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Show-Harness: Just a VLM Agent Can Play Robots

arxiv.org/abs/2609.10522

Updated 51 min ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294GNQAFWT9EFC1B856KM7X

Published
11 Sept 2026
T1 · 51 min ago
arXiv
2609.10522
T1 · 51 min ago
Category
cs.RO
T1 · 51 min ago

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.

Authors 10

Yanzhe Chen, Zechen Bai, Zhijun Cao, Wenzheng Zeng, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Yiqi Lin, Guoqiang Liang, Kevin Yuchen Ma, Qiming Huang, Mike Zheng Shou

Specification

Official page

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 51 min agohigh

Arxiv announce type
cross

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 51 min agohigh

arXiv id
2609.10522

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 51 min agohigh

Categories
cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.MM

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 51 min agohigh

PDF

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 51 min agohigh

Primary category
cs.RO

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 51 min agohigh

Published
11 Sept 2026

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 51 min agohigh

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Provenance

Attributed facts

9

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

51 min ago

Conflicts

None