8th Robot Learning Workshop: Is Physical AI Going Zero-Shot?

The 8th Robot Learning Workshop returns to NeurIPS 2026 to examine a timely question: Is Physical AI going zero-shot? Driven by large-scale robotics foundation models trained across diverse data, tasks, and embodiments are providing increasingly general-purpose robotic systems. We will critically examine how these paradigms shift the traditional boundaries of robot learning. Are we moving past narrow task-specific fine-tuning toward reasoning-based physical agents? What role do scaling laws, diverse datasets, and multi-modal models play in achieving robust real-world performance? Can generalization alone lead us to the strong performance required in robotics use cases? We seek diverse perspectives from the machine learning and robotics communities—both academia and industry—to map the trajectory of zero-shot physical AI. Capitalizing on our prior experience, we will solicit several robotics researchers and companies to exhibit their latest works during the workshop's poster sessions to ground these models in physical reality.