# FRoM-W1: Towards General Humanoid Whole-Body Control with Language Instructions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12799 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12799/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RL for robot locomotion and manipulation, one of 15 directions in Deep reinforcement learning methods.
- Builds on 64 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- Deep reinforcement learning methods / [RL for robot locomotion and manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/deeprl/rl-for-robot-locomotion-and-manipulation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Instruction Tuning with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03277/) (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)
- [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)
- [TM2T: Stochastic and Tokenized Modeling for the Reciprocal Generation of 3D Human Motions and Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01696/) (2022)
- [HybrIK: A Hybrid Analytical-Neural Inverse Kinematics Solution for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14672/) (2020)
- [Motion-X: A Large-scale 3D Expressive Whole-body Human Motion Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00818/) (2023)
- [Perpetual Humanoid Control for Real-time Simulated Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06456/) (2023)
- [OmniH2O: Universal and Dexterous Human-to-Humanoid Whole-Body Teleoperation and Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08858/) (2024)
- [HumanPlus: Humanoid Shadowing and Imitation from Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10454/) (2024)
- [BeyondMimic: From Motion Tracking to Versatile Humanoid Control via Guided Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08241/) (2025)
- [Expressive Whole-Body Control for Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16796/) (2024)
- [Learning Human-to-Humanoid Real-Time Whole-Body Teleoperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04436/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [ZeroWBC: Learning Natural Whole-Body Humanoid Interaction from Human Egocentric Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09170/) (2026)
- [ECHO: Edge-Cloud Humanoid Orchestration for Language-to-Motion Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16188/) (2026)
- [VLK: Learning Humanoid Loco-Manipulation from Synthetic Interactions in Reconstructed Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30645/) (2026)
- [PhysMoDPO: Physically-Plausible Humanoid Motion with Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13228/) (2026)
- [PhyGile: Physics-Prefix Guided Motion Generation for Agile General Humanoid Motion Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19305/) (2026)
- [AHAP: Reconstructing Arbitrary Humans from Arbitrary Perspectives with Geometric Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23951/) (2026)
- [Before the Body Moves: Learning Anticipatory Joint Intent for Language-Conditioned Humanoid Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14417/) (2026)
- [Semantic Audio-driven Understanding for Dynamic Humanoid Whole Body Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14182/) (2026)
- [Sample, Simulate, Select: Physics-in-the-Loop Text-to-Motion for Humanoids Without Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26420/) (2026)
- [ECHO-G: Embodied Co-speech Humanoid mOtion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39575/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humanoid robots are capable of performing various actions such as greeting, dancing and even backflipping. However, these motions are often hard-coded or specifically trained, which limits their versatility. In this work, we present FRoM-W1, an open-source framework designed to achieve general humanoid whole-body motion control using natural language. To universally understand natural language and generate corresponding motions, as well as enable various humanoid robots to stably execute these motions in the physical world under gravity, FRoM-W1 operates in two stages: (a) H-GPT: utilizing massive human data, a large-scale language-driven human whole-body motion generation model is trained to generate diverse natural behaviors. We further leverage the Chain-of-Thought technique to improve the model's generalization in instruction understanding. (b) H-ACT: After retargeting generated human whole-body motions into robot-specific actions, a motion controller that is pretrained and further fine-tuned through reinforcement learning in physical simulation enables humanoid robots to accurately and stably perform corresponding actions. It is then deployed on real robots via a modular simulation-to-reality module. We extensively evaluate FRoM-W1 on Unitree H1 and G1 robots. Results demonstrate superior performance on the HumanML3D-X benchmark for human whole-body motion generation, and our introduced reinforcement learning fine-tuning consistently improves both motion tracking accuracy and task success rates of these humanoid robots. We open-source the entire FRoM-W1 framework and hope it will advance the development of humanoid intelligence.
