BEHAVIOR: Benchmark for Everyday Household Activities in Virtual, Interactive, and Ecological Environments

Embodied AI refers to the study and development of artificial agents that can perceive, reason, and interact with the environment with the capabilities and limitations of a physical body. Recently, significant progress has been made in developing solutions to embodied AI problems such as (visual) navigation [1-5], interactive Q&A [6-10], instruction following [11-15], and manipulation [16-22]. To calibrate the progress, several lines of pioneering efforts have been made towards benchmarking embodied AI in simulated environments, including Rearrangement [23, 24], TDW Transport Challenge [25], VirtualHome [26], ALFRED [11], Interactive Gibson Benchmark [27], MetaWorld [28], and RLBench [29], among others [30-32]). These efforts are inspiring, but their activities represent only a fraction of challenges that humans face in their daily lives. To develop artificial agents that can eventually perform and assist with everyday activities with human-level robustness and flexibility, we need a comprehensive benchmark with activities that are more realistic, diverse, and complex. But this is easier said than done. There are three major challenges that have prevented existing benchmarks to accommodate more realistic, diverse, and complex activities: - Definition: Identifying and defining meaningful activities for benchmarking; - Realization: Developing simulated environments that realistically support such activities; - Evaluation: Defining success and objective metrics for evaluating performance.