CIALLO: Learning Shared Intent Representations for Cross-Embodiment Manipulation

Robot demonstrations contain reusable manipulation knowledge, but transferring this knowledge across embodiments requires representations that bridge differences in control interfaces. Action reconstruction alone does not ensure that similar behaviors across robots share a representation. To address this gap, we introduce CIALLO, an action codec that aligns actions, visual changes, and observation-grounded language in a shared space of short-horizon behavioral intent. An embodiment-conditioned decoder maps this intent back to robot-specific actions, allowing a shared representation to support different control interfaces. After pretraining on eight embodiments, CIALLO adapts to a new robot from one recording of at most 10 seconds by updating only its embodiment embeddings. The calibrated codec then remains frozen while a policy learns to predict intent from observations and instructions. We instantiate this policy with Qwen3.5-4B to form Qwen-CIALLO, whose backbone requires no large-scale robot-action pretraining before policy finetuning. With 20 demonstrations per task, Qwen-CIALLO achieves 75.0% average success across real SO-101 and single-arm Piper robots, compared with 68.3% for fully finetuned ${\pi }_0$. In simulation, we additionally finetune the action decoder, achieving 97.3% success on LIBERO and 52.7% on RoboTwin 2.0. The LIBERO policy also achieves 80.8% on LIBERO-Plus without further finetuning. Together, these results support a shared action codec as a transferable control interface that separates embodiment calibration from task learning.