ComSim: Building Scalable Real-World Robot Data Generation via Compositional Simulation

Recent advancements in foundational models, such as large language models and world models, have greatly enhanced the capabilities of robotics, enabling robots to autonomously perform complex tasks. However, acquiring large-scale, high-quality training data for robotics remains a challenge, as it often requires substantial manual effort and is limited in its coverage of diverse real-world environments. To address this, we propose a novel hybrid approach called Compositional Simulation, which combines classical simulation and neural simulation to generate accurate action-video pairs while maintaining real-world consistency. Our approach utilizes a closed-loop real-sim-real data augmentation pipeline, leveraging a small amount of real-world data to generate diverse, large-scale training datasets that cover a broader spectrum of real-world scenarios. We train a neural simulator to transform classical simulation videos into real-world representations, improving the accuracy of policy models trained in real-world environments. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method significantly reduces the sim2real domain gap, resulting in higher success rates in real-world policy model training. Our approach offers a scalable solution for generating robust training data and bridging the gap between simulated and real-world robotics.

Select-then-Solve: Paradigm Routing as Inference-Time Optimization for LLM Agents

When an LLM-based agent improves on a task, is the gain from the model itself or from the reasoning paradigm wrapped around it? We study this question by comparing six inference-time paradigms, namely Direct, CoT, ReAct, Plan-Execute, Reflection, and ReCode, across four frontier LLMs and ten benchmarks, yielding roughly 18,000 runs. We find that reasoning structure helps dramatically on some tasks but hurts on others: ReAct improves over Direct by 44pp on GAIA, while CoT degrades performance by 15pp on HumanEval. No single paradigm dominates, and oracle per-task selection beats the best fixed paradigm by 17.1pp on average. Motivated by this complementarity, we propose a select-then-solve approach: before answering each task, a lightweight embedding-based router selects the most suitable paradigm. Across four models, the router improves average accuracy from 47.6% to 53.1%, outperforming the best fixed paradigm at 50.3% by 2.8pp and recovering up to 37% of the oracle gap. In contrast, zero-shot self-routing only works for GPT-5 at 67.1% and fails for weaker models, all trailing the learned router. Our results argue that reasoning paradigm selection should be a per-task decision made by a learned router, not a fixed architectural choice.

CoEnv: Driving Embodied Multi-Agent Collaboration via Compositional Environment

Multi-agent embodied systems hold promise for complex collaborative manipulation, yet face critical challenges in spatial coordination, temporal reasoning, and shared workspace awareness. Inspired by human collaboration where cognitive planning occurs separately from physical execution, we introduce the concept of compositional environment -- a synergistic integration of real-world and simulation components that enables multiple robotic agents to perceive intentions and operate within a unified decision-making space. Building on this concept, we present CoEnv, a framework that leverages simulation for safe strategy exploration while ensuring reliable real-world deployment. CoEnv operates through three stages: real-to-sim scene reconstruction that digitizes physical workspaces, VLM-driven action synthesis supporting both real-time planning with high-level interfaces and iterative planning with code-based trajectory generation, and validated sim-to-real transfer with collision detection for safe deployment. Extensive experiments on challenging multi-arm manipulation benchmarks demonstrate CoEnv's effectiveness in achieving high task success rates and execution efficiency, establishing a new paradigm for multi-agent embodied AI.

Ego to World: Collaborative Spatial Reasoning in Embodied Systems via Reinforcement Learning

