Andy Zhai

Ryan Yu, Pushi Zhang, Starrick Liu et al.

Large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) pretraining is increasingly adopted as the foundation for robot policies, yet the evidence for pretrained VLAs is almost invariably reported after task-specific fine-tuning.This leaves a foundational question unanswered: does VLA pretraining itself yield executable robot behavior, or does it merely furnish a better initialization for downstream policy learning? We present Wall-OSS-0.5, an open-source 4B VLA built upon a 3B VLM backbone augmented with action-generation components, designed so that pretrained robotic capability is directly measurable on physical hardware.The model is pretrained across more than 20 embodiments, processing over one million robot trajectories per epoch alongside a grounded multimodal corpus. We adopt a gradient-bridged co-training recipe in which three objectives play distinct and complementary roles: discrete action prediction routes strong VLM-native gradients into the backbone, multimodal prediction preserves grounded vision-language understanding, and continuous flow matching serves as the deployment-time action interface. Before task-specific fine-tuning, the pretrained checkpoint achieves non-trivial zero-shot real-robot behavior, completing several tasks, including a held-out deformable manipulation task, at high task progress on a 17-task suite. After fine-tuning, the same checkpoint serves as a stronger adaptation prior, reaching 60.5% average task progress on 15 real-robot tasks and outperforming π_0.5 by 17.5%. Multimodal evaluations further confirm that action training does not erode grounded vision-language competence: the model preserves broad vision-language ability while strengthening embodied grounding. Together, these results reposition VLA pretraining from an initialization strategy to a directly testable, already useful source of robot capability.

James Wang, Primo Pu, Zephyr Fung et al.

The acquisition of high-quality, action-aligned demonstration data remains a fundamental bottleneck in scaling foundation models for dexterous robot manipulation. Although robot-free human demonstrations (e.g., the UMI paradigm) offer a scalable alternative to traditional teleoperation, current systems are constrained by sub-optimal hardware ergonomics, open-loop workflows, and a lack of systematic data-mixing strategies. To address these limitations, we present XRZero-G0, a hardware-software co-designed system for embodied data collection and policy learning. The system features an ergonomic, virtual reality interface equipped with a top-view camera and dual specialized grippers to directly improve collection efficiency. To ensure dataset reliability, we propose a closed-loop collection, inspection, training, and evaluation pipeline for non-proprioceptive data. This workflow achieves an 85% data validity rate and establishes a transparent mechanism for quality control. Furthermore, we investigate the empirical scaling behaviors and optimal mixing ratios of robot-free data. Extensive experiments indicate that combining a minimal volume of real-robot data with large-scale robot-free data (e.g., a 10:1 ratio) achieves performance comparable to exclusively real-robot datasets, while reducing acquisition costs by a factor of twenty. Utilizing XRZero-G0, we construct a 2,000-hour robot-free dataset that enables zero-shot cross-embodiment transfer to a target physical robot, demonstrating a highly scalable methodology for generalized real-world manipulation.Our project repository: https://github.com/X-Square-Robot/XRZero-G0

Yu Sun, Meng Cao, Ping Yang et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and world models have recently emerged as promising paradigms for general-purpose robotic intelligence, yet their progress is hindered by the lack of reliable evaluation protocols that reflect real-world deployment. Existing benchmarks are largely simulator-centric, which provide controllability but fail to capture the reality gap caused by perception noise, complex contact dynamics, hardware constraints, and system latency. Moreover, fragmented real-world evaluations across different robot platforms prevent fair and reproducible comparison. To address these challenges, we introduce ManipArena, a standardized evaluation framework designed to bridge simulation and real-world execution. ManipArena comprises 20 diverse tasks across 10,812 expert trajectories emphasizing reasoning-oriented manipulation tasks requiring semantic and spatial reasoning, supports multi-level generalization through controlled out-of-distribution settings, and incorporates long-horizon mobile manipulation beyond tabletop scenarios. The framework further provides rich sensory diagnostics, including low-level motor signals, and synchronized real-to-sim environments constructed via high-quality 3D scanning. Together, these features enable fair, realistic, and reproducible evaluation for both VLA and world model approaches, providing a scalable foundation for diagnosing and advancing embodied intelligence systems.