From Instructions to Assistance: a Dataset Aligning Instruction Manuals with Assembly Videos for Evaluating Multimodal LLMs
Authors: Federico Toschi, Nicolò Brunello, Andrea Sassella, Vincenzo Scotti, Mark James Carman
Organizations: DEIB, Politecnico di Milano, Via Ponzio 34/5, 20133, Milano (MI), Italy · KASTEL, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Am Fasanengarten, 576131, Karlsruhe, Germany
The recent advancements introduced by Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can support complex, real world tasks, pushing research outside the text boundaries towards multi modal contexts and leading to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLMs). Given the current adoption of LLM based assistants in solving technical or domain specific problems, the natural continuation of this trend is to extend the input domains of these assistants exploiting MLMs. Ideally, these MLMs should be used as real time assistants in procedural tasks, hopefully integrating a view of the environment where the user being assisted is, or even better sharing the same point of view via Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality (AR) supports, to reason over the same scenario the user is experiencing. With this work, we aim at evaluating the quality of currently openly available MLMs to provide this kind of assistance on technical tasks. To this end, we annotated a data set of furniture assembly with step by step labels and manual references: the Manual to Action Dataset (M2AD). We used this dataset to assess (1) to which extent the reasoning abilities of MLMs can be used to reduce the need for detailed labelling, allowing for more efficient, cost effective annotation practices, (2) whether MLMs are able to track the progression of assembly steps (3) and whether MLMs can refer correctly to the instruction manual pages. Our results showed that while some models understand procedural sequences, their performance is limited by architectural and hardware constraints, highlighting the need for multi image and interleaved text image reasoning.
Figures & tables
Total
Avg.
Std.
Min
Max
No. of Annotations
1228.0
Frames per Step
1365.3
No. of annotated frames
1676677.8
No. of steps per video
23.2
16.2
2.0
71.0
Step duration [s]
21.1
20.5
1.0
176.0
Completion time [s]
652.5
465.4
Table 1: dataset summary statistics for the 53 furniture items considered.
Figure 2
Figure 3: Heatmap showcasing the trend in non-consecutive step transition lenghts. Warm colours indicate positive transitions (skipping), and cold colours indicate negative transitions (re-visiting).
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in visual understanding, but precise 3D spatial reasoning integrated with physical environment remains difficult. Furniture assembly requires not only recovering step-level operations from diagrammatic manuals, but also translating semantic attachment relations into 6D pose updates that enable parts to physically interact with the environment and previously assembled components. To study this problem, we propose AssemState, a zero-shot framework for manual and physical-state-guided furniture assembly. It firstly employs anchor-guided boundary assembly states to decompose manual pages into single-part operations and recover an assembly-tree. Then, it uses iterative after-state feedback refinement to guide successive (SE(3)) updates and corrections, and validates their physical plausibility through simulation-based release tests. Experiments show that compared with the strongest prior baseline, AssemState improves F1 from 38.58% to 62.80% and Tree Exact Match from 28.24% to 53.92% for assembly-tree recovery. On 243 independently evaluated part-level operations, our proposed iterative refinement improves judge-accepted operations from 0 to 5.3% and reduces mean Chamfer distance from 5.4111 to 1.7744. However, visually plausible candidate poses may still suffer from collision, floating, mirror-orientation errors, incomplete seating, and wrong-side attachment. These results show that AssemState improves operation-structure recovery and selected local pose metrics, while MLLMs remain limited for spatial relationship reasoning.
Zhiyuan Qi, Jierui Li, Yifan Shen +2
Tsinghua University · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Xidian University
2D assembly diagrams are often abstract and hard to follow, creating a need for intelligent assistants that can monitor progress, detect errors, and provide step-by-step guidance. In mixed reality settings, such systems must recognize completed and ongoing steps from the camera feed and align them with the diagram instructions. Vision Language Models (VLMs) show promise for this task, but face a depiction gap because assembly diagrams and video frames share few visual features. To systematically assess this gap, we construct IKEA-Bench, a benchmark of 1,623 questions across 6 task types on 29 IKEA furniture products, and evaluate 19 VLMs (2B-38B) under three alignment strategies. Our key findings: (1) assembly instruction understanding is recoverable via text, but text simultaneously degrades diagram-to-video alignment; (2) architecture family predicts alignment accuracy more strongly than parameter count; (3) video understanding remains a hard bottleneck unaffected by strategy. A three-level mechanistic analysis further reveals that diagrams and video occupy disjoint ViT subspaces, and that adding text shifts models from visual to text-driven reasoning. These results identify visual encoding as the primary target for improving cross-depiction robustness. Project page: https://ryenhails.github.io/IKEA-Bench/
Despite rapid progress, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) still fail on tasks that humans solve effortlessly, such as navigating a grid maze from a screenshot or selecting the correct puzzle piece. Rather than retraining the model, we ask a complementary question: how much capability can be elicited from a frozen MLLM purely by improving the execution scaffold around it? We introduce MUSE, a multimodal unified structured execution harness that wraps any off-the-shelf MLLM with composable modules for task representation, visual processing, perception tool use, structured parsing, deterministic verification, and verifier-guided repair, without any model retraining. We evaluate MUSE across diverse benchmarks spanning visual spatial planning, visual perception, multimodal reasoning, and fine-grained visual discrimination, using multiple state-of-the-art MLLMs. MUSE delivers consistent gains over the bare model in all settings, with the largest jumps on challenging instances. Further analysis reveals that many MLLM failures arise from harness-level shortcomings rather than fundamental model deficits, and can be addressed through verifier-guided repair without touching the model. These findings highlight the agentic multimodal harness as a critical yet underexplored design dimension, offering an orthogonal avenue for improving MLLMs beyond model-centric optimization.