MotorMind: Scaffolding General Vision Language Models for Zero-Shot Robot Manipulation

arXiv:2609.38078 · cs.RO · Submitted 2026-09-29 · Read on arXiv

cs.RO

Submitted: 2026-09-29

Updated: 2026-09-29

Project page: https://motor-mind.github.io

Terminology

• Scaffolding — 31× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Verification — 16× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Grounding — 14× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 10× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Ablation — 9× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Foundation Model — 8× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Foundation Models — 7× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Verifier — 7× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 6× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adaptive Reasoning — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Visual Grounding — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Abstraction — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adaptation — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Semantic Understanding — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ablation study — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Conference on Robot Learning — 3× in this paper
• Core — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generalization — 3× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Vision-language models — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Action Decoder — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Action Chunking — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Affordance — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmarking — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Catastrophic Forgetting — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Closed-Loop Control — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Failure Modes — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Generative Modeling — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• In International Conference on Learning Representations — 1× in this paper
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Steering — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Temporal Reasoning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Vision-Language Models (VLMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• World Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Zero-Shot Generalization — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Zero-Shot Transfer — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes

Sources

• SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts
• VoLo: A Physical Orchestrator for Open-Vocabulary Long-Horizon Manipulation
• Show-Harness: Just a VLM Agent Can Play Robots
• ETA: A New Agentic Paradigm for Embodied Tasks
• RHO: Your Coding Agent is Secretly a Roboticist
• MolmoAct2: Action Reasoning Models for Real-world Deployment
• CaP-X: A Framework for Benchmarking and Improving Coding Agents for Robot Manipulation
• Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy
• Transferring the Intelligence of VLMs to Robotic Control
• VIA: Visual Interface Agent for Robot Control
• Guava: Distilling Frontier VLMs into a Compact Agent through a Robotic Manipulation Harness
• ASPIRE: Agentic /Skills Discovery for Robotics
• Mechanistic Finetuning of Vision-Language-Action Models via Few-Shot Demonstrations
• Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI
• Learning Affordances at Inference-Time for Vision-Language-Action Models
• HY-Embodied-0.5: Embodied Foundation Models for Real-World Agents
• Hy-Embodied-VLM-1.0: Efficient Physical-World Agents
• Harness VLA: Steering Frozen VLAs into Reliable Manipulation Primitives via Memory-Guided Agents
• LIBERO-PRO: Towards Robust and Fair Evaluation of Vision-Language-Action Models Beyond Memorization

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