Shreyas Gite (@shreyasgite)
2025-04-11 | ❤️ 107 | 🔁 8
So, I was reading the paper Proc4Gem from the DeepMind team on sim-to-real, and realized that using current VLMs - think Gemini or Gemma 3 and friends - kinda brings us very close to tackling the sim-to-real issue.
Semantic Grounding: the current VLMs are trained on massive amount of images, they have really good understanding of semantics and spatial reasoning.
Regularization Effect? The VLM’s strong priors might also act as a kind of regularizer during sim training. So, even if there is some distribution gap between sim and real world, unlike a model trained from scratch on sim data, a VLM-based policy might not overfit for sim domain.
Bridging the Physics Gap? this will likely only get better as we go from VLMs to foundational world models or even video models (for e.g., Veo 2 & friends). These models build more implicit knowledge of physics, object permanence, and causality. A policy built on such a model might be even more robust to sim-to-real gaps, especially in dynamics, because its internal “world model” is more aligned with reality, potentially requiring less perfect simulation fidelity.
For now, the quality and diversity of the simulation still matter immensely, especially for contact-rich tasks where physics fidelity is key. You still need good simulation. The Proc4Gem paper highlights this too – they addressed all three components: using MuJoCo for high-fidelity physics, Unity for photorealistic rendering, and procedural generation for diverse scenes.
Leveraging large pre-trained models drastically changes the sim-to-real equation, making simulation a much more powerful tool for robotics than ever before. It reduces the reliance purely on real-world data and makes the transfer process more robust, largely thanks to the models’ pre-existing world knowledge. It’s a very exciting time for simulation in robotics, or synthetic data in general!
미디어
🔗 Related
Auto-generated - needs manual review
Tags
domain-robotics domain-genai domain-rendering domain-llm domain-vlm domain-simulation domain-dev-tools domain-visionos