Model reference · open weights

UniVR-Planning

LLMs ByteDance Vision + text 1 build Open weights 3 dl/mo

UniVR-Planning is an open-weight language model from ByteDance. UniVR-34B-Planning (BF16) weighs 136 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is B200 180 GB.

  • UniVR-Planning is a 34B parameter image-text-to-text model developed by ByteDance for long-horizon planning tasks such as robotic manipulation and tool use.
  • Built on the Emu3.5 architecture, it uses a unified next-token prediction objective to generate visual reasoning traces from images and instructions.
  • The model supports English and is released under the CC BY 4.0 license.

Summary of the ByteDance/UniVR-34B-Planning model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byByteDance
Released2026-07-13
VRAM136 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for UniVR-34B-Planning (BF16)

136 GBweights, file size
762 MBruntime overhead, at least

How much memory each request adds isn't estimated yet for this architecture. The weights need at least the cards below, plus room for the context.

CardWeights alone
RTX 3060 12 GB … H200 141 GB
11 smaller cards
does not fit
B200 180 GBfits
8× H100 80 GB
tensor parallel
does not fit
8× A100 80 GB
tensor parallel
does not fit
8× H200 141 GB
tensor parallel
does not fit

From the model card

What ByteDance says about UniVR-Planning

Read the model card

Model Summary

UniVR is the first framework that simultaneously learns complex reasoning, fine-grained physical dynamics, and long-term planning from pure visual demonstrations — without relying on dense image-text pairs or task-specific heuristics.

Built on Emu3.5 (34B), UniVR uses a unified next-token prediction objective to directly generate visual reasoning traces given an image and instruction. Training employs a two-stage pipeline: supervised cold initialization on the VR-X dataset, followed by VR-GRPO reinforcement learning with complementary global and step-focal rewards.

FeatureDetail
ArchitectureEmu3.5 34B (VQ-VAE unified generative model)
TrainingSFT (310k samples) → VR-GRPO RL (3k samples)
Visual ThinkingNative visual-space reasoning, no intermediate text chain
BenchmarkVR-X: 16 sources, 6 task categories, 1.8k evaluation samples

Available Checkpoints

ModelDescriptionPath
UniVR-34B-PlanningOptimized for long-horizon planning tasks (robotic manipulation, tool use, multi-step control)Planning/
UniVR-34B-GeneralFull UniVR recipe with interleaved image-text data; suitable for general visual reasoningGeneral/

Both checkpoints live as subdirectories of this repo: ByteDance/UniVR-34B-Planning.


Key Results

VR-X Benchmark

UniVR achieves up to 25% improvement over the Emu3.5 baseline and approaches Gemini 3 Pro + Nano Banana 2 with only 34B parameters.

MethodVisual ThinkingGuidanceRobotEditingSpatialPuzzleSearchOverall↑
Gemini-3-pro + Nano Banana 2✗66.267.163.755.165.579.066.1
GPT-5 + GPT-image-1.5✗68.264.158.049.364.077.463.5
Emu3.5 34B✗38.642.832.735.343.446.239.8
UniVR 34B✓59.568.048.546.562.264.358.2
Δ v.s. Emu3.5↑20.9↑25.2↑15.8↑11.2↑18.8↑18.1↑18.4

Multimodal Understanding

Enhanced visual reasoning also boosts standard multimodal benchmarks — no degradation of the base model's capabilities.

MethodMMMUMME(P)MME(C)MMBenchMathVistaMM-Vet
Emu 3.50.292781.1324.60.18341.728.0
UniVR0.337799.3338.50.19844.035.6
Δ v.s. Emu3.5↑0.045↑18.2↑13.9↑0.015↑2.3↑7.6

Quick Start

Installation

git clone https://github.com/bytedance/UniVR.git
cd UniVR
bash install.sh

Inference

cd UniVR_SFT

# Download checkpoint (choose Planning or General subdir)
huggingface-cli download ByteDance/UniVR-34B-Planning --include "Planning/*" --local-dir weights/UniVR-34B-Planning

# Download VisionTokenizer
huggingface-cli download BAAI/Emu3.5-VisionTokenizer --local-dir weights/Emu3.5-VisionTokenizer

# Run inference
bash scripts/inference.sh

Configure configs/config.py to set model paths and prompts:

{
    "prompt": "Tie the red rope around the white gift box. Finish this task in 3 steps.",
    "reference_image": "path/to/first_frame.jpg",
}

Training

SFT (Cold Initialization):

cd UniVR_SFT
# LoRA (2 nodes × 8 GPUs)
bash scripts/train_sft_lora.sh
# Full parameter (4 nodes × 8 GPUs)
bash scripts/train_sft_full.sh

RL (VR-GRPO):

cd UniVR_RL
bash examples/emu3_grpo_lora.sh

Method: VR-GRPO

UniVR proposes VR-GRPO (Visual Reasoning GRPO), a reinforcement learning paradigm that combines:

  • Global Reward (R_g): A VLM evaluator assesses overall task completion and visual quality via pairwise comparison.
  • Step-Focal Reward (R_s): Identifies the most error-prone sub-steps by computing inter-trajectory CLIP-feature variance across rollout samples, then applies fine-grained VLM evaluation on critical windows.
  • Combined Reward: R_reason = R_g − λ|R_g − R_s|, enforcing both terminal correctness and procedural integrity.

This design prevents reward hacking in long-horizon tasks where global-only rewards overlook intermediate physical violations and logical gaps.


Sample Outputs


Training Data

UniVR is trained on VR-X, a large-scale benchmark curated from 1.5M raw samples across 16 diverse sources:

CategorySourcesExamples
Visual GuidanceEgoDex, Action100M, Epic-Kitchen, VideoCraftBenchCooking, handcrafting, daily activities
Robot ManipulationAgiBot, Droid, Bridge, ZebraCoT-RobotRobotic grasping, tool use, multi-step control
EditingZebraCoT-MultiobjectObject manipulation, scene editing
Spatial PerceptionThinkMorph-Navigation, ZebraCoT-EmbodimentNavigation, spatial reasoning
Visual SearchVisualCoT, ThinkMorph-SearchObject localization, attention
Puzzle & GameVRBench, Zebra-Jigsaw, ThinkMorph-VisPuzzleMazes, jigsaw, visual puzzles

Download: ByteDance/VR-X-SFT-RL


Citation

@article{ren2026univr,
  title={UniVR: Thinking in Visual Space for Unified Visual Reasoning},
  author={Zhongwei Ren and Yunchao Wei and Zhao Yao and Guixun Luo and Yao Zhao and Weibo Gong and Xiao Liu and Anran Wang and Xiangtai Li and Xiaojie Jin},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12800},
  year={2026},
}

License

This project is released under the CC BY 4.0 License.

Acknowledgements

UniVR is built upon Emu3.5 and verl. We thank the authors for their excellent open-source contributions.

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

How it works

How language models work

Your prompttext / messagesTransformerattention over tokensNext-token loopgenerate + streamResponsetext · tool callsA language model reads your tokens and predicts the next one, again and again, streaming the reply back.
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