Embodied Reasoning

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Overview

Embodied reasoning connects what an agent sees with what it knows about space, time, objects, and physical cause and effect, so it can choose actions and adapt when the world changes. Approaches include vision-language and vision-language-action models, structured scene graphs and world models, language-based reasoning, memory and reflection, and reinforcement learning. Benchmarks test navigation, manipulation, and long-horizon tasks in simulators such as ALFRED and BEHAVIOR as well as on real robots. Models are improving, but fluent plans and strong benchmark scores do not always translate into grounded, reliable action, especially under changing conditions or partial observation.

Latest papers

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78 papers12 papers in the last four weeks, up 100% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Apr 8, 2026

HY-Embodied-0.5: Embodied Foundation Models for Real-World Agents

We introduce HY-Embodied-0.5, a family of foundation models specifically designed for real-world embodied agents. To bridge the gap between general Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and the demands of embodied agents, our models are developed to enhance the core capabilities required by embodied intelligence: spatial and temporal visual perception, alongside advanced embodied reasoning for prediction, interaction, and planning. The HY-Embodied-0.5 suite comprises two primary variants: an efficient model with 2B activated parameters designed for edge deployment, and a powerful model with 32B activated parameters targeted for complex reasoning. To support the fine-grained visual perception essential for embodied tasks, we adopt a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture to enable modality-specific computing. By incorporating latent tokens, this design effectively enhances the perceptual representation of the models. To improve reasoning capabilities, we introduce an iterative, self-evolving post-training paradigm. Furthermore, we employ on-policy distillation to transfer the advanced capabilities of the large model to the smaller variant, thereby maximizing the performance potential of the compact model. Extensive evaluations across 22 benchmarks, spanning visual perception, spatial reasoning, and embodied understanding, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our MoT-2B model outperforms similarly sized state-of-the-art models on 16 benchmarks, while the 32B variant achieves performance comparable to frontier models such as Gemini 3.0 Pro. In downstream robot control experiments, we leverage our robust VLM foundation to train an effective Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, achieving compelling results in real-world physical evaluations. Code and models are open-sourced at https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HY-Embodied.

Tencent Robotics X, HY Vision Team, : +20

Mixture-of-TransformersRobot Foundation ModelsVLMs for RoboticsEmbodied ReasoningSpatial Reasoning
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Apr 4, 2026

FlueBricks: A Construction Kit of Flute-like Instruments for Acoustic Reasoning

We present FlueBricks, a construction kit for acoustic reasoning via building and customizing flute-like instruments. By assembling generator, resonator, and connector modules that embody various aeroacoustic properties, users gain deeper understanding of how blowhole, tube length, and tone-hole placement alter onset, pitch, and timbre through hands-on experimentation. This forms a designer-player loop of configuring and playing to form, test, and refine acoustic behaviors-acoustic reasoning-shifting acoustic instruments from static artifacts to dynamic systems. To understand how users engage with this system, we conducted an exploratory study with 12 participants ranging from novices to professional musicians. During their explorations, we observed participants fluently switching between designer and player roles, scaffolding designs from familiar instruments, forming and refining their acoustic understanding of length, tone holes, and generator geometry, reinterpreting modules beyond their intended functions, and using their creations for performative acts such as pedagogical showing and musical expression. These collectively demonstrated FlueBricks's potential as a pedagogical tool for embodied acoustic reasoning.

Bo-Yu Chen, Chiao-Wei Huang, Lung-Pan Cheng

National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan · Independent Researcher, Taipei, Taiwan

Audio ReasoningEmbodied ReasoningEducational Technology
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Mar 20, 2026

Why Cognitive Robotics Matters: Lessons from OntoAgent and LLM Deployment in HARMONIC for Safety-Critical Robot Teaming

Deploying embodied AI agents in the physical world demands cognitive capabilities for long-horizon planning that execute reliably, deterministically, and transparently. We present HARMONIC, a cognitive-robotic architecture that pairs OntoAgent, a content-centric cognitive architecture providing metacognitive self-monitoring, domain-grounded diagnosis, and consequence-based action selection over ontologically structured knowledge, with a modular reactive tactical layer. HARMONIC's modular design enables a functional evaluation of whether LLMs can replicate OntoAgent's cognitive capabilities, evaluated within the same robotic system under identical conditions. Six LLMs spanning frontier and efficient tiers replace OntoAgent in a collaborative maintenance scenario under native and knowledge-equalized conditions. Results reveal that LLMs do not consistently assess their own knowledge state before acting, causing downstream failures in diagnostic reasoning and action selection. These deficits persist even with equivalent procedural knowledge, indicating the issues are architectural rather than knowledge-based. These findings support the design of physically embodied systems in which cognitive architectures retain primary authority for reasoning, owing to their deterministic and transparent characteristics.

