Organizations: Dept. of Computer, Control, and Management Engineering Sapienza University of Rome, Rome (Italy) · Dept. of International Humanities and Social Sciences, International University of Rome, Rome (Italy) · Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC-CNR), National Research Council, Italy · University of Bologna, Bologna (Italy)
RoboCup has always been a scenario to develop systems that solve real-world problems. Driven by the main goal of playing against the 2050 FIFA World Cup champions, the RoboCup Soccer leagues need to constantly measure how the research community is progressing. Computing visual statistics from match videos is a crucial way to track this evolution. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a fully autonomous, real-time sports commentator for RoboCup matches. By bridging the gap between raw kinematic tracking and natural language generation, our neuro-symbolic architecture extracts precise statistics from video streams and turns them into fluent, hallucination-free narration. The proposed system is capable of generating statistics and commentary both during live match streaming and in post-game analysis, easily adapting to the new dynamism of the league where different humanoid robots of different sizes share the field. Supplemental materials are available at https://lab-rococo-sapienza.github.io/MARIO/
Recent advances in robot world models enable synthetic video generation for embodied prediction and planning. However, evaluating these videos is challenging: visually realistic outputs often violate physical laws, temporal consistency, or task logic, while conventional metrics and monolithic Vision-Language Model (VLM) judges fail to generalize or provide precise diagnostic value. We present RoboGaze, a training-free, multi-agent VLM framework that provides structured, interpretable evaluation for generated robot-manipulation videos. Given a task instruction and video, RoboGaze operates via a three-stage pipeline: task-scene grounding, dimension-specific specialist routing, and critic-based verification. It outputs temporally localized glitch reports categorized under a novel 6-dimension, 30-type robotics-specific taxonomy. To benchmark RoboGaze, we introduce a human-validated dataset of 382 clips spanning simulated and real-world multi-view manipulation. Evaluating eight open-source and proprietary VLM backbones, RoboGaze dramatically outperforms zero-shot baselines, improving description-F1 by up to +43 points and temporal alignment (F1 x IoU) by up to +37 points, closing approximately 85% of the gap to the human ceiling. Furthermore, its critic verifier mitigates the "cry-wolf" false-positive flaw of standard VLMs, lifting clean-clip accuracy from under 25% to over 80%. RoboGaze offers a scalable, highly interpretable diagnostic tool for the rigorous evaluation of robot world models.
Robot soccer is a challenging testbed for multi-agent reinforcement learning because it combines partial observability, cooperative and adversarial interaction, sparse rewards, and long-horizon tactical behavior. RoboCup 2D Soccer Simulation (RCSS2D) provides a mature robot-soccer platform, but its competition-oriented server-client architecture is difficult to use directly with modern Python-based MARL workflows. We introduce R2D-RL, a reinforcement learning environment that connects RCSS2D and HELIOS-based player clients to a Python MARL interface through shared-memory communication and cycle-level synchronization. R2D-RL supports full-field and scenario-based training with configurable opponents, Base discrete and Hybrid parameterized action spaces, action masks, expected possession value (EPV)-based reward shaping, and parallel execution. We provide front-goal scenarios and an 11-vs-11 full-field benchmark, together with baseline results.
Refereeing is vital in sports, where fair, accurate, and explainable decisions are fundamental. While intelligent assistant technologies are being widely adopted in soccer refereeing, current AI-assisted approaches remain preliminary. Existing research mostly focuses on isolated video perception tasks and lacks the ability to understand and reason about foul scenarios. To fill this gap, we propose SoccerRef-Agents, a holistic and explainable multi-agent decision-making framework for soccer refereeing. The main contributions are: (i) constructing the multimodal benchmark SoccerRefBench with over 1,200 referee theory questions and 600 foul video clips; (ii) building a vector-based knowledge base RefKnowledgeDB using the latest "Laws of the Game" and a classic case database for precise, knowledge-driven reasoning; (iii) designing a novel multi-agent architecture that collaborates via cross-modal RAG to bridge the semantic gap between visual content and regulatory texts. This work explores the technical capability of integrating MLLMs with refereeing expertise, and evaluations show our system significantly outperforms general-purpose MLLMs in decision accuracy and explanation quality. All databases, benchmarks, and code will be made available.