SPEAR-1: Scaling Beyond Robot Demonstrations via 3D Understanding

Nikolay Nikolov, Giuliano Albanese, Sombit Dey, Aleksandar Yanev, Luc Van Gool, Jan-Nico Zaech, Danda Pani Paudel; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 35124-35134

Robotic Foundation Models (RFMs) hold great promise as generalist, end-to-end systems for robot control.Yet their ability to generalize across new environments, tasks, and embodiments remains limited.We argue that a major bottleneck lies in their foundations: most RFMs are built by fine-tuning internet-pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs).However, these VLMs are trained on 2D image-language tasks and lack the 3D spatial reasoning inherently required for embodied control in the 3D world.Bridging this gap directly with large-scale robotic data is costly and difficult to scale.Instead, we propose to enrich easy-to-collect non-robotic image data with 3D annotations and enhance a pretrained VLM with 3D understanding capabilities.Following this strategy, we train SPEAR-VLM, a 3D-aware VLM that infers object coordinates in 3D space from a single 2D image.Building on SPEAR-VLM, we introduce our main contribution, SPEAR-1: a robotic foundation model that integrates grounded 3D perception with language-instructed embodied control.Trained on ~45M frames from 24 Open X-Embodiment datasets, SPEAR-1 outperforms or matches state-of-the-art models such as \pi_0-FAST and \pi_ 0.5 , while it uses 20xfewer robot demonstrations.This carefully-engineered training strategy unlocks new VLM capabilities and as a consequence boosts the reliability of embodied control beyond what is achievable with only robotic data.We make our model weights and 3D-annotated datasets publicly available.