Pelican-Unify 1.0: A Unified Embodied Intelligence Model for Understanding, Reasoning, Imagination and Action

TL;DR

Pelican-Unify 1.0 is a pioneering embodied foundation model that unifies understanding, reasoning, imagination, and action in a single system, achieving state-of-the-art results across multiple benchmarks.

Contribution

It introduces the first unified embodied foundation model trained to jointly optimize understanding, reasoning, imagination, and action, avoiding the need for isolated expert systems.

Findings

Achieves 64.7 on eight VLM benchmarks, the best among comparable models.

Ranks first on WorldArena with 66.03.

Scores 93.5 on RoboTwin, second-best among action methods.

Abstract

We present Pelican-Unify 1.0, the first embodied foundation model trained according to the principle of unification. Pelican-Unify 1.0 uses a single VLM as a unified understanding module, mapping scenes, instructions, visual contexts, and action histories into a shared semantic space. The same VLM also serves as a unified reasoning module, autoregressively producing task-, action-, and future-oriented chains of thought in a single forward pass and projecting the final hidden state into a dense latent variable. A Unified Future Generator (UFG) then conditions on this latent variable and jointly generates future videos and future actions through two modality-specific output heads within the same denoising process. The language, video, and action losses are all backpropagated into the shared representation, enabling the model to jointly optimize understanding, reasoning, imagination, and action during training, rather than training three isolated expert systems. Experiments demonstrate that unification does not imply compromise. With a single checkpoint, Pelican-Unify 1.0 achieves strong performance across all three capabilities: 64.7 on eight VLM benchmarks, the best among comparable-scale models; 66.03 on WorldArena, ranking first; and 93.5 on RoboTwin, the second-best average among compared action methods. These results show that the unified paradigm succeeds in preserving specialist strength while bringing understanding, reasoning, imagination, and action into one model.