arXiv AI

NormAct: Benchmarking Embodied Agents' Proactive Compliance with Unspoken Social Norms

arXiv:2606. 27826v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Embodied agents driven by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can often complete everyday tasks from visual observations, but goal achievement does not establish whether they proactively respect unstated social norms.

arXiv AI
Jun 29

NormAct: A Benchmark for Hidden Social Norm Compliance in Embodied Planning

arXiv:2606. 27826v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed as embodied planners in egocentric environments, where task success requires not only achieving instructed goals but also acting in socially appropriate ways.

By Shiyun Zhao, Xinwei Song, Tianyu Guo, Xiaomeng Gao, Mingyuan Liu, Xu Han, Yuanyuan Zhang, Zhenliang Zhang, Xue Feng, Bo Dai
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Inferring the Unspoken: Aligning Embodied Agents with Implicit Preferences

The paper "Inferring the Unspoken: Aligning Embodied Agents with Implicit Preferences" addresses the challenge of natural-language instructions that omit details needed for embodied action. It introduces the Preference-based Planning (PbP) benchmark, comprising 5,000 evaluation groups and 290 preferences across three levels, to systematically evaluate agents’ ability to infer latent user preferences from a few demonstrations. The authors propose the two-stage Inferring the Unspoken (InTU) framework, which first verbalizes inferred preferences from multimodal demonstrations and then generates action plans conditioned on that explicit representation, showing that explicit verbalization improves alignment and robustness compared to direct end-to-end planning.

By Manjie Xu, Xinyi Yang, Wei Liang, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Infer Human's Intentions Before Following Natural Language Instructions

The paper introduces FISER, a framework that explicitly infers human goals and intentions before planning actions for AI agents to follow natural language instructions in collaborative embodied tasks. It employs Transformer-based models and is evaluated on the HandMeThat benchmark, outperforming end-to-end approaches and strong baselines such as Chain of Thought prompting. FISER achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on this embodied social reasoning task.

By Yanming Wan, Yue Wu, Yiping Wang, Jiayuan Mao, Natasha Jaques
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Cognitive Chain-of-Thought (CoCoT): Structured Multimodal Reasoning about Social Situations

The paper introduces Cognitive Chain-of-Thought (CoCoT), a structured reasoning framework for vision‑language models that divides multimodal social reasoning into three cognitively inspired stages: Perception, Situation, and Norm. CoCoT improves performance across diverse tasks—multimodal intent disambiguation, theory of mind, social commonsense reasoning, and safety instruction following—by 5.9% to 4.6% on average. Fine‑tuning on CoCoT‑structured traces further boosts accuracy by 5–6% without explicit prompting, indicating that models internalize the structured reasoning pattern and that the approach enhances interpretability and social alignment in multimodal systems.

By Eunkyu Park, Wesley Hanwen Deng, Gunhee Kim, Motahhare Eslami, Maarten Sap
arXiv AI
Jul 17

SafeRelBench: A Spatial-Relation-Aware Benchmark for Process-Level Safety in VLM-Driven Embodied Agents

arXiv:2607. 14543v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as the reasoning backbone of embodied agents, enabling robots to interpret visual scenes, follow language instructions, and plan multi-step actions.

By Huaigang Yang, Ya Li, Min Ren, Bo Dai, Zhenliang Zhang, Zhaofeng He
arXiv AI
Jul 16

UESF-Bench: Benchmarking and Probing for Unified Embodied Seeking and Following

arXiv:2607. 13621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-guided human following is an important capability for embodied agents, but existing benchmarks typically assume that the target person is visible at the start of an episode.

By Kun Yu, Jianhua Yang, Yixiang Chen, Changwei Wang, Hongyuan Yu, Yan Huang, Fushuo Huo, Ya Jing, Zhumin Chen, Keji He