# CAP-X: LMs' First Physical Exam

> Source: <https://capgym.github.io/>
> Published: 2026-10-05 21:59:12+00:00

Today's off-the-shelf LMs have incredible generalization, reasoning, and planning capabilities.
          Agentic harnesses in **CaP-Agent0** unleash their potential in the physical world.
        

Click on each task to see the agent in action.

**CaP-Bench** provides the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating how well large language model agents
          can write code to control robots. Integrated with hundreds of manipulation tasks across multiple
          robot learning benchmarks (LIBERO-PRO, Robosuite, BEHAVIOR), **CaP-Bench** tests both LLM and VLM models on their
          ability to generate executable robot control policies from natural language instructions.
        

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Key Findings

1
Frontier models achieve meaningful zero-shot success on robotic manipulation

            Without any task-specific training, today's best frontier models can directly generate executable robot control
            code and achieve over 30% average success — a sharp contrast to the prior belief that only specially trained
            models (VLAs) can perform manipulation. Yet a 56-point gap to human performance remains, marking this as
            one of AI's most important open challenges.
          

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2
Training-free CaP-Agent0 outperforms state-of-the-art VLAs on perturbed tasks

            On LIBERO-PRO — 30 manipulation tasks with position and instruction perturbations — state-of-the-art
            Vision-Language-Action models (OpenVLA, π0) score 0% across the board.
            Even the best VLA (π0.5) reaches only 13% average success. CaP-Agent0, a training-free
            coding agent, achieves 18% without any task-specific training, demonstrating that
            code-generation agents generalize where end-to-end learned policies break down.
          

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3
CaP-RL: Post-training on code dramatically boosts robot performance — and transfers sim-to-real

            Using CaP-RL, we apply reinforcement learning with environment rewards directly on the coding agent.
            A 7B model (Qwen 2.5 Coder) jumps from 20% to 72% average success in simulation after
            just 50 training iterations. The learned policies transfer to a real Franka Emika robot with
            minimal sim-to-real gap — reaching 84% on cube lifting and 76% on cube stacking,
            approaching human expert performance.
          

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4
Higher abstraction boosts all models — and dramatically closes the gap for smaller ones

            As API abstraction increases from raw primitives (S4) to high-level pick-and-place (S1),
            all models improve substantially — but the gains are most pronounced for
            weaker and open-source models, whose compilation rates collapse at low abstraction levels.
            This suggests a promising path: pair a lightweight LM for high-level planning
            with a visual-motor policy (e.g., a VLA) that handles low-level control, letting even
            smaller models achieve strong task performance through the right division of labor.
          

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