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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17411 |
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| _version_ | 1866908995755704320 |
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| author | Nikolov, Nikolay Albanese, Giuliano Dey, Sombit Yanev, Aleksandar Van Gool, Luc Zaech, Jan-Nico Paudel, Danda Pani |
| author_facet | Nikolov, Nikolay Albanese, Giuliano Dey, Sombit Yanev, Aleksandar Van Gool, Luc Zaech, Jan-Nico Paudel, Danda Pani |
| contents | Robotic Foundation Models (RFMs) hold great promise as generalist, end-to-end systems for robot control. Yet their ability to generalize across new environments, tasks, and embodiments remains limited. We argue that a major bottleneck lies in their foundations: most RFMs are built by fine-tuning internet-pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, these VLMs are trained on 2D image-language tasks and lack the 3D spatial reasoning inherently required for embodied control in the 3D world. Bridging this gap directly with large-scale robotic data is costly and difficult to scale. Instead, we propose to enrich easy-to-collect non-robotic image data with 3D annotations and enhance a pretrained VLM with 3D understanding capabilities. Following this strategy, we train SPEAR-VLM, a 3D-aware VLM that infers object coordinates in 3D space from a single 2D image. Building on SPEAR-VLM, we introduce our main contribution, $~\textbf{SPEAR-1}$: a robotic foundation model that integrates grounded 3D perception with language-instructed embodied control. Trained on $\sim$45M frames from 24 Open X-Embodiment datasets, SPEAR-1 outperforms or matches state-of-the-art models such as $π_0$-FAST and $π_{0.5}$, while it uses 20$\times$ fewer robot demonstrations. This carefully-engineered training strategy unlocks new VLM capabilities and as a consequence boosts the reliability of embodied control beyond what is achievable with only robotic data. We make our model weights and 3D-annotated datasets publicly available at https://spear.insait.ai. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_17411 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | SPEAR-1: Scaling Beyond Robot Demonstrations via 3D Understanding Nikolov, Nikolay Albanese, Giuliano Dey, Sombit Yanev, Aleksandar Van Gool, Luc Zaech, Jan-Nico Paudel, Danda Pani Robotics Machine Learning Robotic Foundation Models (RFMs) hold great promise as generalist, end-to-end systems for robot control. Yet their ability to generalize across new environments, tasks, and embodiments remains limited. We argue that a major bottleneck lies in their foundations: most RFMs are built by fine-tuning internet-pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, these VLMs are trained on 2D image-language tasks and lack the 3D spatial reasoning inherently required for embodied control in the 3D world. Bridging this gap directly with large-scale robotic data is costly and difficult to scale. Instead, we propose to enrich easy-to-collect non-robotic image data with 3D annotations and enhance a pretrained VLM with 3D understanding capabilities. Following this strategy, we train SPEAR-VLM, a 3D-aware VLM that infers object coordinates in 3D space from a single 2D image. Building on SPEAR-VLM, we introduce our main contribution, $~\textbf{SPEAR-1}$: a robotic foundation model that integrates grounded 3D perception with language-instructed embodied control. Trained on $\sim$45M frames from 24 Open X-Embodiment datasets, SPEAR-1 outperforms or matches state-of-the-art models such as $π_0$-FAST and $π_{0.5}$, while it uses 20$\times$ fewer robot demonstrations. This carefully-engineered training strategy unlocks new VLM capabilities and as a consequence boosts the reliability of embodied control beyond what is achievable with only robotic data. We make our model weights and 3D-annotated datasets publicly available at https://spear.insait.ai. |
| title | SPEAR-1: Scaling Beyond Robot Demonstrations via 3D Understanding |
| topic | Robotics Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17411 |