Waterloo Robot Learning Reading Group - Robot Foundation Models (Week 1)
Meetup to discuss state-of-the-art research on robot learning (humanoids, foundation models, RL, sim2real, etc.), similar to the Toronto ML/Systems Reading Group and Vector Institute's Machine Learning Lunches- list of topics & articles below - all are welcome! 🎉
Pizza sponsored by Palatial!
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVS-7VJMA5c&t=604s&ab_channel=MoreStevenGong
Topic - Robot Foundation Models
6:00pm - Physical Intelligence, 2024, Pi0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control by Steven Gong
6:20pm - TRI LBM Team, 2025, A Careful Examination of Large Behavior Models for Multitask Dexterous Manipulation by Krish Mehta
6:40pm - Google, 2025, Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI into the Physical World
7:00pm - Open floor discussion on future directions
7:15pm - Wrap up and social
Additional Reading List
Brohan, et al., 2022, RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale
Brohan, et al., 2023, RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control
Open X-Embodiment Collaboration, 2023, Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models
Chi, et al. 2023, Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion
Liu, et al., 2024, RDT-1B: a Diffusion Foundation Model for Bimanual Manipulation
Etukuru, et al., 2024, Robot Utility Models: General Policies for Zero-Shot Deployment in New Environments
Kim, et al. 2024, OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model
Cheang, et al., 2024, GR-2: A Generative Video-Language-Action Model with Web-Scale Knowledge for Robot Manipulation
Octo Model Team, 2024, Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy
Fang, et al., 2025, Robix: A Unified Model for Robot Interaction, Reasoning and Planning
NVIDIA, 2025, GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots
Yang, et al., 2025, FP3: A 3D Foundation Policy for Robotic Manipulation
Lee, et al. 2025, MolmoAct: Action Reasoning Models that can Reason in Space
Additional Resources
Short Blog on VLAs by Chris Paxton
U of T Robotics Institute Seminar on Robotics Foundation Models by Sergey Levine