Test-Time Compute for Humanoid Behavior Foundation Models

Abstract:Humanoid Behavior Foundation Models (BFMs) can execute impressive motions, but downstream applications such as loco-manipulation demand high whole-body positional accuracy. Existing BFMs suffer from a systematic command-execution gap, where executed motions deviate from desired ones. We show that additional test-time compute can improve execution without retraining the BFM. First, we introduce Test-Time Command Optimization (TTCO), which adapts the input command to the specific BFM to produce an executed trajectory closer to the desired motion. TTCO finds such commands by sampling-based optimization through closed-loop simulations of the BFM and robot dynamics. Across three BFMs on the AMASS dataset, TTCO reduces mean global body-position error by 79-84% in simulation. Second, we analyze test-time compute scaling and derive an approximate compute-optimal strategy that can sustain performance gains as the compute budget increases. Third, TTCO can generate BFM-specific action labels from recorded robot trajectories without requiring the original teleoperation body-motion commands. Simulation and real-robot experiments show that these labels are effective for training high-level loco-manipulation policies. This method also supports reusing existing demonstrations across BFMs.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.14896 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.14896v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.14896 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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