Sanjay Oruganti, Sergei Nirenburg, Marjorie McShane +5

Cognitive Science Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180, USA. · University of Georgia, Athens, GA, 30605, USA. · Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, University of Texas at Austin, TX, US.

Cognitive Architectures for AI AgentsLarge Language Model-Based Robot PlanningLLM Agent ReliabilityEmbodied Reasoning
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Mar 18, 2026

Grid Spatial Understanding: A Dataset for Textual Spatial Reasoning over Grids, Embodied Settings, and Coordinate Structures

We introduce GSU, a text-only grid dataset to evaluate the spatial reasoning capabilities of LLMs over 3 core tasks: navigation, object localization, and structure composition. By forgoing visual inputs, isolating spatial reasoning from perception, we show that while most models grasp basic grid concepts, they struggle with frames of reference relative to an embodied agent and identifying 3D shapes from coordinate lists. We also find that exposure to a visual modality does not provide a generalizable understanding of 3D space that VLMs are able to utilize for these tasks. Finally, we show that while the very latest frontier models can solve the provided tasks (though harder variants may still stump them), fully fine-tuning a small LM or LORA fine-tuning a small LLM show potential to match frontier model performance, suggesting an avenue for specialized embodied agents.

Risham Sidhu, Julia Hockenmaier

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Spatial Reasoning in Language ModelsSpatial ReasoningSpatial Reasoning Benchmarks3D Spatial ReasoningEmbodied Reasoning
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Mar 18, 2026

Recurrent Reasoning with Vision-Language Models for Estimating Long-Horizon Embodied Task Progress

Accurately estimating task progress is critical for embodied agents to plan and execute long-horizon, multi-step tasks. Despite promising advances, existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) based methods primarily leverage their video understanding capabilities, while neglecting their complex reasoning potential. Furthermore, processing long video trajectories with VLMs is computationally prohibitive for real-world deployment. To address these challenges, we propose the Recurrent Reasoning Vision-Language Model (R2\text{R}^2VLM). Our model features a recurrent reasoning framework that processes local video snippets iteratively, maintaining a global context through an evolving Chain of Thought (CoT). This CoT explicitly records task decomposition, key steps, and their completion status, enabling the model to reason about complex temporal dependencies. This design avoids the high cost of processing long videos while preserving essential reasoning capabilities. We train R2\text{R}^2VLM on large-scale, automatically generated datasets from ALFRED and Ego4D. Extensive experiments on progress estimation and downstream applications, including progress-enhanced policy learning, reward modeling for reinforcement learning, and proactive assistance, demonstrate that R2\text{R}^2VLM achieves strong performance and generalization, achieving a new state-of-the-art in long-horizon task progress estimation. The models and benchmarks are publicly available at huggingface.

Yuelin Zhang, Sijie Cheng, Chen Li +4

Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China · Beijing Key Laboratory of Research on Large Models and Intelligent Governance · Engineering Research Center of Next-Generation Intelligent Search and Recommendation, MOE +2

Robot Task Progress EstimationVLMs for RoboticsVLM ReasoningEmbodied Reasoning
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Mar 17, 2026

When Should a Robot Think? Resource-Aware Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning for Embodied Robotic Decision-Making

Embodied robotic systems increasingly rely on large language model (LLM)-based agents to support high-level reasoning, planning, and decision-making during interactions with the environment. However, invoking LLM reasoning introduces substantial computational latency and resource overhead, which can interrupt action execution and reduce system reliability. Excessive reasoning may delay actions, while insufficient reasoning often leads to incorrect decisions and task failures. This raises a fundamental question for embodied agents: when should the agent reason, and when should it act? In this work, we propose RARRL (Resource-Aware Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning), a hierarchical framework for resource-aware orchestration of embodied agents. Rather than learning low-level control policies, RARRL learns a high-level orchestration policy that operates at the agent's decision-making layer. This policy enables the agent to adaptively determine whether to invoke reasoning, which reasoning role to employ, and how much computational budget to allocate based on current observations, execution history, and remaining resources. Extensive experiments, including evaluations with empirical latency profiles derived from the ALFRED benchmark, show that RARRL consistently improves task success rates while reducing execution latency and enhancing robustness compared with fixed or heuristic reasoning strategies. These results demonstrate that adaptive reasoning control is essential for building reliable and efficient embodied robotic agents.

