mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Pelican-Unify 1.0: A Unified Embodied Intelligence Model for Understanding, Reasoning, Imagination and Action

arXiv 2605.15153 ↗First posted 14 May 2026cs.RO cs.AIcited by 8

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Abstract (arXiv)

We present Pelican-Unify 1.0, the first embodied foundation model trained according to the principle of unification. Pelican-Unify 1.0 uses a single VLM as a unified understanding module, mapping scenes, instructions, visual contexts, and action histories into a shared semantic space. The same VLM also serves as a unified reasoning module, autoregressively producing task-, action-, and future-oriented chains of thought in a single forward pass and projecting the final hidden state into a dense latent variable. A Unified Future Generator (UFG) then conditions on this latent variable and jointly generates future videos and future actions through two modality-specific output heads within the same denoising process. The language, video, and action losses are all backpropagated into the shared representation, enabling the model to jointly optimize understanding, reasoning, imagination, and action during training, rather than training three isolated expert systems. Experiments demonstrate that unification does not imply compromise. With a single checkpoint, Pelican-Unify 1.0 achieves strong performance across all three capabilities: 64.7 on eight VLM benchmarks, the best among comparable-scale models; 66.03 on WorldArena, ranking first; and 93.5 on RoboTwin, the second-best average among compared action methods. These results show that the unified paradigm succeeds in preserving specialist strength while bringing understanding, reasoning, imagination, and action into one model.

Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 25 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 May 2026.

Builds on

25 of 41 references.

References · 25

  1. 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 3,080
  2. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,887
  3. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,793
  4. 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,708
  5. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
  6. 2023MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?cited by 2,141
  7. 2023MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGIcited by 2,080
  8. 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,761
  9. 2022ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoningcited by 1,479
  10. 2024Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?cited by 914
  11. 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policiescited by 465
  12. 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?cited by 349
13 more
  1. 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Controlcited by 321
  2. 2025X-VLA: Soft-Prompted Transformer as Scalable Cross-Embodiment Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 303
  3. 2026LeWorldModel: Stable End-to-End Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture from Pixelscited by 273
  4. 2025World Simulation with Video Foundation Models for Physical AIcited by 200
  5. 2025Ctrl-World: A Controllable Generative World Model for Robot Manipulationcited by 167
  6. 2026StarVLA: A Lego-like Codebase for Vision-Language-Action Model Developingcited by 112
  7. 2026A Pragmatic VLA Foundation Modelcited by 103
  8. 2026ABot-M0: VLA Foundation Model for Robotic Manipulation with Action Manifold Learningcited by 103
  9. 2026WorldArena: A Unified Benchmark for Evaluating Perception and Functional Utility of Embodied World Modelscited by 76
  10. 2026Being-H0.7: A Latent World-Action Model from Egocentric Videoscited by 75
  11. 2025WoW: Towards a World omniscient World model Through Embodied Interactioncited by 67
  12. 2026AIM: Intent-Aware Unified world action Modeling with Spatial Value Mapscited by 12
  13. 2025Pelican-VL 1.0: A Foundation Brain Model for Embodied Intelligencecited by 10

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 8.

8 papers.

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  1. 2026ABot-ER: Unified Embodied Reasoning through Agentic Data-Model Co-Evolution
  2. 2026Hy-Embodied-VLM-1.0: Efficient Physical-World Agents
  3. 2026Embodied-R1.5: Evolving Physical Intelligence via Embodied Foundation Models
  4. 2026RxBrain: Embodied Cognition Foundation Model with Joint Language-Visual Reasoning and Imagination
  5. 2026HY-Embodied-0.5: Embodied Foundation Models for Real-World Agents
  6. 2026Towards general embodied intelligence: integrating large language models, knowledge bases, and reasoning capabilities to build the next generation of AI agents
  7. 2025BLM1: A Boundless Large Model for Cross-Space, Cross-Task, and Cross-Embodiment Learning
  8. 2026iFLYTEK-Embodied-Omni Technical Report