segmentation, object-centric appearance, and 3D placement while keeping the reconstructed scenes physically stable. Furthermore, SceneRig is effective for downstream robotics: its scenes predict real-robot policy outcomes more accurately than the baseline method and more reliably support replay of recorded manipulations without trajectory adaptation.
Continuous-time reinforcement learning seeks an optimal policy under unknown dynamics driven by stochastic differential equations using observations collected at discrete times. We develop a policy gradient framework that combines rigorous convergence analysis with learning from discrete data. We first establish a performance difference lemma and derive policy gradient formulas for randomized and parametrized policies. We then prove exponential convergence of an entropy-regularized policy flow to the regularized optimum. For discrete parametrized updates, we derive a convergence bound that explicitly separates the contributions of critic error, policy-regression error, and the learning step size. To enable learning under unknown dynamics, we integrate this framework with PhiBE, which constructs a continuous-time surrogate generator from discrete transition data. The resulting on-policy and off-policy model-free actor-critic algorithms preserve the continuous-time structure of the control problem. Numerical experiments on an entropy-regularized linear-quadratic regulator and a nonlinear wheeled robot demonstrate the performance and stability of the proposed methods with both known and data-driven dynamics.
Humanoid-human interaction requires robots to operate under severe partial observability: during close physical contact, the human partner is occluded, truncated, or outside the robot's field of view, causing pose estimation to fail and often necessitating external tracking or privileged human state. At the same time, heavy mutual occlusions introduce errors into the human-human motion-capture data used for learning. We present REACT, a framework for learning deployable humanoid-human interaction policies from human-human demonstrations. REACT treats semantic contact structure as the key supervisory signal connecting demonstration processing, interaction learning, and onboard control. First, a VLM-guided contact modeling and retargeting pipeline identifies semantically meaningful contacts and transfers them onto humanoid-human geometry while preserving interaction structure. Using these annotations, privileged interaction policies learn physically grounded behaviors through interaction-aware contact rewards and are then distilled into deployable egocentric depth policies trained entirely from onboard sensing using photorealistic human depth rendering. To address severe partial observability, we introduce generative partner-state modeling objectives that predict partner motion from occluded egocentric views. We evaluate REACT in simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid across five contact-rich interactions. Semantic contact modeling substantially improves preservation of demonstrated interactions, while generative partner-state modeling improves contact recall on four of five interactions, most under heavy occlusion. On real hardware, REACT performs all five interactions using onboard sensing alone.
It’s the moment everyone is waiting for — the ChatGPT moment for robotics, Amulya Vishwanath explained to TechCrunch’s Equity.