Understanding the world from distributed, partial viewpoints is a fundamental challenge for embodied multi-agent systems. Each agent perceives the environment through an ego-centric view that is often limited by occlusion and ambiguity. To study this problem, we introduce the Ego-to-World (E2W) benchmark, which evaluates a vision-language model's ability to fuse heterogeneous viewpoints across three tasks: (i) global counting, (ii) relational location reasoning, and (iii) action-oriented grasping that requires predicting view-specific image coordinates. To address this setting, we propose CoRL, a two-stage framework that combines Chain-of-Thought supervised fine-tuning with reinforcement learning using Group-Relative Policy Optimization. Its core component, the Cross-View Spatial Reward (CVSR), provides dense task-aligned feedback by linking reasoning steps to visual evidence, ensuring coherent cross-view entity resolution, and guiding the model toward correct final predictions. Experiments on E2W show that CoRL consistently surpasses strong proprietary and open-source baselines on both reasoning and perception-grounding metrics, while ablations further confirm the necessity of each CVSR component. Beyond that, CoRL generalizes to external spatial reasoning benchmarks and enables effective real-world multi-robot manipulation with calibrated multi-camera rigs, demonstrating cross-view localization and successful grasp-and-place execution. Together, E2W and CoRL provide a principled foundation for learning world-centric scene understanding from distributed, ego-centric observations, advancing collaborative embodied AI.

Reading $ eq$ Seeing: Diagnosing and Closing the Typography Gap in Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models achieve near-perfect accuracy at reading text in images, yet prove largely typography-blind: capable of recognizing what text says, but not how it looks. We systematically investigate this gap by evaluating font family, size, style, and color recognition across 26 fonts, four scripts, and three difficulty levels. Our evaluation of 15 state-of-the-art VLMs reveals a striking perception hierarchy: color recognition is near-perfect, yet font style detection remains universally poor. We further find that model scale fails to predict performance and that accuracy is uniform across difficulty levels, together pointing to a training-data omission rather than a capacity ceiling. LoRA fine-tuning on a small set of synthetic samples substantially improves an open-source model, narrowing the gap to the best closed-source system and surpassing it on font size recognition. Font style alone remains resistant to fine-tuning, suggesting that relational visual reasoning may require architectural innovation beyond current patch-based encoders. We release our evaluation framework, data, and fine-tuning recipe to support progress in closing the typographic gap in vision-language understanding.

TouchGuide: Inference-Time Steering of Visuomotor Policies via Touch Guidance

Fine-grained and contact-rich manipulation remain challenging for robots, largely due to the underutilization of tactile feedback. To address this, we introduce TouchGuide, a novel cross-policy visuo-tactile fusion paradigm that fuses modalities within a low-dimensional action space. Specifically, TouchGuide operates in two stages to guide a pre-trained diffusion or flow-matching visuomotor policy at inference time. First, the policy produces a coarse, visually-plausible action using only visual inputs during early sampling. Second, a task-specific Contact Physical Model (CPM) provides tactile guidance to steer and refine the action, ensuring it aligns with realistic physical contact conditions. Trained through contrastive learning on limited expert demonstrations, the CPM provides a tactile-informed feasibility score to steer the sampling process toward refined actions that satisfy physical contact constraints. Furthermore, to facilitate TouchGuide training with high-quality and cost-effective data, we introduce TacUMI, a data collection system. TacUMI achieves a favorable trade-off between precision and affordability; by leveraging rigid fingertips, it obtains direct tactile feedback, thereby enabling the collection of reliable tactile data. Extensive experiments on five challenging contact-rich tasks, such as shoe lacing and chip handover, show that TouchGuide consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art visuo-tactile policies.

Advances and Innovations in the Multi-Agent Robotic System (MARS) Challenge

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models and vision-languageaction models have significantly driven progress in Embodied AI. As the field transitions toward more complex task scenarios, multi-agent system frameworks are becoming essential for achieving scalable, efficient, and collaborative solutions. This shift is fueled by three primary factors: increasing agent capabilities, enhancing system efficiency through task delegation, and enabling advanced human-agent interactions. To address the challenges posed by multi-agent collaboration, we propose the Multi-Agent Robotic System (MARS) Challenge, held at the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on SpaVLE. The competition focuses on two critical areas: planning and control, where participants explore multi-agent embodied planning using vision-language models (VLMs) to coordinate tasks and policy execution to perform robotic manipulation in dynamic environments. By evaluating solutions submitted by participants, the challenge provides valuable insights into the design and coordination of embodied multi-agent systems, contributing to the future development of advanced collaborative AI systems.

