DeepMind's EXIMO shows the harness-eating loop: VLM scaffold distilled into VLA weights for RL
m_wulfmeier · x · 2026-09-07
A Google DeepMind researcher highlights EXIMO, a student researcher project, as a clean example of the create-and-eat-harness tension in physical AI. EXIMO wraps Gemini Robotics (a VLA) with Gemini (a VLM) for interpretable hierarchical control, then distills the orchestrated behavior into the VLA weights via simple imitation — enabling RL optimization of the whole model beyond what the scaffold could hand-design, readying the next generation of harnesses.
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