Proc4Gem: Foundation models for physical agency through procedural generation

Yixin Lin; Jan Humplik; Sandy H. Huang; Leonard Hasenclever; Francesco Romano; Stefano Saliceti; Daniel Zheng; Jose Enrique Chen; Catarina Barros; Adrian Collister; Matt Young; Adil Dostmohamed; Ben Moran; Ken Caluwaerts; Marissa Giustina; Joss Moore; Kieran Connell; Francesco Nori; Nicolas Heess; Steven Bohez; Arunkumar Byravan

arXiv · 2503.08593

Proc4Gem: Foundation models for physical agency through procedural generation

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Abstract

In robot learning, it is common to either ignore the environment semantics, focusing on tasks like whole-body control which only require reasoning about robot-environment contacts, or conversely to ignore contact dynamics, focusing on grounding high-level movement in vision and language. In this work, we show that advances in generative modeling, photorealistic rendering, and procedural generation allow us to tackle tasks requiring both. By generating contact-rich trajectories with accurate physics in semantically-diverse simulations, we can distill behaviors into large multimodal models that directly transfer to the real world: a system we call Proc4Gem. Specifically, we show that a foundation model, Gemini, fine-tuned on only simulation data, can be instructed in language to control a quadruped robot to push an object with its body to unseen targets in unseen real-world environments. Our real-world results demonstrate the promise of using simulation to imbue foundation models with physical agency. Videos can be found at our website: https://sites.google.com/view/proc4gem

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Yixin Lin, Jan Humplik, Sandy H. Huang, Leonard Hasenclever, Francesco Romano, Stefano Saliceti, Daniel Zheng, Jose Enrique Chen, Catarina Barros, Adrian Collister, Matt Young, Adil Dostmohamed, Ben Moran, Ken Caluwaerts, Marissa Giustina, Joss Moore, Kieran Connell, Francesco Nori, Nicolas Heess, Steven Bohez, Arunkumar Byravan. 2025-03-11. Proc4Gem: Foundation models for physical agency through procedural generation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08593

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