HODAgent: Towards On-Demand, Responsive Humanoids for Physical World Human Interaction

We propose HODAgent, a System-2 embodied agent for humanoid robots in service settings, addressing situated intent, responsive execution, task revision, and outcome verification. Its semi-duplex architecture integrates an Env-Interactor, Planner, Executor, and hierarchical Memory to maintain coherent interaction, planning, and task state during service episodes. This allows handling new requests during motion, retaining progress, revising actions, and grounding closure in execution outcomes. A shared interface connects simulation and physical robots (Unitree G1), isolating platform-specific control. In an interactive simulation with 164 cases, HODAgent achieves 84.8% and 91.5% Joint Success under two VLM backbones, outperforming baselines by 9.8 and 18.9 points. On physical robots, pass rates are 92% (atomic), 72% (composite), and 63.3% (complete tasks). On multiple embodied benchmarks, it improves over baselines by 0.7-9.0 points. Results show a unified System-2 agent enables adaptive humanoid service across simulation and reality.

Capek 0.5: An Execution-Centric Vision-Language Model for Embodied Intelligence

Vision-language models are increasingly serving as the reasoning core of embodied agents. Robot execution is inherently iterative: each action reshapes the scene and physical state, continually renewing what must be perceived, reasoned about, and verified. Meeting these demands requires complementary capabilities that differ in supervision signals, prediction formats, and verification criteria. Existing approaches typically develop these capabilities against isolated, task-specific objectives, leaving open how they should be organized and integrated around execution as a whole. We present Capek 0.5, an embodied vision-language model built around an execution-centric capability taxonomy. Rather than organizing training by datasets or tasks, the taxonomy groups embodied capabilities according to their functional roles throughout execution and comprises four capability families: Spatial Reasoning, Temporal Understanding, Action Guidance, and State Verification. Each capability is first acquired by a dedicated specialist through reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards from a shared backbone, and the specialists are then consolidated into a single inference-time model through weight-space merging followed by routed policy-space distillation. We instantiate Capek 0.5 at the 2B and 35B-A3B scales and evaluate it from three complementary perspectives: comprehensive benchmark suites including Capek-StateBench, a new benchmark for state verification; a controlled study of capability retention from specialists to the unified model; and closed-loop evaluation in simulated embodied environments. Capek 0.5 improves the large majority of matched benchmark rows over its initialization, retains all four specialized capabilities in one checkpoint with quantified losses, and transfers to closed-loop embodied task execution.

ASPO: Adaptive Sentence-Level Preference Optimization for Fine-Grained Multimodal Reasoning

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has gained significant attention for its simplicity and computational efficiency in aligning large language models (LLMs). Recent advancements have extended DPO to multimodal scenarios, achieving strong performance. However, traditional DPO relies on binary preference optimization, rewarding or penalizing entire responses without considering fine-grained segment correctness, leading to suboptimal solutions. The root of this issue lies in the absence of fine-grained supervision during the optimization process. To address this, we propose Adaptive Sentence-level Preference Optimization (ASPO), which evaluates individual sentences for more precise preference optimization. By dynamically calculating adaptive rewards at the sentence level based on model predictions, ASPO enhances response content assessment without additional models or parameters. This significantly improves the alignment of multimodal features. Extensive experiments show that ASPO substantially enhances the overall performance of multimodal models.

CoF: Coarse to Fine-Grained Image Understanding for Multi-modal Large Language Models

The impressive performance of Large Language Model (LLM) has prompted researchers to develop Multi-modal LLM (MLLM), which has shown great potential for various multi-modal tasks. However, current MLLM often struggles to effectively address fine-grained multi-modal challenges. We argue that this limitation is closely linked to the models' visual grounding capabilities. The restricted spatial awareness and perceptual acuity of visual encoders frequently lead to interference from irrelevant background information in images, causing the models to overlook subtle but crucial details. As a result, achieving fine-grained regional visual comprehension becomes difficult. In this paper, we break down multi-modal understanding into two stages, from Coarse to Fine (CoF). In the first stage, we prompt the MLLM to locate the approximate area of the answer. In the second stage, we further enhance the model's focus on relevant areas within the image through visual prompt engineering, adjusting attention weights of pertinent regions. This, in turn, improves both visual grounding and overall performance in downstream tasks. Our experiments show that this approach significantly boosts the performance of baseline models, demonstrating notable generalization and effectiveness. Our CoF approach is available online at https://github.com/Gavin001201/CoF.

Enhancing Fine-Grained Vision-Language Pretraining with Negative Augmented Samples

Existing Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) methods have achieved remarkable improvements across a variety of vision-language tasks, confirming their effectiveness in capturing coarse-grained semantic correlations. However, their capability for fine-grained understanding, which is critical for many nuanced vision-language applications, remains limited. Prevailing VLP models often overlook the intricate distinctions in expressing different modal features and typically depend on the similarity of holistic features for cross-modal interactions. Moreover, these models directly align and integrate features from different modalities, focusing more on coarse-grained general representations, thus failing to capture the nuanced differences necessary for tasks demanding a more detailed perception. In response to these limitations, we introduce Negative Augmented Samples(NAS), a refined vision-language pretraining model that innovatively incorporates NAS to specifically address the challenge of fine-grained understanding. NAS utilizes a Visual Dictionary(VD) as a semantic bridge between visual and linguistic domains. Additionally, it employs a Negative Visual Augmentation(NVA) method based on the VD to generate challenging negative image samples. These samples deviate from positive samples exclusively at the token level, thereby necessitating that the model discerns the subtle disparities between positive and negative samples with greater precision. Comprehensive experiments validate the efficacy of NAS components and underscore its potential to enhance fine-grained vision-language comprehension.