Oral Session
Oral Session 4B: Embodied & Agentic Intelligence
CodeV: Code with Images for Faithful Visual Reasoning via Tool-Aware Policy Optimization
Xinhai Hou ⋅ Shaoyuan Xu ⋅ Manan Biyani ⋅ Moyan Li ⋅ Jia Liu ⋅ Todd C. Hollon ⋅ Bryan Wang
Agentic vision–language models are increasingly trained to “think with images” by calling image operations. However, we show that high final-answer accuracy often hides unfaithful visual reasoning: models may invoke tools on irrelevant regions or ignore tool outputs entirely, yet still guess the correct answer. In this work, we first propose a faithfulness evaluation protocol that measures whether intermediate visual tool outputs (e.g., crops) actually contain the queried evidence. This reveals that recent visual agents achieve high final-answer accuracy but exhibit low rates of faithful tool-use on visual search benchmarks. We then introduce CodeV, a code-based visual agent trained with Tool-Aware Policy Optimization (TAPO). TAPO is a process-level RL framework that augments GRPO with dense rewards defined directly on visual tool inputs and outputs, rather than on chain-of-thought tokens, making supervision easier to verify and less susceptible to reward hacking. CodeV represents visual tools as executable Python code, and TAPO assigns step-wise rewards based solely on the question and tool output, encouraging both necessary and evidence-consistent tool use. In a two-stage SFT+RL pipeline, CodeV achieves competitive or superior accuracy while substantially increasing faithful tool-use rates on related visual search benchmarks. Beyond visual search, CodeV attains strong performance on a range of multimodal reasoning and math benchmarks, suggesting that explicitly supervising intermediate tool behavior is crucial for building trustworthy, agentic visual reasoning systems.
NitroGen: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Gaming Agents
Loïc Magne ⋅ Anas Awadalla ⋅ Guanzhi Wang ⋅ Yinzhen Xu ⋅ Joshua Belofsky ⋅ Fengyuan Hu ⋅ Joohwan Kim ⋅ Ludwig Schmidt ⋅ Georgia Gkioxari ⋅ Jan Kautz ⋅ Yisong Yue ⋅ Yejin Choi ⋅ Yuke Zhu ⋅ Jim Fan
We introduce NitroGen, a video-action foundation model for generalist gaming agents, trained on 40,000 hours of gameplay videos across more than 1000 games. We incorporate three key ingredients: 1) an internet-scale video-action dataset constructed by automatically extracting player actions from publicly available gameplay videos, 2) a multi-game benchmark environment that can measure cross-game generalization, and 3) a unified vision-action model trained with large-scale behavior cloning. NitroGen exhibits strong competence across diverse domains, including combat encounters in 3D action games, high-precision control in 2D platformers, and exploration in procedurally generated worlds. It transfers effectively to unseen games, achieving up to 52% relative improvement in success rates over models trained from scratch. We release the dataset, benchmark, and model weights to advance research on generalist embodied agents.
PAI-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark For Physical AI
Fengzhe Zhou ⋅ Jiannan Huang ⋅ Jialuo Li ⋅ Deva Ramanan ⋅ Humphrey Shi
Physical AI aims to develop models that can perceive and predict real-world dynamics; yet, the extent to which current multi-modal large language models and video generative models support these abilities is insufficiently understood. We introduce Physical AI Bench (PAI-Bench), a unified and comprehensive benchmark that evaluates perception and prediction capabilities across video generation, conditional video generation, and video understanding, comprising 2,808 real-world cases with task-aligned metrics designed to capture physical plausibility and domain-specific reasoning. Our study provides a systematic assessment of recent models and shows that video generative models, despite strong visual fidelity, often struggle to maintain physically coherent dynamics, while multi-modal large language models exhibit limited performance in forecasting and causal interpretation. These observations suggest that current systems are still at an early stage in handling the perceptual and predictive demands of Physical AI. In summary, PAI-Bench establishes a realistic foundation for evaluating Physical AI and highlights key gaps that future systems must address.