Jun Liu, Pu Zhao, Zhenglun Kong +12

Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University · Northeastern University · Harvard University +9

Embodied AIEmbodied ReasoningRL for LLM AgentsRobotic RL
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Mar 15, 2026

RenderMem: Rendering as Spatial Memory Retrieval

Embodied reasoning is inherently viewpoint-dependent: what is visible, occluded, or reachable depends critically on where the agent stands. However, existing spatial memory systems for embodied agents typically store either multi-view observations or object-centric abstractions, making it difficult to perform reasoning with explicit geometric grounding. We introduce RenderMem, a spatial memory framework that treats rendering as the interface between 3D world representations and spatial reasoning. Instead of storing fixed observations, RenderMem maintains a 3D scene representation and generates query-conditioned visual evidence by rendering the scene from viewpoints implied by the query. This enables embodied agents to reason directly about line-of-sight, visibility, and occlusion from arbitrary perspectives. RenderMem is fully compatible with existing vision-language models and requires no modification to standard architectures. Experiments in the AI2-THOR environment show consistent improvements on viewpoint-dependent visibility and occlusion queries over prior memory baselines.

JooHyun Park, HyeongYeop Kang

Korea University, South Korea

Long-Term Memory for Embodied AgentsAgent MemoryRobotic Spatial MemoryEmbodied Spatial ReasoningVisual Spatial ReasoningEmbodied Reasoning+1
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Mar 8, 2026

ICLR: In-Context Imitation Learning with Visual Reasoning

In-context imitation learning enables robots to adapt to new tasks from a small number of demonstrations without additional training. However, existing approaches typically condition only on state-action trajectories and lack explicit representations of task intent. This limitation hinders performance in complex and ambiguous task settings where the same actions may be consistent with different objectives. To address this, we present In-Context Imitation Learning with Visual Reasoning (ICLR), a novel framework that augments demonstration prompts with structured visual reasoning traces representing anticipated future robot trajectories in image space. ICLR also jointly learns to generate reasoning traces and low-level actions within a unified autoregressive transformer, enabling the model to mimic not only action prediction but also the reasoning process that leads to those actions. We extensively evaluate ICLR in both simulation and real-world manipulation tasks and demonstrate consistent improvements in success rates and generalization to unseen tasks and novel object configurations compared to other in-context imitation learning methods. These results suggest that incorporating embodied visual reasoning represents a promising direction for enhancing the robustness and generalization of robotic in-context learning systems.

Toan Nguyen, Weiduo Yuan, Songlin Wei +3

University of Southern California · Autodesk Research

Robot Imitation LearningICL for RoboticsRobotic ManipulationGeneralization in Robotic ManipulationEmbodied Reasoning
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Mar 4, 2026

ManipulationNet: An Infrastructure for Benchmarking Real-World Robot Manipulation with Physical Skill Challenges and Embodied Multimodal Reasoning

Dexterous manipulation enables robots to purposefully alter the physical world, transforming them from passive observers into active agents in unstructured environments. This capability is the cornerstone of physical artificial intelligence. Despite decades of advances in hardware, perception, control, and learning, progress toward general manipulation systems remains fragmented due to the absence of widely adopted standard benchmarks. The central challenge lies in reconciling the variability of the real world with the reproducibility and authenticity required for rigorous scientific evaluation. To address this, we introduce ManipulationNet, a global infrastructure that hosts real-world benchmark tasks for robotic manipulation. ManipulationNet delivers reproducible task setups through standardized hardware kits, and enables distributed performance evaluation via a unified software client that delivers real-time task instructions and collects benchmarking results. As a persistent and scalable infrastructure, ManipulationNet organizes benchmark tasks into two complementary tracks: 1) the Physical Skills Track, which evaluates low-level physical interaction skills, and 2) the Embodied Reasoning Track, which tests high-level reasoning and multimodal grounding abilities. This design fosters the systematic growth of an interconnected network of real-world abilities and skills, paving the path toward general robotic manipulation. By enabling comparable manipulation research in the real world at scale, this infrastructure establishes a sustainable foundation for measuring long-term scientific progress and identifying capabilities ready for real-world deployment.

