aiqbench analysis
Show-Harness bridges the gap between foundation vision-language models and physical robot control by introducing a semantic interface that translates high-level intent into deterministic actions. This approach enables zero-shot deployment on closed-source frontier models while allowing small-scale open-source VLMs to adapt quickly with minimal fine-tuning, effectively bypassing the need for costly embodiment-specific pretraining. The method demonstrates robust generalization across diverse tasks and environments, suggesting that architectural interfaces can unlock significant embodied capabilities without increasing model capacity.
Show-Harness: Just a VLM Agent Can Play Robots
arXiv:2609.10522v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit broad intelligence about the world, yet translating this intelligence into robot control remains challenging. We present Show-Harness, an Embodied Harness that enables VLMs to "play" robots through a compact semantic interface linking intent to action. Show-Harness exposes discrete semantic action units that VLMs can naturally reason over, while embodiment-specific interpreters deterministically ground them into local robot actions, keeping the VLM directly responsible for fine-grained physical decisions. Through the same interface, Show-Harness demonstrates the feasibility of (1) directly unlocking closed-source frontier VLMs for zero-shot robot control, and (2) adapting small-scale open-source VLMs for low-cost deployment with just a few GPU-hours of fine-tuning. We further develop GUMI (GUI Manipulation Interface), which extends the same semantic action space to GUI-based demonstration collection, allowing humans and agents to "play" robots across embodiments without specialized teleoperation hardware. Extensive experiments show that Show-Harness-equipped VLM agents generalize robustly across tasks, embodiments, and environments, outperforming representative agentic and VLA paradigms. These results suggest that the right interface can unlock substantial embodied capability from foundation VLMs, without requiring additional model capacity or costly embodiment-specific pretraining.
Abstract:Foundation vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit broad intelligence about the world, yet translating this intelligence into robot control remains challenging. We present Show-Harness, an Embodied Harness that enables VLMs to "play" robots through a compact semantic interface linking intent to action. Show-Harness exposes discrete semantic action units that VLMs can naturally reason over, while embodiment-specific interpreters deterministically ground them into local robot actions, keeping the VLM directly responsible for fine-grained physical decisions. Through the same interface, Show-Harness demonstrates the feasibility of (1) directly unlocking closed-source frontier VLMs for zero-shot robot control, and (2) adapting small-scale open-source VLMs for low-cost deployment with just a few GPU-hours of fine-tuning. We further develop GUMI (GUI Manipulation Interface), which extends the same semantic action space to GUI-based demonstration collection, allowing humans and agents to "play" robots across embodiments without specialized teleoperation hardware. Extensive experiments show that Show-Harness-equipped VLM agents generalize robustly across tasks, embodiments, and environments, outperforming representative agentic and VLA paradigms. These results suggest that the right interface can unlock substantial embodied capability from foundation VLMs, without requiring additional model capacity or costly embodiment-specific pretraining.
Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Multimedia (cs.MM)
arXiv:2609.10522 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2609.10522v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.10522 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 285 words
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