Humanoid control requires natural whole-body coordination, precise real-time responses to control signals, and robust generalization across diverse environmental contexts, making it a cornerstone for generalist embodied agents. Behavior Foundation Models (BFMs) have recently emerged as a promising solution to address these challenges by leveraging large-scale behavioral data to achieve superior expressiveness, versatility and generalization. However, despite growing interest in scaling BFMs to further improve their capabilities, it remains unclear how key factors, including the learning paradigm, behavioral data and model architecture should be coordinated to enable effective scaling. In this work, we revisit the scaling recipe for BFMs and demonstrate that substantial performance gains can be achieved through the coordination of three core components: 1) the learning paradigm of motion tracking that reformulates diverse humanoid control problems as the reproduction of integrated whole-body behaviors in the global frame; 2) the strategic synergy between on-policy rollout quantity and reference motion diversity; and 3) the expressive and scalable model architecture termed Humanoid Transformer that facilitates the natural emergence of structured behavioral representations. Through extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world deployment, we demonstrate that our approach yields significant improvements in control fidelity and task generalization, reducing Mean Per-Keypoint Position Error (MPKPE) on the test set by over 10% in local mode and 82% in global mode compared with existing humanoid controllers. These results establish BFM as a principled and effective foundation for scalable and general-purpose humanoid control.
Humanoid robots stand at the forefront of robotics, aiming to capture the agility, robustness, and expressivity of human movement in an anthropomorphic form. The locomotion control of humanoids has evolved from classical model-based methods to reinforcement learning powered by large-scale simulation and now to generative models that produce adaptive, whole-body behaviors, propelling humanoids toward operation in real-world environments. This survey positions humanoid control at a turning point, converging toward a unified paradigm of physics-guided generative intelligence that integrates optimization, learning, and predictive reasoning. We identify three core principles linking these paradigms: physics-based modeling, constrained decision-making, and adaptation to uncertainty. Building on these connections, we provide recommendations for researchers and outline open challenges in safety, accessibility, and human-level capability. These directions represent a transformation from engineered stability to intelligent autonomy, laying the groundwork for humanoid generalists capable of operating safely, collaborating naturally, and extending human capability in the open world.
Yan Gu, Guanya Shi, Fan Shi et al.· Science Robotics· 7 citations
The motion controller is one of the most fundamental modules in embodied intelligence systems. Driven by large-scale human motion-capture data and the motion-tracking paradigm, humanoid control has achieved remarkable progress in recent years. However, migrating this recipe to the quadrupedal setting is far less straightforward: animal motion data is scarcer and harder to capture at scale than human data, and cross-embodiment retargeting remains fragile. We present ABot-C0, a generalist motion-control system for quadruped robots that establishes three complementary behavior foundations: a scalable multi-source motion-data pipeline, robust policy learning across motion tracking, locomotion, and scene interaction, and a unified deployment stack for reliable real-world operation. Fundamentally, we construct a data pyramid through conditional video-generation synthesis, annotated motion capture, teleoperation, and human design, producing 16,074 physically feasible motion clips as the data foundation for diverse motion-learning demands. With large-scale motion data, a Flow-Matching generalist policy demonstrates, for the first time, a scaling law for quadruped motion tracking: performance improves consistently as training scales up, with zero-shot capability to track unseen motions. We then go a step further toward robust all-terrain locomotion by adopting a three-stage privileged-to-perceptive framework with temporal LiDAR memory and terrain-predictive supervision. Collectively, these components form a motion generalist that coordinates multi-policy execution, smooth behavior transitions, energy-efficient control, and safety mechanisms for real-world deployment. Extensive experiments on urban-terrain autonomous navigation and companion-style multimodal interaction demonstrate that quadruped robots can move beyond functional demos toward product-level behavioral intelligence.
Xufeng Zhao, Fuzhi Yang, Jianhui Chen et al.· 0 citations
GigaBrain-WBC-0.5, the first Behavior World Model for humanoid whole-body control, is presented, which trains a causal Transformer to jointly predict its next action, next state, and the distribution over its next latent behavior command, so the network that acts also models how the environment shapes what it can do next.
Ziyang Cheng, Tianshu Tang, Jinxi Lan et al.· 0 citations
Humanoid robots hold great promise as general-purpose agents in human-centered environments, yet generalist vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models are not readily applicable to humanoid whole-body loco-manipulation. The high dimensionality and interdependence of humanoid motions make it challenging for conventional single-stage VLA architectures to coordinate locomotion, waist posture, and dual-arm manipulation effectively. Moreover, policies trained through offline behavior cloning can remain suboptimal during real-world deployment. Although online reinforcement learning can refine policies through real-world interaction, directly tuning large VLA backbones demands excessive computation and may introduce safety risks during real-robot exploration. To address these bottlenecks, we introduce HAF (Humanoid Adaptation Framework), a two-part framework consisting of HAF-VLA and HAF-Steer that transfers off-the-shelf generalist VLA foundation models to humanoid whole-body loco-manipulation. HAF-VLA is a hierarchical action-flow generator built on a pretrained flow-matching VLA. It splits full-body action denoising into three sequential stages with stage embeddings and cross-stage KV caches that retain kinematic dependencies, avoiding incoherent whole-body actions from one-shot generation. On top of the frozen HAF-VLA, HAF-Steer is a latent offline-to-online RL pipeline that leverages flow-matching invertibility and DCT-based dimensionality reduction to restrict RL optimization to a compact noise subspace and train a regularized SAC policy. This avoids updating the large VLA backbone and enables efficient real-world policy refinement. Evaluated on seven real-world humanoid loco-manipulation tasks, HAF surpasses vanilla single-stage VLA baselines and improves whole-body coordination and task performance. Project website: https://grange007.github.io/HAF .
Langzhe Gu, Chengkai Hou, Meng Li et al.· 0 citations
Humanoid general motion tracking requires policies that can follow diverse whole-body references while maintaining balance. Building such policies involves many practical design choices, and their individual effects are often hard to assess. We address this issue with an empirical study of common modeling and training factors used in recent humanoid motion-imitation pipelines. To make the study controlled and reproducible, we developed YAHMP, an open-source modular framework for training, evaluating, and deploying whole-body motion tracking policies on the Unitree G1. Within YAHMP, we define a nominal configuration and compare variants that differ in motion-command representation, observation history, action representation, actuation profile, hand-force randomization during training, and training approach. We evaluate the resulting policies on a test set of retargeted human motions and compare the nominal policy with TWIST2 as an external baseline trained on the same motion set. The results distinguish choices with clear tracking effects from choices that mainly change actuation effort, training complexity, or physical interaction capability. Finally, we deploy YAHMP policies zero-shot on the real Unitree G1, demonstrating diverse whole-body motion tracking, balance under external perturbations, and forceful interaction.