Yiting Chen, Kenneth Kimble, Edward H. Adelson +20

Rice University · U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology · Massachusetts Institute of Technology +12

Robotic ManipulationRobot Manipulation BenchmarksEmbodied ReasoningMultimodal Grounding
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Mar 3, 2026

ACE-Brain-0: Spatial Intelligence as a Shared Scaffold for Universal Embodiments

Universal embodied intelligence demands robust generalization across heterogeneous embodiments, such as autonomous driving, robotics, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, existing embodied brain in training a unified model over diverse embodiments frequently triggers long-tail data, gradient interference, and catastrophic forgetting, making it notoriously difficult to balance universal generalization with domain-specific proficiency. In this report, we introduce ACE-Brain-0, a generalist foundation brain that unifies spatial reasoning, autonomous driving, and embodied manipulation within a single multimodal large language model~(MLLM). Our key insight is that spatial intelligence serves as a universal scaffold across diverse physical embodiments: although vehicles, robots, and UAVs differ drastically in morphology, they share a common need for modeling 3D mental space, making spatial cognition a natural, domain-agnostic foundation for cross-embodiment transfer. Building on this insight, we propose the Scaffold-Specialize-Reconcile~(SSR) paradigm, which first establishes a shared spatial foundation, then cultivates domain-specialized experts, and finally harmonizes them through data-free model merging. Furthermore, we adopt Group Relative Policy Optimization~(GRPO) to strengthen the model's comprehensive capability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ACE-Brain-0 achieves competitive and even state-of-the-art performance across 24 spatial and embodiment-related benchmarks.

Ziyang Gong, Zehang Luo, Anke Tang +21

ACE Robotics · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · The University of Hong Kong +7

Embodied Spatial ReasoningEmbodied AICross-Embodiment TransferEmbodied ReasoningUnified Multimodal ModelsRobot Foundation Models
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Mar 3, 2026

From Language to Action: Can LLM-Based Agents Be Used for Embodied Robot Cognition?

In order to flexibly act in an everyday environment, a robotic agent needs a variety of cognitive capabilities that enable it to reason about plans and perform execution recovery. Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to demonstrate emergent cognitive aspects, such as reasoning and language understanding; however, the ability to control embodied robotic agents requires reliably bridging high-level language to low-level functionalities for perception and control. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which an LLM can serve as a core component for planning and execution reasoning in a cognitive robot architecture. For this purpose, we propose a cognitive architecture in which an agentic LLM serves as the core component for planning and reasoning, while components for working and episodic memories support learning from experience and adaptation. An instance of the architecture is then used to control a mobile manipulator in a simulated household environment, where environment interaction is done through a set of high-level tools for perception, reasoning, navigation, grasping, and placement, all of which are made available to the LLM-based agent. We evaluate our proposed system on two household tasks (object placement and object swapping), which evaluate the agent's reasoning, planning, and memory utilisation. The results demonstrate that the LLM-driven agent can complete structured tasks and exhibits emergent adaptation and memory-guided planning, but also reveal significant limitations, such as hallucinations about the task success and poor instruction following by refusing to acknowledge and complete sequential tasks. These findings highlight both the potential and challenges of employing LLMs as embodied cognitive controllers for autonomous robots.

Shinas Shaji, Fabian Huppertz, Alex Mitrevski +1

Institute of AI and Autonomous Systems (A2S), Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Sankt Augustin, Germany · Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems, Sankt Augustin, Germany

Large Language Model-Based Robot PlanningLanguage Model-Based ControlCognitive Architectures for AI AgentsEmbodied ReasoningMemory-Augmented Language Model Agents
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Feb 25, 2026

OOWM: Structuring Embodied Reasoning and Planning via Object-Oriented Programmatic World Modeling

Standard Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities, yet its reliance on linear natural language is inherently insufficient for effective world modeling in embodied tasks. While text offers flexibility, it fails to explicitly represent the state-space, object hierarchies, and causal dependencies required for robust robotic planning. To address these limitations, we propose Object-Oriented World Modeling (OOWM), a novel framework that structures embodied reasoning through the lens of software engineering formalisms. We redefine the world model not as a latent vector space, but as an explicit symbolic tuple W=⟨S,T⟩W = \langle S, T \rangle: a State Abstraction (GstateG_\text{state}) instantiating the environmental state SS, coupled with a Control Policy (GcontrolG_\text{control}) representing the transition logic T:S×A→S′T: S \times A \rightarrow S'. OOWM leverages the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to materialize this definition: it employs Class Diagrams to ground visual perception into rigorous object hierarchies, and Activity Diagrams to operationalize planning into executable control flows. Furthermore, we introduce a three-stage training pipeline combining Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Crucially, this method utilizes outcome-based rewards from the final plan to implicitly optimize the underlying object-oriented reasoning structure, enabling effective learning even with sparse annotations. Extensive evaluations on the MRoom-30k benchmark demonstrate that OOWM significantly outperforms unstructured textual baselines in planning coherence, execution success, and structural fidelity, establishing a new paradigm for structured embodied reasoning.

