Physical Words: A Vocabulary for Structuring Latent Reasoning in Robot Manipulation

Abstract

Multimodal reasoning provides robotic foundation models with predictive context needed for reliable action generation. However, language-based reasoning captures task semantics but struggles to express fine-grained physical dynamics, while latent reasoning models future state evolution but offers limited structure for organizing these dynamics into reusable reasoning primitives. To bridge this gap, we introduce PhysWord, a reasoning-before-acting foundation model built on Physical Words, which use atomic action verbs as shared semantic anchors for continuous representations of physical dynamics. Specifically, PhysWord predicts upcoming atomic action words and directly aligns their contextual hidden states with latent targets derived from the corresponding future observations. Building on these primitives, we construct a temporally structured PhysWord space with visual and optional tactile variants of each action word. Autoregressively predicting Physical Words across future timesteps captures transitions between execution stages, providing structured multimodal context for action generation. PhysWord achieves state-of-the-art success rates of 90.3\% on visuotactile UniVTAC and 99.6\% on vision-based LIBERO-Long, and outperforms competing methods on real-world tasks using bimanual grippers and dexterous hands. Further evaluations demonstrate that our structured latent reasoning framework generalizes to unseen scenarios and enables long-horizon manipulation.