North China University of Technology
Abstract:Canary deployment routes a fraction of traffic to a new software version, monitors metrics, and rolls back on regression. Mainstream controllers (Argo Rollouts, Spinnaker, Flagger) change the deployed system's cryptographic identity during the canary window. The drift is harmless for stateless microservices but breaks the claim that "the agent you certified is still the agent you have" for safety-critical embodied agents, forcing re-certification per canary. We present ICAN-Deploy (Identity-stable CANary Deployment), a middleware construction whose state machine holds the identity hash invariant across the canary window by separating capability names (frozen, hashed) from capability versions (mutable runtime state). We implement ICAN-Deploy inside a runtime governance layer for LLM-driven robots and verify invariance by closed-form proof, AST lint, and TLA+ model-checking, then corroborate over N=100 real canary cycles on a Franka Panda arm in MuJoCo (zero drift; entry latency 95% BCa CI [1.52, 2.01] ms). A feature-flagged strawman that folds versions into the manifest falsifies on the same workload. A system certified once at identity-creation time can then ship arbitrary capability evolution under that same certification, within the version-and-name envelope.
Abstract:Recent progress in embodied AI has produced a growing ecosystem of robot policies, foundation models, and modular runtimes. However, current evaluation remains dominated by task success metrics such as completion rate or manipulation accuracy. These metrics leave a critical gap: they do not measure whether embodied systems are governable -- whether they respect capability boundaries, enforce policies, recover safely, maintain audit trails, and respond to human oversight. We present EmbodiedGovBench, a benchmark for governance-oriented evaluation of embodied agent systems. Rather than asking only whether a robot can complete a task, EmbodiedGovBench evaluates whether the system remains controllable, policy-bounded, recoverable, auditable, and evolution-safe under realistic perturbations. The benchmark covers seven governance dimensions: unauthorized capability invocation, runtime drift robustness, recovery success, policy portability, version upgrade safety, human override responsiveness, and audit completeness. We define a benchmark structure spanning single-robot and fleet settings, with scenario templates, perturbation operators, governance metrics, and baseline evaluation protocols. We describe how the benchmark can be instantiated over embodied capability runtimes with modular interfaces and contract-aware upgrade workflows. Our analysis suggests that embodied governance should become a first-class evaluation target. EmbodiedGovBench provides the initial measurement framework for that shift.
Abstract:As embodied robots move toward fleet-scale operation, multi-robot coordination is becoming a central systems challenge. Existing approaches often treat this as motivation for increasing internal multi-agent decomposition within each robot. We argue for a different principle: multi-robot coordination does not require intra-robot multi-agent fragmentation. Each robot should remain a single embodied agent with its own persistent runtime, local policy scope, capability state, and recovery authority, while coordination emerges through federation across robots at the fleet level. We present Federated Single-Agent Robotics (FSAR), a runtime architecture for multi-robot coordination built on single-agent robot runtimes. Each robot exposes a governed capability surface rather than an internally fragmented agent society. Fleet coordination is achieved through shared capability registries, cross-robot task delegation, policy-aware authority assignment, trust-scoped interaction, and layered recovery protocols. We formalize key coordination relations including authority delegation, inter-robot capability requests, local-versus-fleet recovery boundaries, and hierarchical human supervision, and describe a fleet runtime architecture supporting shared Embodied Capability Module (ECM) discovery, contract-aware cross-robot coordination, and fleet-level governance. We evaluate FSAR on representative multi-robot coordination scenarios against decomposition-heavy baselines. Results show statistically significant gains in governance locality (d=2.91, p<.001 vs. centralized control) and recovery containment (d=4.88, p<.001 vs. decomposition-heavy), while reducing authority conflicts and policy violations across all scenarios. Our results support the view that the path from embodied agents to embodied fleets is better served by federation across coherent robot runtimes than by fragmentation within them.