Hongyu Chen, Liang Lin, Guangrun Wang

Sun Yat-sen University · Guangdong Key Laboratory of Big Data Analysis and Processing · X-Era AI Lab

Large Language Model-Based Robot PlanningWorld ModelsWorld Model-Based PlanningEmbodied ReasoningObject-Centric World Models
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Feb 24, 2026

Learning from Trials and Errors: Reflective Test-Time Planning for Embodied LLMs

Embodied LLMs endow robots with high-level task reasoning, but they cannot reflect on what went wrong or why, turning deployment into a sequence of independent trials where mistakes repeat rather than accumulate into experience. Drawing upon human reflective practitioners, we introduce Reflective Test-Time Planning, which integrates two modes of reflection: reflection-in-action, where the agent uses test-time scaling to generate and score multiple candidate actions using internal reflections before execution; and reflection-on-action, which uses test-time training to update both its internal reflection model and its action policy based on external reflections after execution. We also include retrospective reflection, allowing the agent to re-evaluate earlier decisions and perform model updates with hindsight for proper long-horizon credit assignment. Experiments on our newly-designed Long-Horizon Household benchmark and MuJoCo Cupboard Fitting benchmark show significant gains over baseline models, with zero-shot generalization to photorealistic HM3D environments and real-robot experiments on a Franka Panda arm. Ablations confirm that reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action are mutually dependent, and that retrospective reflection achieves better credit assignment than step-wise external feedback at lower computational overhead. Qualitative analyses further highlight behavioral correction through reflection.

Yining Hong, Huang Huang, Manling Li +4

Stanford University · Northwestern University

Large Language Model-Based Robot PlanningLLM Agent PlanningLong-Horizon LLM AgentsEmbodied ReasoningTest-Time Training
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Feb 24, 2026

Grounding LLMs in Scientific Discovery via Embodied Actions

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant potential in scientific discovery but struggle to bridge the gap between theoretical reasoning and verifiable physical simulation. Existing solutions operate in a passive "execute-then-response" loop and thus lacks runtime perception, obscuring agents to transient anomalies (e.g., numerical instability or diverging oscillations). To address this limitation, we propose EmbodiedAct, a framework that transforms established scientific software into active embodied agents by grounding LLMs in embodied actions with a tight perception-execution loop. We instantiate EmbodiedAct within MATLAB and evaluate it on complex engineering design and scientific modeling tasks. Extensive experiments show that EmbodiedAct significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving SOTA performance by ensuring satisfactory reliability and stability in long-horizon simulations and enhanced accuracy in scientific modeling.

Bo Zhang, Jinfeng Zhou, Yuxuan Chen +3

Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

AI Agents for Scientific DiscoveryLLM GroundingLarge Language Model-Guided Scientific DiscoveryEmbodied Reasoning
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Feb 23, 2026

PhysMem: Scaling Test-Time Memory for Embodied Physical Reasoning

Reliable object manipulation requires understanding physical properties that vary across objects and environments. Vision-language model (VLM) planners can reason about friction and stability in general terms; however, they often cannot predict how a specific ball will roll on a particular surface or which stone will provide a stable foundation without direct experience. We present PhysMem, a memory framework that enables VLM robot planners to learn physical principles from interaction at test time, without updating model parameters. The system records experiences, generates candidate hypotheses, and verifies them through targeted interaction before promoting validated knowledge to guide future decisions. A central design choice is verification before application: the system tests hypotheses against new observations rather than applying retrieved experience directly, reducing rigid reliance on prior experience when physical conditions change. We evaluate PhysMem on three real-world manipulation tasks and simulation benchmarks across four VLM backbones. On a controlled brick insertion task, principled abstraction achieves 76% success compared to 23% for direct experience retrieval, and real-world experiments show consistent improvement over 30-minute deployment sessions.

