Paper

PhysBrain 1.5: From Vision-Language Models to Physical Foundation Models

Unifies embodied QA, action trajectories, and future scene prediction as discrete autoregressive generation in one VLM-derived model.

arXiv ↗Sep 14, 2026Code ↗

  • cv
  • robotics
  • vision-language-action models
  • world models
  • embodied ai
Complete pipeline diagram showing context encoding, unified modeling, and physical capabilities
Complete pipeline diagram showing context encoding, unified modeling, and physical capabilities

What it is

Extends a VLM into a single autoregressive model for embodied understanding, action generation, and future-state prediction using shared discrete tokens. Instead of separate perception, policy, and world models, it casts language, end-effector motion, and future RGB/depth/mask outputs as one token stream and trains a shared VLM backbone on human-video pretraining plus embodied SFT.

Key results

  • 72.5 avg on 28 embodied benchmarks, best open-source overall
  • Ranks 1st on 14 benchmarks and 2nd on 10 among open-source models
  • Near proprietary models: 72.5 vs GPT-6-Astra 73.3 and Gemini 3.6 Flash 73.0

A shared token-generation interface can jointly learn physical understanding, action, and state prediction without giving up strong embodied benchmark performance.

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