arXiv subjects

Bingao Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Bingao Chen.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Can Astra Solve RoboMME without Breaking the Bank?

Robotic manipulation often requires remembering information that is no longer visible, such as an object's location before occlusion or the order of a demonstrated action sequence. A large vision-language planner can read this history, but calling it before every action chunk is slow and costly. We present a three-tier system for the RoboMME benchmark. GPT-6 Astra (System 2) selects a grounded subtask from stored visual history, a $π_{0.5}$ vision-language-action policy (System 1) executes it, and a fine-tuned Qwen3-VL-4B monitor (System 1.5) checks after each action chunk whether the subtask is finished. The instruction is kept until the monitor reports completion or a task-specific event occurs, while the policy keeps acting on new observations. On RoboMME, the system succeeds in 79.13% of episodes with an average of 3.63 Astra calls and 80.84 seconds per episode. This is 34.62 points above the best published non-oracle baseline and 4.95 points below GroundSG+Oracle, which gives the low-level policy ground-truth subgoals.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

FoveaVLA: Foveation Actions Replace the Wrist Camera in VLAs

We present FoveaVLA, a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that replaces the wrist camera with learned foveation actions. Wrist cameras provide close-up detail but restrict the view to the end-effector's surroundings. External cameras see the whole scene, but the policy receives them at low resolution, so the fine detail needed for manipulation is lost. FoveaVLA recovers this detail by predicting, alongside each action chunk, the interaction region to observe at the next policy query. The policy then receives crops of these regions, taken from the original-resolution images, together with the full views. We build FoveaVLA on $π_{0.5}$ in two configurations, Single and Dual, using one or two external stereo cameras with full and foveal RGB and depth inputs, and post-train both on DROID with RoboInter interaction annotations. Across four real-world task suites, FoveaVLA-Single achieves 70.8% success with one external RGB-D view, and FoveaVLA-Dual achieves 77.1%, versus 52.1% for the wrist-equipped $π_{0.5}$. Both match the baseline on plain pick-and-place and improve success with distractors, cloth manipulation, and far-away objects.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Towards Agentic Robots: Model, Data, Environment, and Harness

Foundation models are driving a paradigm shift in robotic intelligence, moving beyond low-level action prediction to goal-directed orchestration of data collection, model training, task planning, and real-world execution. We characterize this emerging paradigm as an agentic robots, in which agents reason over human instructions, interact with robotic environments, rectify execution errors autonomously, and dynamically adjust operational strategies. Although this field develops fast, current studies are not well connected. Researchers have no consistent view of how to combine different agentic functions into a complete robot system. This paper provides a unified overview of existing research on agentic robots. We first trace the development from robot policies to agentic systems, covering vision-language-action models, world models, and world-action models. We then clarify the definition and scope of agentic robots and organize existing research into seventeen categories across four functional domains: Model, Data, Environment, and Harness. Across these domains, we examine how agents shape model learning and robot decisions, collect and curate robot data, construct worlds, tasks, and tests for learning and evaluation, and organize capabilities for robot use. Finally, we discuss open challenges and outline directions for future research. Looking forward, we hope this work contributes to a clearer understanding of agentic robots and supports new approaches to making them more capable, reliable, and adaptive.

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arXiv2026

$τ_0$-VLA: a Hierarchical Robot Foundation Model with World-Model-Guided Test-Time Computation

Long-horizon robot manipulation requires a robot to both execute individual skills reliably and sequence them coherently over extended tasks. Most hierarchical vision-language-action (VLA) models make each such decision with a single forward pass, leaving no mechanism to allocate additional computation to difficult or consequential choices. We introduce $τ_0$-VLA, a hierarchical robot foundation model that formulates high-level subtask generation as a compute-scalable inference problem through world-model-guided test-time computation. At each inference step, the high-level policy uses execution memory to generate a subtask and, when needed, searches over alternatives before committing to its output. A low-level policy then executes the generated subtask across multiple robot embodiments. The policy is trained on 40,115 hours of heterogeneous real-world data with multimodal co-training. Across in-domain and distribution-shifted settings, allocating additional test-time computation substantially improves next-subtask prediction accuracy, and these gains translate into higher closed-loop success on long-horizon robot manipulation tasks.

cs.RO↗