Foundation Models

Base Policy

A base policy is a generalist pretrained robot policy that serves as the starting point for adaptation, analogous to a base model in language modeling: it is trained on broad multi-task, often multi-embodiment data, then specialized to a target robot or task via fine-tuning, distillation, or steering. The term also denotes the prior policy that residual reinforcement learning or test-time refinement methods improve upon.

Why it matters for physical AI

The pretrain-then-adapt recipe reduces per-task data needs from thousands of demonstrations to tens, making base policy quality and coverage the central asset of robot foundation model efforts.