Generalization in robot manipulation is essential for deploying robots in open-world environments and advancing toward artificial general intelligence. While recent vision-language-action models leverage large pre-trained understanding models for perception and instruction following, their ability to generalize to novel tasks, objects, and settings remains limited. In this work, we present VideoVLA, a simple approach that explores the potential of directly transforming large video generation models into robotic VLA manipulators. Given a language instruction and an image, VideoVLA predicts an action sequence as well as the future visual outcomes. Built on a multi-modal Diffusion Transformer, VideoVLA jointly models video, language, and action modalities, using pre-trained video generative models for joint visual and action forecasting. Our experiments show that high-quality imagined futures correlate with reliable action predictions and task success, highlighting the importance of visual imagination in manipulation. VideoVLA demonstrates strong generalization, including imitating other embodiments' skills and handling novel objects. This dual-prediction strategy--forecasting both actions and their visual consequences--explores a paradigm shift in robot learning and unlocks generalization capabilities in manipulation systems.

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents have demonstrated strong performance in structured environments, yet they continue to struggle in real-world settings where goals are ambiguous, conditions change dynamically, and external supervision is limited. These challenges stem not primarily from the algorithmic limitations but from the characteristics of conventional training environments, which are usually static, task-specific, and externally defined. In contrast, biological agents develop autonomy and adaptivity by interacting with complex, dynamic environments, where most behaviors are ultimately driven by internal physiological needs. Inspired by these biological constraints, we introduce EVAAA (Essential Variables in Autonomous and Adaptive Agents), a 3D virtual environment for training and evaluating egocentric RL agents endowed with internal physiological state variables. In EVAAA, agents must maintain essential variables (EVs)--e.g., satiation, hydration, body temperature, and tissue integrity (the level of damage)--within viable bounds by interacting with environments that increase in difficulty at each stage.

One of the roadblocks for training generalist robotic models today is heterogeneity. Previous robot learning methods often collect data to train with one specific embodiment for one task, which is expensive and prone to overfitting. This work studies the problem of learning policy representations through heterogeneous pre-training on robot data across different embodiments and tasks at scale. We propose Heterogeneous Pre-trained Transformers (HPT), which pre-train a large, shareable trunk of a policy neural network to learn a task and embodiment agnostic shared representation. This general architecture aligns the specific proprioception and vision inputs from distinct embodiments to a short sequence of tokens and then processes such tokens to map to control robots for different tasks. Leveraging the recent large-scale multi-embodiment real-world robotic datasets as well as simulation, deployed robots, and human video datasets, we investigate pre-training policies across heterogeneity. We conduct experiments to investigate the scaling behaviors of training objectives, to the extent of 52 datasets. HPTs outperform several baselines and enhance the fine-tuned policy performance by over 20% on unseen tasks in multiple simulator benchmarks and real-world settings. See the project website (liruiw.github.io/hpt)

Designing generalizable agents capable of adapting to diverse embodiments has achieved significant attention in Reinforcement Learning (RL), which is critical for deploying RL agents in various real-world applications. Previous Cross-Embodiment RL approaches have focused on transferring knowledge across embodiments within specific tasks. These methods often result in knowledge tightly coupled with those tasks and fail to adequately capture the distinct characteristics of different embodiments. To address this limitation, we introduce the notion of Cross-Embodiment Unsupervised RL (CEURL), which leverages unsupervised learning to enable agents to acquire embodiment-aware and task-agnostic knowledge through online interactions within reward-free environments. We formulate CEURL as a novel Controlled Embodiment Markov Decision Process (CE-MDP) and systematically analyze CEURL's pre-training objectives under CE-MDP. Based on these analyses, we develop a novel algorithm Pre-trained Embodiment-Aware Control (PEAC) for handling CEURL, incorporating an intrinsic reward function specifically designed for cross-embodiment pre-training. PEAC not only provides an intuitive optimization strategy for cross-embodiment pre-training but also can integrate flexibly with existing unsupervised RL methods, facilitating cross-embodiment exploration and skill discovery. Extensive experiments in both simulated (e.g., DMC and Robosuite) and real-world environments (e.g., legged locomotion) demonstrate that PEAC significantly improves adaptation performance and cross-embodiment generalization, demonstrating its effectiveness in overcoming the unique challenges of CEURL.

Robot embodiments vary widely in their morphological ( e.g., number and connectivity