ResearchResearch paperRobotics & Embodied AI1 source · Oct 8, 2026

ARC: A Reasoning Recipe for Robot Foundation Models

We show that there exists an effective and efficient complementary approach: the right reasoning recipe can substantially improve the zero-shot task performance of existing state-of-the-art RFMs. We refer to this recipe as ARC.

Key points

  • The prevailing approach to improving robot foundation models (RFMs) relies on larger models, more robot demonstrations, and costly training at scale.
  • First, we find that effective reasoning traces should be grounded in the robot's next action and explain its causal structure: why the action is appropriate and what effect it should produce.
  • Second, we show that these traces can be generated automatically from existing demonstrations, enabling us to construct ARC-Trace-DROID from DROID without collecting new robot data.
  • Third, we show how state-of-the-art VLAs such as $π{0.5}$ and WAMs such as Cosmos3-Nano-Policy can learn to use these traces for control, with fine-tuning and inference tailored to each model's architecture and capabilities.

Sources (1)

  • [1]ARC: A Reasoning Recipe for Robot Foundation Models
    arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 8, 05:38 PM
    We show that there exists an effective and efficient complementary approach: the right reasoning recipe can substantially improve the zero-shot task performance of existing state-of-the-art RFMs. We refer to this recipe as ARC.
    The prevailing approach to improving robot foundation models (RFMs) relies on larger models, more robot demonstrations, and costly training at scale.

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