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research article

A Survey of Behavior Foundation Model: Next-Generation Whole-Body Control System of Humanoid Robots

Yuan, Mingqi
•
Yu, Tao
•
Ge, Wenqi
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December 30, 2025
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

Humanoid robots are drawing significant attention as versatile platforms for complex motor control, human-robot interaction, and general-purpose physical intelligence. However, achieving efficient whole-body control (WBC) in humanoids remains a fundamental challenge due to sophisticated dynamics, underactuation, and diverse task requirements. While learning-based controllers have shown promise for complex tasks, their reliance on labor-intensive and costly retraining for new scenarios limits real-world applicability. To address these limitations, behavior(al) foundation models (BFMs) have emerged as a new paradigm that leverages large-scale pre-training to learn reusable primitive skills and broad behavioral priors, enabling zero-shot or rapid adaptation to a wide range of downstream tasks. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of BFMs for humanoid WBC, tracing their development across diverse pre-training pipelines. Furthermore, we discuss real-world applications, current limitations, urgent challenges, and future opportunities, positioning BFMs as a key approach toward scalable and general-purpose humanoid intelligence. Finally, we provide a curated and regularly updated collection of BFM papers and projects to facilitate further research, which is available at https://github.com/yuanmingqi/awesome-bfm-papers.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1109/tpami.2025.3649177
Author(s)
Yuan, Mingqi
Yu, Tao
Ge, Wenqi
Yao, Xiuyong
Li, Dapeng
Wang, Huijiang  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Chen, Jiayu
Li, Bo
Zhang, Wei
Zeng, Wenjun
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Date Issued

2025-12-30

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Published in
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Subjects

Humanoid robot

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whole-body control

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behavior foundation model

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pre-training

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adaptation

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
CREATE-LAB  
Available on Infoscience
December 31, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/257435
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