Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2610.10409

RobotWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Robot Use Across Diverse Tasks and Embodiments

Abstract

General-purpose agents increasingly write code, use tools, and complete complex digital tasks, raising the question of how far these capabilities carry into the physical world. To investigate this, we introduce RobotWorld, a challenging simulation testbed for robot use: turning instructions and observations into physical task execution through robot interfaces. Its 84 tasks span manipulation, mobile manipulation, locomotion, driving, and aerial control, with explicit interaction budgets and executable success checks. By analysing task outcomes alongside execution traces, we identify both the capabilities that transfer and the gaps that prevent reliable completion. Furthermore, we find that current agents can construct sophisticated perception and control workflows, including image segmentation, camera calibration, spatial estimation, and dynamics-based computation. These capabilities, however, do not consistently compose into successful behaviour: agents lose task-relevant object states despite reaching commanded poses, fail to correct ineffective actions, recover too late, or mistake unfinished tasks for completion. This uneven transfer also differs across models: Astra succeeds more often on spatial and constrained-contact goals, whereas Opus 5.5 succeeds more often on continuous-balance and timed-interaction goals. By linking these outcomes to execution behaviour, RobotWorld provides both a rigorous proving ground and an empirical account of the remaining capability gaps, thereby establishing concrete targets for training and designing more reliable physical-world agents.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Zhiqin Yang, Chenxin Li, Xiaomeng Hu, Yibin Liu, Weidong Huang, Jiankai Sun, Haitao Li, Zijian Wu, Yuzhi Huang, Fanding Huang, Hanwen Sun, Jiashun Liu, Jingqi Tong, Mingxin Huang, Shaoli Hu, Shijue Huang, Tianyi Bai, Xinyuan Wang, Yunlong Lin, Zhengyang Tang, Zhexin Zhang, Zhuo Chen, Xierui Song, Juntao Dai, Boyuan Chen, Jiaming Ji, Fangneng Zhan, Mengkang Hu, Wei Xue, Yonggang Zhang, Han Hu, Tsung-Yi Ho, Yike Guo. 2026-10-07. RobotWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Robot Use Across Diverse Tasks and Embodiments. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10409

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

The Kinetics Observer: A Tightly Coupled Estimator for Legged Robots

This paper presents the Kinetics Observer, a novel proprioceptive state estimator for legged robots designed to provide the feedback required for versatile locomotion and physical interaction with the environment, with enhanced robustness to contact slippage. Its core contribution is a tight coupling between whole-body kinematics and external wrenches through a contact dynamics model, enabling the consistent fusion of leg kinematics, IMU, and wrench sensor measurements for real-time joint estimation of centroidal kinematics, contact rest poses, contact wrenches, and disturbance wrenches. By exploiting contact wrench measurements as correction terms, the proposed observer increases sensing redundancy, which provides observability of contact slippage relative to the centroid frame and enhanced robustness to modeling and sensor errors. The approach is experimentally evaluated on two humanoid robots across three scenarios totaling thirteen walking sequences, including long-distance walking with repeated contact changes, locomotion over slippery obstacles, and non-coplanar multicontact motion.

cs.RO↗

RoboAug: One Annotation to Hundreds of Scenes via Region-Contrastive Data Augmentation for Robotic Manipulation

Enhancing the generalization of robotic learning in diverse unseen environments remains a fundamental challenge. Existing approaches often rely on large-scale pretraining, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming, or semantic data augmentation methods that assume flawless upstream object detection in real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose RoboAug, a novel generative data augmentation framework that reduces reliance on large-scale pretraining and perfect visual recognition by requiring only a single image with bounding box annotations for dataset construction. Leveraging this minimal supervision, RoboAug employs pretrained generative models for precise semantic augmentation and introduces a plug-and-play region-contrastive loss to guide attention toward task-relevant regions, thereby enhancing generalization and task success rates. Extensive real-world experiments on UR-5e, AgileX, and Tian Gong 2.0 demonstrate that RoboAug consistently outperforms state-of-the-art augmentation baselines under background, distractor, and lighting shifts. Our project is available at https://x-roboaug.github.io/.

cs.RO↗

ActionCodec: What Makes for Good Action Tokenizers

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leveraging the native autoregressive paradigm of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated superior instruction-following and training efficiency. Central to this paradigm is action tokenization, yet its design has primarily focused on reconstruction fidelity, failing to address its direct impact on VLA optimization. Consequently, the fundamental question of \textit{what makes for good action tokenizers} remains unanswered. In this paper, we bridge this gap by establishing design principles specifically from the perspective of VLA optimization. We identify a set of best practices based on information-theoretic insights, including maximized temporal token overlap, minimized vocabulary redundancy, enhanced multimodal mutual information, and token independence. Guided by these principles, we introduce \textbf{ActionCodec}, a high-performance action tokenizer that significantly enhances both training efficiency and VLA performance across diverse simulation and real-world benchmarks. Notably, on LIBERO, a SmolVLM2-2.2B fine-tuned with ActionCodec achieves a 95.5\% success rate without any robotics pre-training. With advanced architectural enhancements, this reaches 97.4\%, representing a new SOTA for VLA models without robotics pre-training. We believe our established design principles, alongside the released model, will provide a clear roadmap for the community to develop more effective action tokenizers.

cs.RO↗