AICVLGROMar 18, 2025

Cosmos-Reason1: From Physical Common Sense To Embodied Reasoning

NVIDIA
arXiv:2503.15558v3117 citationsh-index: 15Has Code
Originality Incremental advance
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This work addresses the challenge of building Physical AI systems that can reason and act in real-world environments, representing an incremental advancement in multimodal language models for embodied tasks.

The paper tackles the problem of enabling AI systems to understand the physical world and make embodied decisions by developing Cosmos-Reason1 models, which show significant improvements in physical common sense and embodied reasoning benchmarks through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning.

Physical AI systems need to perceive, understand, and perform complex actions in the physical world. In this paper, we present the Cosmos-Reason1 models that can understand the physical world and generate appropriate embodied decisions (e.g., next step action) in natural language through long chain-of-thought reasoning processes. We begin by defining key capabilities for Physical AI reasoning, with a focus on physical common sense and embodied reasoning. To represent physical common sense, we use a hierarchical ontology that captures fundamental knowledge about space, time, and physics. For embodied reasoning, we rely on a two-dimensional ontology that generalizes across different physical embodiments. Building on these capabilities, we develop two multimodal large language models, Cosmos-Reason1-7B and Cosmos-Reason1-56B. We curate data and train our models in two stages: Physical AI supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Physical AI reinforcement learning (RL). To evaluate our models, we build comprehensive benchmarks for physical common sense and embodied reasoning according to our ontologies. Evaluation results show that Physical AI SFT and RL bring significant improvements. To facilitate the development of Physical AI, we make our code and pre-trained models available under the NVIDIA Open Model License at https://github.com/nvidia-cosmos/cosmos-reason1.

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