README.md

October 11, 2025 · View on GitHub

Multimodal Fusion and Vision–Language Models: A Survey for Robot Vision

Xiaofeng Han · Shunpeng Chen · Zenghuang Fu · Zhe Feng · Lue Fan · Dong An · Zhangwei Wang · Li Guo · Weiliang Meng* · Xiaopeng Zhang · Rongtao Xu* · Shibiao Xu

License: MIT

This repository tracks research on multimodal fusion and vision–language models (VLMs) for robot vision, covering semantic scene understanding, 3D perception, SLAM, navigation & localization, and manipulation. We also summarize datasets, metrics, challenges (e.g., cross-modal alignment, efficient fusion, real-time deployment), and future directions.

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News

[2025-09-03] Camera-ready accepted by Information Fusion (Vol. 126, 2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.inffus.2025.103652.

[2025-09-01] Featured by Embodied Intelligence Hub — article recap of our survey and repo. Read the post »

📖 Introduction

The overview figure illustrates the overall framework of multimodal fusion and VLMs for robot vision:

Alt Text

Table of Contents

:bar_chart:Awesome Benchmarks

Scene Understanding Datasets

Datasets Scene Multimodal Data Venue Year
360+x Indoor/Outdoor Video/Audio CVPR 2024
ScanQA Indoor RGB/Text CVPR 2022
Hypersim Indoor RGB/Depth ICCV 2021
NuScenes Urban street RGB/Lidar/Radar CVPR 2020
Waymo Outdoor RGB/Lidar CVPR 2020
Semantickitti Urban street RGB/Lidar ICCV 2019
Matterport3D Indoor RGB/Depth arxiv 2017
ScanNet Indoor RGB/Depth CVPR 2017
Cityscapes Urban street RGB/Depth CVPR 2016
NYUDv2 Indoor RGB/Depth ECCV 2012

Robot Manipulation Datasets

DatasetsCore ModalitiesData ScaleMain Application
DROIDRGB, Depth, Text76,000 trajectoriesMulti-task scene adaptation
R2SGraspRGB-D, Point Cloud64,000 RGB-D imagesGrasp detection
RT-1RGB, Text130,000 trajectoriesReal-time task control
Touch and GoRGB, Tactile3,971 virtual object models, 13,900 tactile interactionsCross-modal perception
VisGelGelSight Tactile, RGB12,000 tactile interactionsTactile-enhanced manipulation
ObjectFolder 2.0RGB, Audio, Tactile1,000 virtual object modelsVirtual-to-reality transfer
Grasp-Anything-6DPoint Cloud, Text1M point cloud scenesLanguage-driven grasping
Grasp-Anything++Point Cloud, Text1M samples, 10M instructionsFine-grained manipulation
Open X-EmbodimentRGB, Depth, Text, Multi-robot DataAggregated data from multiple institutionsCross-robot system generalization
  • Grasp-Anything++: Language-driven Grasp Detection(CVPR, 2024) [paper]
  • Grasp-Anything-6D: Language-Driven 6-DoF Grasp Detection Using Negative Prompt Guidance(ECCV, 2024) [paper]
  • Real-to-Sim Grasp: Rethinking the Gap between Simulation and Real World in Grasp Detection(CORL, 2024) [paper]
  • Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models(ICRA, 2024) [paper]
  • DROID: A Large-Scale In-The-Wild Robot Manipulation Dataset(ICRA, 2024) [paper]
  • Objectfolder 2.0: A multisensory object dataset for sim2real transfer (CVPR, 2022) [paper]
  • Touch and Go: Learning from Human-Collected Vision and Touch Supplementary Material (NuerIPS, 2022) [paper]
  • Connecting Touch and Vision via Cross-Modal Prediction (CVPR, 2019) [paper]
  • Rt-1: Robotics transformer for real-world control at scale (arXiv, 2022) [paper]

Embodied Navigation Datasets

DatasetModalitiesUnique Feature
Matterport3DRGB-D, Semantic AnnotationsFoundational dataset for navigation
R2RRGB-D, Natural LanguageVision-and-Language Navigation
REVERIERGB-D, Object AnnotationsCombines object grounding tasks
CVDNRGB-D, DialogIntroduces multi-turn interactions
SOONRGB-D, Natural LanguageCoarse-to-fine target localization
R3EDPoint Cloud, Object LabelsReal-world sensor-based data

Manipulation Benchmarks

TitleVenueDate
Manipulation in Home Environment
HomeRobot: Open-Vocabulary Mobile ManipulationCoRL 20232023-06-20
ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday TasksCVPR 20202019-12-03
Manipulation in On-Table Environment
OBSBench: Point Cloud Matters: Rethinking the Impact of Different Observation Spaces on Robot LearningNeurIPS 20242024-02-04
LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot LearningNeurIPS 20232023-06-05
BenchmarkSimulator# TasksReal-World ReproducibilityApplicable AlgorithmsKey Evaluation Metrics
RLBenchRLBench100+RL, IL, Traditional ControlTask Success Rate, Trajectory Efficiency, Task Completion Time
GemBenchRLBench44RL, IL, VLM-basedZero-shot Task Success, Object Recognition, Generalization
VLMbenchRLBench8RL, VLM-basedTask Execution Success, Compositional Generalization
KitchenShiftIsaac Sim7IL, RLPerformance Under Domain Shifts, Task Success Rate
CALVINPyBullet34RL, ILLong-Horizon Task Success, Multi-Task Adaptability
COLOSSEUMRLBench20RL, ILRobustness to Perturbations, Multi-Task Learning Performance
VIMARavens17RL, VLM-basedZero-shot Success, Multi-Modal Task Performance

Embodied Large Language Models

  • Rt-2: Vision-language-action models transfer web knowledge to robotic control (arXiv, 2023) [paper]
  • Open x-embodiment: Robotic learning datasets and rt-x models (arXiv, 2023) [paper]
  • Rt-h: Action hierarchies using language (arXiv, 2024) [paper]
  • Autort: Embodied foundation models for large scale orchestration of robotic agents (arXiv, 2024) [paper]
  • Gr-2: A generative video-language-action model with web-scale knowledge for robot manipulation (arXiv, 2024) [paper]
  • Voxposer: Composable 3d value maps for robotic manipulation with language models (arXiv, 2023) [paper]
  • Rdt-1b: a diffusion foundation model for bimanual manipulation (arXiv, 2024) [paper]
  • Rekep: Spatio-temporal reasoning of relational keypoint constraints for robotic manipulation (arXiv, 2024) [paper]
  • Copa: General robotic manipulation through spatial constraints of parts with foundation models (arXiv, 2024) [paper]
  • OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model (arXiv, 2024) [paper]
  • Palm-e: An embodied multimodal language model (arXiv, 2023) [paper]
  • Π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control (arXiv, 2024) [paper]

📖 Citation

If you find our survey and repository useful for your research, please consider citing our paper:

@article{han2025multimodal,
  title={Multimodal fusion and vision-language models: A survey for robot vision},
  author={Han, Xiaofeng and Chen, Shunpeng and Fu, Zenghuang and Feng, Zhe and Fan, Lue and An, Dong and Wang, Changwei and Guo, Li and Meng, Weiliang and Zhang, Xiaopeng and others},
  journal={Information Fusion},
  pages={103652},
  year={2025},
  publisher={Elsevier}
}