Haoyang Li, Yang You, Hao Su +1

UC San Diego · Stanford University

Memory-Augmented AgentsEmbodied ReasoningLarge Language Model-Based Robot PlanningRobotic Manipulation
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Jan 19, 2026

SplatReasoner: Enhancing Embodied Reasoning and Grounding by Novel View Synthesis

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities over images and videos, yet their application to embodied scene understanding often constrained by the fixed viewpoints stored in episodic RGB-D memories. These observations may fail to capture query-relevant evidence due to occlusions, object truncation, restricted fields of view, or suboptimal view composition. We present SplatReasoner, a framework that introduces novel view synthesis into the VLM reasoning process by leveraging 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Given a user query about a 3D scene, SplatReasoner retrieves relevant observations and synthesizes query-conditioned viewpoints that reveal the visual evidence needed to answer the query and ground the referred entities in 3D. Experiments show that query-conditioned novel view synthesis improves both embodied reasoning and 3D grounding over fixed-view memory and language-embedded 3DGS baselines.

Kim Yu-Ji, Dahye Lee, Kim Jun-Seong +6

POSTECH · KAIST · ETRI +1

VLM ReasoningVisually Grounded ReasoningEmbodied Reasoning3D Scene Understanding3D Visual Grounding
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Oct 20, 2025

Robobench: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models as Embodied Brain

Building robots that can perceive, reason, and act in dynamic, unstructured environments remains a central challenge. Recent embodied systems often follow a dual-system paradigm, where System 2 performs high-level reasoning and System 1 handles low-level control. We refer to System 2 as the embodied brain, the cognitive core for decision-making in manipulation. Although evaluating this embodied brain is crucial, existing benchmarks mainly measure execution success or cover only limited aspects of high-level cognition and task realism. We introduce RoboBench, a benchmark for evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as embodied brains. RoboBench covers five dimensions: Instruction Comprehension, Perception Reasoning, Generalized Planning, Affordance Prediction, and Failure Analysis. It spans 14 capabilities, 25 tasks, and 6,092 QA pairs. To improve realism, it draws from large-scale real robotic data and in-house collection across diverse embodiments, attribute-rich objects, multi-view scenes, and memory-driven navigation. For planning, RoboBench introduces an MLLM-as-world-simulator framework that assesses whether predicted plans can achieve critical object-state changes under physical and visual constraints, enabling more faithful evaluation of long-horizon reasoning than symbolic matching. Experiments on 18 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal persistent limitations in implicit instruction understanding, spatiotemporal reasoning, cross-scenario planning, fine-grained affordance understanding, and failure diagnosis. We further analyze how embodied cognitive abilities relate to downstream robotic control. RoboBench offers a comprehensive scaffold for quantifying high-level cognition and guiding next-generation MLLMs toward more robust robotic intelligence.

Yulin Luo, Chun-Kai Fan, Menghang Dong +19

State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer2026 Science, Peking University · Institute for Brain and Intelligence, Fudan University · University of Science andJul Technology Beijing +2

Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationMultimodal Large Language ModelsRobot Manipulation BenchmarksEmbodied AIMultimodal Model EvaluationEmbodied Reasoning
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Oct 7, 2025

BuilderBench: The Building Blocks of Intelligent Agents

Today's AI models learn primarily through mimicry and refining, so it is not surprising that they struggle to solve problems beyond the limits set by existing data. To solve novel problems, agents should acquire skills by exploring and learning through experience. Finding a scalable learning mechanism for developing agents that learn through interaction remains a major open problem. In this work, we introduce BuilderBench, a benchmark to accelerate research into agent training that centers open-ended exploration. BuilderBench requires agents to learn how to build any structure using blocks. BuilderBench is equipped with (1) a simulator of a robot interacting with various physical blocks, and (2) a task-suite with over 50 diverse target structures that are carefully curated to test an understanding of physics, mathematics, and long-horizon planning. Agents are provided with a target structure at the start, and can interact with the environment for multiple episodes to experiment and learn various skills for building the structure. Solving these tasks requires embodied reasoning in a way that is not reflected in words but rather in actions, experimenting with different strategies and piecing them together. Our experiments with multiple state-of-the-art frontier language model based agents and tabula rasa reinforcement learning algorithms show that these agents cannot solve any of the non-trivial tasks in the BuilderBench. Our analysis throws light on the lack of exploration abilities in these models.

Raj Ghugare, Roger Creus Castanyer, Catherine Ji +4

Princeton University · Mila – Quebec AI Institute · Université de Montréal

Long-Horizon Agent EvaluationRobot Manipulation BenchmarksLLM Agent TrainingEmbodied AIEmbodied Reasoning
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