SHANGHAI, CHINA -
Media OutReach Newswire
- 15 June 2026 - ACE ROBOTICS today announced that its open-source
Kairos world model has achieved leading results across four global
embodied-intelligence benchmarks: RoboTwin 2.0, LIBERO-Plus,
WorldModelBench Robot and DreamGen. Kairos ranked first among evaluated
world models and vision-language-action (VLA) systems on these
benchmarks' public leaderboards as of 12 June 2026, leading across the
core capabilities of embodied intelligence, including complex robotic
manipulation, scene-level generalization, physical-world modeling and
zero-shot transfer. The project is openly available on GitHub, Hugging
Face and ModelScope, giving researchers and developers a public
reference point for the model, benchmark results and technical
materials.
Embodied intelligence faces a fundamental challenge: generalization. A
robot must operate reliably in environments it has never seen, adapting
to new lighting, layouts, objects, embodiments and noisy real-world
conditions. While VLA models have become a prevailing approach by
directly mapping perception and language inputs to robot actions, ACE
ROBOTICS believes world models offer a more scalable path by explicitly
learning the underlying dynamics of the physical world and predicting
how environments evolve. Kairos is designed to validate that approach.
Leading scene-level generalization on LIBERO-Plus
One of Kairos' most significant results comes from LIBERO-Plus, a
scene-level generalization benchmark proposed by the Shanghai Innovation
Institute with Fudan University, Tongji University and the National
University of Singapore. It evaluates robustness under seven real-world
variables: camera angle, robot embodiment, language instruction,
lighting, background, sensor noise and spatial layout.
Kairos achieved an overall score of 89.0, ranking first among all
evaluated world models and VLA systems. It surpassed leading VLA models
including ACoT-VLA (88.0), Pi 0.5 (85.7) and ProGAL-VLA (85.5), as well
as the Being-H0.7 world model (84.8). It also showed strong
environmental robustness, with near-ceiling performance on lighting
(97.7), noise (96.8) and background (95.8), and ranked highly on camera
angle and language instruction.
According to ACE ROBOTICS, this marks the first time a world-model
approach has outperformed leading VLA systems on LIBERO-Plus for
scene-level generalization, pointing to a path where robots adapt to
homes, factories, retail spaces and other environments with far less
environment-specific retraining.
A compact model with strong physical modeling efficiency
On WorldModelBench Robot, a physical-modeling benchmark proposed by
researchers from UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, NVIDIA and MIT, Kairos-4B
achieved an overall score of 9.30, ranking first on the benchmark. With
only 4 billion parameters, it outperformed larger systems including
28-billion-parameter Lingbot, 16-billion-parameter Cosmos 3,
14-billion-parameter Abot-PhysWorld and 5-billion-parameter Wan 2.2,
setting a new record for parameter efficiency in embodied world models.
Kairos matched the top instruction-following score (2.36) of the
16-billion-parameter Cosmos 3 with about one quarter of the parameters, a
fourfold efficiency gain. It scored 4.96 on physics adherence, with
perfect marks on Newtonian mechanics and gravity, and a perfect score on
temporal quality, reflecting strong temporal consistency and visual
continuity over long horizons.
A unified architecture, not a modular pipeline
ACE ROBOTICS attributes Kairos' performance to its native unified
"multi-modal understanding-generation-prediction" architecture. Unlike
modular approaches that stitch together separate components for world
understanding, generation and prediction, Kairos integrates these within
a single backbone that shares one global world state, reducing the
information loss and coordination latency between modules for more
consistent physical modeling, stronger long-horizon prediction and more
reliable action planning.
ACE ROBOTICS first introduced this architecture in December 2025, and
the broader industry is now converging on a similar path: NVIDIA's
Cosmos 3.0, introduced in 2026, adopts a comparable single-system design
that brings vision reasoning, world generation and action prediction
into one architecture. Built on this foundation, Kairos-4B is, in ACE
ROBOTICS' description, the first embodied world model able to drive a
physical robot directly on-device, closing the perception-to-action loop
without intermediate translation latency.
Leading on synthetic data transfer and complex robot manipulation
Kairos also ranked first on DreamGen Bench, a benchmark led by NVIDIA
with the University of Washington, UC Berkeley and UCLA that measures
how well synthetic data generated by world models transfers to unseen
objects, behaviors and environments, a key predictor of downstream
robot-training value. Kairos ranked first on both average physics
adherence (AVG_PA 0.538) and overall average score (AVG_Score 0.618),
and led globally on new-behavior execution and new-environment
adaptation.
On RoboTwin 2.0, a demanding dual-arm manipulation benchmark proposed by
Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Hong Kong with
Shanghai AI Laboratory, Kairos scored 96.1% — a state-of-the-art result
on the benchmark's public leaderboard as of 12 June 2026. Across the
benchmark's 50 complex two-arm tasks it scored 96.9% in clean scenarios
and 95.2% in randomized scenarios, ahead of VLA models such as G0.5
(93.2) and starVLA (88.3) and world models including AIM (93.1),
Fast-WAM (91.8) and MotuBrain (96.0).
From benchmark leadership to commercial deployment
Together, these results validate Kairos' technical direction across the
core dimensions of embodied intelligence, from physical-rule
understanding and zero-shot generalization to environmental robustness
and fine-grained dual-arm manipulation, supporting ACE ROBOTICS' aim to
move robots beyond task imitation toward physical-world understanding,
long-horizon reasoning and real-world execution.
The results come as ACE ROBOTICS accelerates commercialization. The
company says it has raised several hundred million U.S. dollars across
financing rounds in the first half of 2026, including a recent Angel+
round backed by investors such as Dachen Caizhi, Shenzhen Capital Group
and the Shanghai Sci-Tech Innovation Fund, with existing shareholder
SenseTime's Guoxiang Capital increasing its stake. The proceeds will
support continued world-model research and integrated hardware-software
solutions for sectors including smart retail, security and inspection,
tourism and hospitality.
"Embodied intelligence is the next era of AI, and a world model is the
key to unlocking it," said Wang Xiaogang, Chairman of ACE ROBOTICS. "Our
mission is to give every robot a capable brain."
Kairos is openly available on GitHub, Hugging Face and ModelScope:
https://github.com/kairos-agi/kairos-sensenova
https://huggingface.co/kairos-agi
https://modelscope.cn/collections/kairos-team/kairos30
https://www.linkedin.com/company/acerobotics/posts/'feedView=all&viewAsMember=true%EF%BD%9C
https://x.com/ace_robotics