# Endowing GPT-4 with a Humanoid Body: Building the Bridge Between Off-the-Shelf VLMs and the Physical World

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00041 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00041/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 68 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16054/) (2025)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14734/) (2025)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10470/) (2021)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [T2M-GPT: Generating Human Motion from Textual Descriptions with Discrete Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06052/) (2023)
- [Executing your Commands via Motion Diffusion in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04048/) (2022)
- [MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14795/) (2023)
- [Action-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Synthesis with Transformer VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05670/) (2021)
- [Action2Motion: Conditioned Generation of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15240/) (2020)
- [MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00063/) (2023)
- [PhysDiff: Physics-Guided Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02500/) (2022)
- [An Embodied Generalist Agent in 3D World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12871/) (2023)
- [Set-of-Mark Prompting Unleashes Extraordinary Visual Grounding in GPT-4V](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11441/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14093/) (2024)
- [BEHAVE: Dataset and Method for Tracking Human Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06950/) (2022)
- [Learning to Detect Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05448/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Depth Estimators Are Implicit Neural Fields for 3D Scene Geometry Inpainting and Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16286/) (2026)
- [Human-Centric Intelligence in the Era of Foundation Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18184/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humanoid agents often struggle to handle flexible and diverse interactions in open environments. A common solution is to collect massive datasets to train a highly capable model, but this approach can be prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we explore an alternative solution: empowering off-the-shelf Vision-Language Models (VLMs, such as GPT-4) to control humanoid agents, thereby leveraging their strong open-world generalization to mitigate the need for extensive data collection. To this end, we present BiBo (Building humanoId agent By Off-the-shelf VLMs). It consists of two key components: (1) an embodied instruction compiler, which enables the VLM to perceive the environment and precisely translate high-level user instructions (e.g., smallitshape ``have a rest'') into low-level primitive commands with control parameters (e.g., smallitshape ``sit casually, location: (1, 2), facing: 90^circ''); and (2) a diffusion-based motion executor, which generates human-like motions from these commands, while dynamically adapting to physical feedback from the environment. In this way, BiBo is capable of handling not only basic interactions but also diverse and complex motions. Experiments demonstrate that BiBo achieves an interaction task success rate of 90.2% in open environments, and improves the precision of text-guided motion execution by 16.3% over prior methods. The code will be made publicly available.