Toward Efficient Agents: Memory, Tool learning, and Planning

Recent years have witnessed increasing interest in extending large language models into agentic systems. While the effectiveness of agents has continued to improve, efficiency, which is crucial for real-world deployment, has often been overlooked. This paper therefore investigates efficiency from three core components of agents: memory, tool learning, and planning, considering costs such as latency, tokens, steps, etc. Aimed at conducting comprehensive research addressing the efficiency of the agentic system itself, we review a broad range of recent approaches that differ in implementation yet frequently converge on shared high-level principles including but not limited to bounding context via compression and management, designing reinforcement learning rewards to minimize tool invocation, and employing controlled search mechanisms to enhance efficiency, which we discuss in detail. Accordingly, we characterize efficiency in two complementary ways: comparing effectiveness under a fixed cost budget, and comparing cost at a comparable level of effectiveness. This trade-off can also be viewed through the Pareto frontier between effectiveness and cost. From this perspective, we also examine efficiency oriented benchmarks by summarizing evaluation protocols for these components and consolidating commonly reported efficiency metrics from both benchmark and methodological studies. Moreover, we discuss the key challenges and future directions, with the goal of providing promising insights.

Exploring the Potential of LLMs for Serendipity Evaluation in Recommender Systems

Serendipity plays a pivotal role in enhancing user satisfaction within recommender systems, yet its evaluation poses significant challenges due to its inherently subjective nature and conceptual ambiguity. Current algorithmic approaches predominantly rely on proxy metrics for indirect assessment, often failing to align with real user perceptions, thus creating a gap. With large language models (LLMs) increasingly revolutionizing evaluation methodologies across various human annotation tasks, we are inspired to explore a core research proposition: Can LLMs effectively simulate human users for serendipity evaluation? To address this question, we conduct a meta-evaluation on two datasets derived from real user studies in the e-commerce and movie domains, focusing on three key aspects: the accuracy of LLMs compared to conventional proxy metrics, the influence of auxiliary data on LLM comprehension, and the efficacy of recently popular multi-LLM techniques. Our findings indicate that even the simplest zero-shot LLMs achieve parity with, or surpass, the performance of conventional metrics. Furthermore, multi-LLM techniques and the incorporation of auxiliary data further enhance alignment with human perspectives. Based on our findings, the optimal evaluation by LLMs yields a Pearson correlation coefficient of 21.5\% when compared to the results of the user study. This research implies that LLMs may serve as potentially accurate and cost-effective evaluators, introducing a new paradigm for serendipity evaluation in recommender systems.

VIKI-R: Coordinating Embodied Multi-Agent Cooperation via Reinforcement Learning

Coordinating multiple embodied agents in dynamic environments remains a core challenge in artificial intelligence, requiring both perception-driven reasoning and scalable cooperation strategies. While recent works have leveraged large language models (LLMs) for multi-agent planning, a few have begun to explore vision-language models (VLMs) for visual reasoning. However, these VLM-based approaches remain limited in their support for diverse embodiment types. In this work, we introduce VIKI-Bench, the first hierarchical benchmark tailored for embodied multi-agent cooperation, featuring three structured levels: agent activation, task planning, and trajectory perception. VIKI-Bench includes diverse robot embodiments, multi-view visual observations, and structured supervision signals to evaluate reasoning grounded in visual inputs. To demonstrate the utility of VIKI-Bench, we propose VIKI-R, a two-stage framework that fine-tunes a pretrained vision-language model (VLM) using Chain-of-Thought annotated demonstrations, followed by reinforcement learning under multi-level reward signals. Our extensive experiments show that VIKI-R significantly outperforms baselines method across all task levels. Furthermore, we show that reinforcement learning enables the emergence of compositional cooperation patterns among heterogeneous agents. Together, VIKI-Bench and VIKI-R offer a unified testbed and method for advancing multi-agent, visual-driven cooperation in embodied AI systems.