Abstract:Embodied agents increasingly rely on modular capabilities that can be installed, upgraded, composed, and governed at runtime. Prior work has introduced embodied capability modules (ECMs) as reusable units of embodied functionality, and recent research has explored their runtime governance and controlled evolution. However, a key systems question remains unresolved: how can ECMs be composed and released as a stable software ecosystem rather than as ad hoc skill bundles? We present ECM Contracts, a contract-based interface model for embodied capability modules. Unlike conventional software interfaces that specify only input and output types, ECM Contracts encode six dimensions essential for embodied execution: functional signature, behavioral assumptions, resource requirements, permission boundaries, recovery semantics, and version compatibility. Based on this model, we introduce a compatibility framework for ECM installation, composition, and upgrade, enabling static and pre-deployment checks for type mismatches, dependency conflicts, policy violations, resource contention, and recovery incompatibilities. We further propose a release discipline for embodied capabilities, including version-aware compatibility classes, deprecation rules, migration constraints, and policy-sensitive upgrade checks. We implement a prototype ECM registry, resolver, and contract checker, and evaluate the approach on modular embodied tasks in a robotics runtime setting. Results show that contract-aware composition substantially reduces unsafe or invalid module combinations, and that contract-guided release checks improve upgrade safety and rollback readiness compared with schema-only or ad hoc baselines. Our findings suggest that stable embodied software ecosystems require more than modular packaging: they require explicit contracts that connect capability composition, governance, and evolution.
Abstract:Embodied agents are increasingly expected to improve over time by updating their executable capabilities rather than rewriting the agent itself. Prior work has separately studied modular capability packaging, capability evolution, and runtime governance. However, a key systems problem remains underexplored: once an embodied capability module evolves into a new version, how can the hosting system deploy it safely without breaking policy constraints, execution assumptions, or recovery guarantees? We formulate governed capability evolution as a first-class systems problem for embodied agents. We propose a lifecycle-aware upgrade framework in which every new capability version is treated as a governed deployment candidate rather than an immediately executable replacement. The framework introduces four upgrade compatibility checks -- interface, policy, behavioral, and recovery -- and organizes them into a staged runtime pipeline comprising candidate validation, sandbox evaluation, shadow deployment, gated activation, online monitoring, and rollback. We evaluate over 6 rounds of capability upgrade with 15 random seeds. Naive upgrade achieves 72.9% task success but drives unsafe activation to 60% by the final round; governed upgrade retains comparable success (67.4%) while maintaining zero unsafe activations across all rounds (Wilcoxon p=0.003). Shadow deployment reveals 40% of regressions invisible to sandbox evaluation alone, and rollback succeeds in 79.8% of post-activation drift scenarios.
Abstract:Embodied agents are expected to operate persistently in dynamic physical environments, continuously acquiring new capabilities over time. Existing approaches to improving agent performance often rely on modifying the agent itself -- through prompt engineering, policy updates, or structural redesign -- leading to instability and loss of identity in long-lived systems. In this work, we propose a capability-centric evolution paradigm for embodied agents. We argue that a robot should maintain a persistent agent as its cognitive identity, while enabling continuous improvement through the evolution of its capabilities. Specifically, we introduce the concept of Embodied Capability Modules (ECMs), which represent modular, versioned units of embodied functionality that can be learned, refined, and composed over time. We present a unified framework in which capability evolution is decoupled from agent identity. Capabilities evolve through a closed-loop process involving task execution, experience collection, model refinement, and module updating, while all executions are governed by a runtime layer that enforces safety and policy constraints. We demonstrate through simulated embodied tasks that capability evolution improves task success rates from 32.4% to 91.3% over 20 iterations, outperforming both agent-modification baselines and established skill-learning methods (SPiRL, SkiMo), while preserving zero policy drift and zero safety violations. Our results suggest that separating agent identity from capability evolution provides a scalable and safe foundation for long-term embodied intelligence.