RefAV: Towards Planning-Centric Scenario Mining
Cainan Davidson ⋅ Deva Ramanan ⋅ Neehar Peri
Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) collect and pseudo-label terabytes of multi-modal data localized to HD maps during normal fleet testing. However, identifying interesting and safety-critical scenarios from uncurated driving logs remains a significant challenge. Traditional scenario mining techniques are error-prone and prohibitively time-consuming, often relying on hand-crafted structured queries. In this work, we revisit spatio-temporal scenario mining through the lens of recent vision-language models (VLMs) to detect whether a described scenario occurs in a driving log and, if so, precisely localize it in both time and space. To address this problem, we introduce RefAV, a large-scale dataset of $10,000$ diverse natural language queries that describe complex multi-agent interactions relevant to motion planning derived from $1000$ driving logs in the Argoverse 2 Sensor dataset. We evaluate several referential multi-object trackers and present an empirical analysis of our baselines. Notably, we find that naively repurposing off-the-shelf VLMs yields poor performance, suggesting that scenario mining presents unique challenges. Lastly, we discuss our recently held competition and share insights from the community.
SoccerMaster: A Vision Foundation Model for Soccer Understanding
Haolin Yang ⋅ Jiayuan Rao ⋅ Haoning Wu ⋅ Weidi Xie
Soccer understanding has recently garnered growing research interest due to its domain-specific complexity and unique challenges.However, prior works typically rely on task-specific expert models, which are resource-intensive and hinder a holistic view of the game.This paper aims to propose a unified framework that enables a single model to handle diverse soccer visual understanding tasks, spanning both fine-grained perception (e.g., athlete detection) and semantic reasoning (e.g., event classification).Concretely, we make the following contributions in this paper:(i) we present SoccerMaster, the first soccer-specific vision foundation model that unifies comprehensive understanding tasks within a single framework via supervised multi-task pretraining;(ii) we consolidate multiple existing soccer video datasets and develop an automated data curation pipeline, termed as SoccerFactory, to produce scalable multi-task training annotations;and (iii) we conduct extensive experiments demonstrating that SoccerMaster consistently outperforms task-specific expert models across diverse downstream tasks, underscoring its breadth and superiority.The data, code, and model will be publicly available to the research community.
VS-Bench: Evaluating VLMs for Strategic Abilities in Multi-Agent Environments
Zelai Xu ⋅ Zhexuan Xu ⋅ Xiangmin Yi ⋅ Huining Yuan ⋅ Mo Guang ⋅ Kaiwen Long ⋅ Xinlei Chen ⋅ Yi Wu ⋅ Chao Yu ⋅ Yu Wang
Recent advancements in Vision Language Models (VLMs) have expanded their capabilities to interactive agent tasks, yet existing benchmarks remain limited to single-agent or text-only environments. In contrast, real-world scenarios often involve multiple agents interacting within rich visual and textual contexts, posing challenges with both multimodal observations and strategic interactions. To bridge this gap, we introduce Visual Strategic Bench (VS-Bench), a multimodal benchmark that evaluates VLMs for strategic abilities in multi-agent environments. VS-Bench comprises ten vision-grounded environments that cover cooperative, competitive, and mixed-motive interactions. The performance of VLM agents is evaluated across three dimensions: perception measured by element recognition accuracy; strategic reasoning measured by next-action prediction accuracy; and decision-making measured by normalized episode return. Extensive experiments on fifteen leading VLMs show that, although current models exhibit strong perception abilities, there remains a significant gap to optimal performance in reasoning and decision-making, with the best-performing model attaining 46.6% prediction accuracy and 31.4% normalized return. We further analyze the key factors influencing performance, conduct human studies, and examine failure modes to provide a deeper understanding of VLMs' strategic abilities. By standardizing the evaluation and highlighting the limitations of existing models, we envision VS-Bench as a foundation for future research on strategic multimodal agents.