InternData-A1: Pioneering High-Fidelity Synthetic Data for Pre-training Generalist Policy

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that large-scale synthetic data alone can effectively pre-train Vision-Language-Action models, achieving performance comparable to real-robot data and enabling zero-shot sim-to-real transfer in robotics.

Contribution

It introduces InternData-A1, a comprehensive synthetic dataset for robotic pre-training, and shows its effectiveness in matching real-robot pre-training performance across multiple tasks.

Findings

Synthetic data matches real-robot pre-training performance.

Zero-shot sim-to-real transfer achieved on challenging tasks.

Large-scale synthetic dataset enables scalable embodied AI research.

Abstract

Recent works explore how real and synthetic data contribute to Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models' generalization. While current VLA models have shown the strong effectiveness of large-scale real-robot pre-training, synthetic data has not previously demonstrated comparable capability at scale. This paper provides the first evidence that synthetic data alone can match the performance of the strongest $\pi$-dataset in pre-training a VLA model, revealing the substantial value of large-scale simulation. The resulting model also exhibits surprisingly zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on several challenging tasks. Our synthetic dataset, InternData-A1, contains over 630k trajectories and 7,433 hours across 4 embodiments, 18 skills, 70 tasks, and 227 scenes, covering rigid, articulated, deformable, and fluid-object manipulation. It is generated through a highly autonomous, fully decoupled, and compositional simulation pipeline that enables long-horizon skill composition, flexible task assembly, and heterogeneous embodiments with minimal manual tuning. Using the same architecture as $\pi_0$, we pre-train a model entirely on InternData-A1 and find that it matches the official $\pi_0$ across 49 simulation tasks, 5 real-world tasks, and 4 long-horizon dexterous tasks. We release the dataset and will open-source the generation pipeline to broaden access to large-scale robotic data and to lower the barrier to scalable data creation for embodied AI research.