Abstract:Embodied agents are evolving from passive reasoning systems into active executors that interact with tools, robots, and physical environments. Once granted execution authority, the central challenge becomes how to keep actions governable at runtime. Existing approaches embed safety and recovery logic inside the agent loop, making execution control difficult to standardize, audit, and adapt. This paper argues that embodied intelligence requires not only stronger agents, but stronger runtime governance. We propose a framework for policy-constrained execution that separates agent cognition from execution oversight. Governance is externalized into a dedicated runtime layer performing policy checking, capability admission, execution monitoring, rollback handling, and human override. We formalize the control boundary among the embodied agent, Embodied Capability Modules (ECMs), and runtime governance layer, and validate through 1000 randomized simulation trials across three governance dimensions. Results show 96.2% interception of unauthorized actions, reduction of unsafe continuation from 100% to 22.2% under runtime drift, and 91.4% recovery success with full policy compliance, substantially outperforming all baselines (p<0.001). By reframing runtime governance as a first-class systems problem, this paper positions policy-constrained execution as a key design principle for embodied agent systems.
Abstract:We present Genie Sim PanoRecon, a feed-forward Gaussian-splatting pipeline that delivers high-fidelity, low-cost 3D scenes for robotic manipulation simulation. The panorama input is decomposed into six non-overlapping cube-map faces, processed in parallel, and seamlessly reassembled. To guarantee geometric consistency across views, we devise a depth-aware fusion strategy coupled with a training-free depth-injection module that steers the monocular feed-forward network to generate coherent 3D Gaussians. The whole system reconstructs photo-realistic scenes in seconds and has been integrated into Genie Sim - a LLM-driven simulation platform for embodied synthetic data generation and evaluation - to provide scalable backgrounds for manipulation tasks. For code details, please refer to: https://github.com/AgibotTech/genie_sim/tree/main/source/geniesim_world.
Abstract:Robotic systems lack a principled abstraction for organizing intelligence, capabilities, and execution in a unified manner. Existing approaches either couple skills within monolithic architectures or decompose functionality into loosely coordinated modules or multiple agents, often without a coherent model of identity and control authority. We argue that a robot should be modeled as a single persistent intelligent subject whose capabilities are extended through installable packages. We formalize this view as AEROS (Agent Execution Runtime Operating System), in which each robot corresponds to one persistent agent and capabilities are provided through Embodied Capability Modules (ECMs). Each ECM encapsulates executable skills, models, and tools, while execution constraints and safety guarantees are enforced by a policy-separated runtime. This separation enables modular extensibility, composable capability execution, and consistent system-level safety. We evaluate a reference implementation in PyBullet simulation with a Franka Panda 7-DOF manipulator across eight experiments covering re-planning, failure recovery, policy enforcement, baseline comparison, cross-task generality, ECM hot-swapping, ablation, and failure boundary analysis. Over 100 randomized trials per condition, AEROS achieves 100% task success across three tasks versus baselines (BehaviorTree.CPP-style and ProgPrompt-style at 92--93%, flat pipeline at 67--73%), the policy layer blocks all invalid actions with zero false acceptances, runtime benefits generalize across tasks without task-specific tuning, and ECMs load at runtime with 100% post-swap success.
Abstract:Vision--Language--Action (VLA) models that encode actions using a discrete tokenization scheme are increasingly adopted for robotic manipulation, but existing decoding paradigms remain fundamentally limited. Whether actions are decoded sequentially by autoregressive VLAs or in parallel by discrete diffusion VLAs, once a token is generated, it is typically fixed and cannot be revised in subsequent iterations, so early token errors cannot be effectively corrected later. We propose DFM-VLA, a discrete flow matching VLA for iterative refinement of action tokens. DFM-VLA~models a token-level probability velocity field that dynamically updates the full action sequence across refinement iterations. We investigate two ways to construct the velocity field: an auxiliary velocity-head formulation and an action-embedding-guided formulation. Our framework further adopts a two-stage decoding strategy with an iterative refinement stage followed by deterministic validation for stable convergence. Extensive experiments on CALVIN, LIBERO, and real-world manipulation tasks show that DFM-VLA consistently outperforms strong autoregressive, discrete diffusion, and continuous diffusion baselines in manipulation performance while retaining high inference efficiency. In particular, DFM-VLA achieves an average success length of 4.44 on CALVIN and an average success rate of 95.7\% on LIBERO, highlighting the value of action refinement via discrete flow matching for robotic manipulation. Our project is available \url{https://chris1220313648.github.io/DFM-VLA/}