Robotics & World Models Reading Club 20: Agentic Robotics Models (ENPIRE and Cap-X) — Mountain View 07/25

Robotics & World Models Reading Club 20: Agentic Robotics Models (ENPIRE and Cap-X) — Mountain View A high-signal reading group for AI researchers & builders pushing the frontiers of robotic world models, WAMs, and embodied intelligence. In our previous sessions, we brought together researchers and engineers from Boston Dynamics, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Physical Intelligence, Tesla, Generalist, Rhoda AI, and leading Bay Area robotics startups. Hosted by Junfan Zhu & Aurora Feng. Reading Club 20's Core Theme Agentic Robotics Models (ENPIRE and Cap-X) Keynote: Haoru Xue (UC Berkeley) If VLMs are so good at reasoning, planning, and grounding language in images, why are Vision-Language-Action models so brittle? State-of-the-art VLAs like OpenVLA and π0 collapse to zero the moment you perturb object positions or reword an instruction—variation a VLM shrugs off. The standard story says manipulation needs end-to-end action learning and oceans of robot data. I'll argue the opposite: the generalization is already there, buried behind an interface that destroys it. CaP-X asks how good frontier models are at robotics directly, using code as the action interface. The answer is surprising—training-free coding agents beat VLAs on exactly the perturbed tasks where those VLAs score 0%, and RL on the agent lifts a 7B model from 20% to 72% in sim with minimal sim-to-real gap. I'll close by showcasing ENPIRE, a frontier extension that puts coding agents in a closed real-world loop—resetting, executing, and refining their own policies on physical robots, reaching 99% on dexterous tasks like zip-tie cutting. A glimpse of where this paradigm leads once you give VLMs an interface that keeps their intelligence intact. Pre-Readings ENPIRE: Agentic Robot Policy Self-Improvement in the Real World https://research.nvidia.com/labs/gear/enpire/ CaP-X: A Framework for Benchmarking and Improving Coding Agents for Robot Manipulation https://capgym.github.io/ Location Mountain View Date & Time Saturday, July 25, 2026 | 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM Join Discord Community https://discord.gg/WH7DrTHRXK Follow Saturday Robotics on X https://x.com/saturdayrobotic Agenda 2:00 PM – 2:30 PM Door Opens & Social Food 😋, beverages🧋 and UNLIMITED strawberries 🍓 (our official reading club fruits ☺️😄). 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM Keynote by Haoru Xue (UC Berkeley) YouTube Recording: TBD (We are looking for recording volunteers) 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM Q&A, open-floor roundtable (10–20 min per topic) on spotlight papers or any paper you’d like to highlight. Feel free to share why the paper matters and its technical details. Future events Past events #cvpr-denver-meetup-0606: Saturday Robotics CVPR & World Models Researchers Meetup—Denver 0606 CVPR Denver Luma: https://luma.com/zamm9g2g #reading-club-08-0516: Embodied Human Data as the “Internet of Motion and Behavior” Session 08 Luma: https://luma.com/qoxioge7 #reading-club-07-0509: Learning to Dream: World Models, Imagination, Path to Foundation Models for Control Session 07 Luma: https://luma.com/srhe0vuo #reading-club-06-0502: Evolution of Video World Models for Robotics Session 06 Luma: https://luma.com/sdrd4zwr Reading Club 06 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2050834699275383008?s=20 #reading-club-05-0425: World Models for Physical Intelligence: From Predictive Brains to Embodied Robots Session 05 Luma: https://luma.com/p7zvpyvg Reading Club 05 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2048315020946317710?s=20 YouTube Recording: https://youtu.be/RVy6oQXNDgc?si=u2VLtCBjfdMvXaf- #reading-club-04-0418: Abstractions of the Physical World for Decision-Making Session 04 Luma: https://luma.com/atv7bm3i Reading Club 04 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2045770010979905862 YouTube Recording: https://www.youtube.com/@saturdayrobotic #reading-club-03-0411: Robotic Policy Adaptation Session 03 Luma: https://luma.com/561xgirg Reading Club 03 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2043243484568768519?s=20 YouTube Rec