This survey examines what can be reused across robot embodiments and what must still be implemented on a new robot, and examines recent work through three overlapping research directions: sharing semantics and perception, sharing robot data and interfaces, and learning correspondence across embodiments.
Abstract
Robot foundation models (RFMs), including vision-language-action (VLA) policies, are often discussed through a scaling view: more data, larger models, and broader benchmarks should improve generalization. In robotics, however, a model can generalize while work still remains before it can run on a robot with a particular body. The work required differs across methods and target robots, and those differences affect practical deployment. We call the gap between reusable models, representations, or data and their use in execution on the target robot the embodiment gap. This survey examines what can be reused across robot embodiments and what must still be implemented on a new robot. We place existing methods on a two-axis map that shows the type of shared structure and the stage at which adaptation is needed for execution on the target robot. We then examine recent work through three overlapping research directions: sharing semantics and perception, sharing robot data and interfaces, and learning correspondence across embodiments. We also propose a reporting framework for adaptation work that success rate alone does not reveal. The framework identifies the work that should be checked when comparing cross-embodiment learning and highlights work that remains on a new robot and questions for future study.
For robots to operate reliably in real-world environments, they need to perceive their surroundings, act, and reason about the consequences of those actions. Rapid progress in the domains of representation learning, VLA models, and world models has significantly enhanced the capabilities of robot learning systems, enabling robots to work in increasingly complex environments. However, these paradigms are typically developed in isolation, resulting in fragmented systems that struggle with generalization, long-horizon temporal reasoning and planning, and deployment in unstructured environments. In this survey, we present a unified perspective on robot learning by organizing the existing methods along three complementary axes: understanding through representation learning, acting through VLA models, and reasoning through world models. We introduce a structured taxonomy that captures key design choices in environment representation, policy learning, and predictive modeling, and summarize the recent progress in these domains. Beyond classifying the existing works, we analyze how these components interact, discuss common limitations, and highlight emerging trends towards more integrated systems. Through this lens, we identify the challenges in the domain of robot learning, including uncertainty quantification, out-of-distribution generalization, cross-embodiment transfer, long-context understanding, and long-horizon planning. We argue that these challenges arise not only from limitations within individual components but also from the lack of integration across perception, action, and reasoning. Building on this analysis, we outline future directions towards unified, physically grounded, and probabilistic robot learning to develop robust robotic systems that maintain consistent internal representations and support decision making over extended interactions in real-world environments.
Shaunak A. Mehta, Ananya Hazarika, Hao-Chen Zhang et al.· Trans. Mach. Learn. Res.· 0 citations
The World-Cognition Model is presented, a human-centered embodied agent built on the SLAK architecture (Sensing, Logic, Action, and Knowledge) and an asynchronous runtime and introduces a human-in-the-loop teaching mode that enables users to interactively teach the robot difficult or long-horizon tasks.
This work organizes the embodied data ecosystem as a pyramidspanning five complementary sources: real-robot data, UMI-style data, egocentric and exocentric data, simulation data, and general vision-language data, and further characterize each source in terms of data quality, diversity, reusability, and physical fidelity.
Yifan Ye, Yankai Fu, Ya-hui Lv et al.· arXiv.org· 4 citations
The results provide stronger evidence that RL-only bootstrapping can create the first usable language-conditioned controller for a genuinely novel embodiment, and use reinforcement learning in simulation with dense geometric rewards computed from simulator state.
Damir Nurtdinov, A. Kornaev, A. Maloletov· 0 citations
Enabling robots to adapt to unfamiliar environments as readily as humans remains a moonshot goal of embodied AI. No finite collection of demonstrations can cover every task and situation a robot will encounter, making the ability to learn from context at deployment essential for generalization. Such in-context learning (ICL), however, remains largely beyond the reach of existing robotic policies. The broad agentic capabilities of commercial vision-language models (VLMs), such as GPT-6 Astra, raise a compelling question: can these models learn from demonstrations, examples, and interaction feedback, then translate that information into executable and verifiable robot behavior from a new initial state without gradient updates or persistent changes to task-specific parameters? We introduce GPT-Policy, a general-agent framework for in-context robot learning. GPT-Policy integrates a context compiler that preserves task-relevant visual transitions, a VLM that proposes robot-tool actions, and a constrained controller that verifies and executes each action and reports its outcome. We evaluate its reliability and limitations through task success and efficiency metrics, matched comparisons across models, and controlled context ablations. In real-robot trials, human video demonstrations improve task completion even without robot action labels, while aligned action references yield further gains on contact-sensitive tasks. These findings position GPT-Policy as a step toward robot adaptation through in-context learning, providing an empirical foundation for translating the general-purpose capabilities of VLMs into physical behavior and clarifying the challenges that must be overcome for reliable deployment.
Dong-Zhou Cheng, Tao-Ran Yi, Ye Fang et al.· 0 citations
The Embodied Task Agent is introduced, a new paradigm for extending digital agents into the physical world, and OpenETA is released as its open-source implementation, which provides replaceable Planners, composable Tools and Skills, auditable memory, replayable trajectories, and common interfaces for simulation and real robots.
Yitong Chen, Zezheng Huai, Sixian Li et al.· 1 citation
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