Igniting VLMs toward the Embodied Space

Andy Zhai; Brae Liu; Bruno Fang; Chalse Cai; Ellie Ma; Ethan Yin; Hao Wang; Hugo Zhou; James Wang; Lights Shi; Lucy Liang; Make Wang; Qian Wang; Roy Gan; Ryan Yu; Shalfun Li; Starrick Liu; Sylas Chen; Vincent Chen; Zach Xu

arXiv · 2509.11766

Igniting VLMs toward the Embodied Space

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Abstract

While foundation models show remarkable progress in language and vision, existing vision-language models (VLMs) still have limited spatial and embodiment understanding. Transferring VLMs to embodied domains reveals fundamental mismatches between modalities, pretraining distributions, and training objectives, leaving action comprehension and generation as a central bottleneck on the path to AGI. We introduce WALL-OSS, an end-to-end embodied foundation model that leverages large-scale multimodal pretraining to achieve (1) embodiment-aware vision-language understanding, (2) strong language-action association, and (3) robust manipulation capability. Our approach employs a tightly coupled architecture and multi-strategies training curriculum that enables Unified Cross-Level CoT-seamlessly unifying instruction reasoning, subgoal decomposition, and fine-grained action synthesis within a single differentiable framework. Our results show that WALL-OSS attains high success on complex long-horizon manipulations, demonstrates strong instruction-following capabilities, complex understanding and reasoning, and outperforms strong baselines, thereby providing a reliable and scalable path from VLMs to embodied foundation models.

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Andy Zhai, Brae Liu, Bruno Fang, Chalse Cai, Ellie Ma, Ethan Yin, Hao Wang, Hugo Zhou, James Wang, Lights Shi, Lucy Liang, Make Wang, Qian Wang, Roy Gan, Ryan Yu, Shalfun Li, Starrick Liu, Sylas Chen, Vincent Chen, Zach Xu. 2025-09-15. Igniting VLMs toward the Embodied Space. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11766

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