Athena-Brain Technical Report: An Efficient Robot Brain for General Intelligence and Embodied Interaction

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in language understanding, reasoning, and world knowledge. As embodied agents become increasingly capable, there is a growing demand for compact models that can serve as an on-device brain, preserving the broad general intelligence of LLMs while enabling effective high-level interaction with embodied environments. Existing approaches, however, often prioritize either general-purpose intelligence or specialized embodied capabilities, making it challenging to satisfy both requirements within a single model. We present Athena-Brain-8B, an 8B LLM designed to serve as an on-device brain for embodied intelligence for embodied intelligence. Through a multi-stage post-training pipeline consisting of General Supervised Fine-Tuning, General Reinforcement Learning, Embodied Expert training, and Model Merge, Athena-Brain-8B maintains strong general capabilities while acquiring strong high-level embodied interaction capabilities and generating concise responses for efficient embodied interaction. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of Athena across both general and embodied evaluations. Compared with the corresponding Qwen3-8B thinking model, Athena-Brain-8B achieves comparable performance on general language and reasoning benchmarks while generating substantially shorter responses. On in-domain embodied benchmarks, Athena-Brain-8B consistently outperforms models of similar scale and surpasses several substantially larger frontier models evaluated zero-shot, demonstrating that compact language models can effectively integrate strong general intelligence with embodied capabilities.