Archived
2026-09-10Show-Harness: Just a VLM Agent Can Play Robots
Yanzhe Chen, Zechen Bai, Zhijun Cao, Wenzheng Zeng, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Yiqi Lin, et al.
arXiv:2609.10522v1Today’s pick is Show-Harness, a new way to let vision-language models control robots without retraining them into full robot policies. The problem is that foundation models can understand goals and scenes, but turning that understanding into precise physical actions is hard, especially when every robot has its own control stack. Show-Harness solves this with a compact semantic interface: the model chooses from discrete action units that are easy for it to reason about, and a robot-specific interpreter turns those units into low-level motions. That means the language model stays in charge of the fine decisions, while the embodiment handles the mechanics. The authors show this works both for closed-source frontier models in zero-shot control and for smaller open models with only a few GPU-hours of fine-tuning. They also extend the same idea to GUI-based demonstration collection. The big takeaway is simple: better interfaces, not just bigger models, may be the key to unlocking general-purpose embodied AI.
Also spotted that day
IdeaAMBIG: Benchmarking Implementation-Critical Gaps in Research-Idea SpecificationsLikelihood-free inference with nuisance parameters through normalizing flowsA positive resolution of the gap-entropy conjectureCharacterizing Language Generation in the Limit: Finite Witnesses and a Separation-Width HierarchOptimal Low-Rank Quantum State Tomography with Bounded-Sample Joint MeasurementsQuantum Feature Engineering for Credit Default Prediction: When and Why IQP Circuits Help Linear ClassifiersCross-Model Agreement as a Deployment-Time Reliability Signal for Automatic Polyp SegmentationIBIB: A Protocol for Measuring Enterprise AI Systems by Serving Route, Not Model IdentifierLearning with Covariance Matrices: Principal Component Analysis Meets Learning with GraphsNonmaximal sums of maximally monotone operators under Rockafellar's constraint qualificationDeep Learning-Based Detection of Electrical Faults and Power Quality Disturbances in Aerospace Power SystemsSemigroup-JEPA: Latent Dynamics Consistency for Zero-Shot Physics GeneralizationJarvisGUI: Towards Cross-Device GUI Agents with Dynamic Task CompositionBuilding Multilingual Bridges: Data Mixing as the Pillar of Generalization for In-Language Reasoning
Previous daily papers
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