# N0-Foundation: Towards the Age of Tactile Intelligence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29601 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29601/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 78 of its 92 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 78)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03310/) (2023)
- [Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10897/) (2019)
- [Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08243/) (2023)
- [DROID: A Large-Scale In-The-Wild Robot Manipulation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12945/) (2024)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03298/) (2021)
- [RLBench: The Robot Learning Benchmark & Learning Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12271/) (2019)
- [BridgeData V2: A Dataset for Robot Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12952/) (2023)
- [CALVIN: A Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Policy Learning for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03227/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Real-World Robot Manipulation Policies in Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05941/) (2024)
- [World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15922/) (2026)
- [AgiBot World Colosseo: A Large-scale Manipulation Platform for Scalable and Intelligent Embodied Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06669/) (2025)
- [Universal Manipulation Interface: In-The-Wild Robot Teaching Without In-The-Wild Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10329/) (2024)
- [Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13139/) (2023)
- [Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16666/) (2026)
- [ManiSkill2: A Unified Benchmark for Generalizable Manipulation Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04659/) (2023)
- [Causal World Modeling for Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21998/) (2026)
- [LIBERO-Plus: In-depth Robustness Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13626/) (2025)
- [Orbit: A Unified Simulation Framework for Interactive Robot Learning Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04195/) (2023)
- [EgoDex: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from Large-Scale Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11709/) (2025)
- [Unified Video Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00200/) (2025)
- [RH20T: A Comprehensive Robotic Dataset for Learning Diverse Skills in One-Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00595/) (2023)
- [LIBERO-PRO: Towards Robust and Fair Evaluation of Vision-Language-Action Models Beyond Memorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03827/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present N0-Foundation, a paradigm for tactile-enabled embodied manipulation, which integrates tactile sensing hardware, large-scale multimodal data, tactile representation learning, and standardized evaluation. First, we engineer the infrastructure for scalable data collection, including a vision-based tactile sensor, a tactile Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI), and a synchronized visuo-tactile data collection system supporting both robot embodiments and UMI-based demonstrations. Leveraging this infrastructure, we construct NeoData, which contains more than 30000 hours of synchronized visual and tactile demonstrations, spanning six embodiments, 450 tasks, and billions of paired RGB and tactile frames collected through a mixture of real-robot teleoperation and UMI-based demonstrations. To facilitate open research, we further release OpenNeoData, a 5000-hour open-source subset of NeoData. The dataset addresses a central limitation of existing manipulation corpora, critical for deformable-object manipulation, precise assembly, delicate force control, and sustained surface interaction. Capitalizing on the large-scale, heterogeneous tactile measurements, we propose NeoForce, a visuo-tactile representation model that learn transferable tactile representations across different sensor designs. To enable systematic evaluation of tactile embodied models built upon our infrastructure, datasets and tactile representations, we further propose a comprehensive benchmark, which combines the real-world NeoReal suite and the simulated NeoSim suite for standardized evaluation. Experiments across both suites show that policies benefit from the physical contact state rather than from the device-specific appearance of the tactile signal. We release the dataset, the representation, and the benchmark, aiming at supporting future work on tactile-enabled embodied manipulation.