Do World Models Make Better Robots? A Survey of Evaluation Benchmarks for Predictive Embodied Intelligence

arXiv:2609.29669 · cs.RO, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-08-30 · Read on arXiv

cs.RO, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-08-30

Updated: 2026-08-30

Terminology

• Benchmark — 209× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• World Model — 56× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Generalization — 24× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Model-Agnostic — 19× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Benchmarking — 17× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Embodied AI — 14× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Provenance — 10× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Accuracy — 8× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Reinforcement Learning — 8× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Alignment — 6× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Core — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Grounding — 5× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Robustness — 5× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Causal Reasoning — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fidelity — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Hallucination — 4× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Temporal Reasoning — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adam — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Consistency — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Generative Model — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generative Models — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Task Planning — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Deep Reinforcement Learning — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Sim-to-Real Gap — 2× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Verification — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ablation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Action Chunking — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Actor — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Baby Intuitions Benchmark — 1× in this paper
• Causal Discovery — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Digital Twin — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Elias — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Foundation Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Foundation Models — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• In Conference on Robot Learning — 1× in this paper
• Multimodal Dataset — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Recent Vision-Language-Action — 1× in this paper
• Transfer Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 10 episodes
• Transformer — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Unified Framework — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Tasks
• BEHAVIOR-1K: A Human-Centered, Embodied AI Benchmark with 1,000 Everyday Activities and Realistic Simulation
• CALVIN: A Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Policy Learning for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation Tasks
• Towards Generalizable Vision-Language Robotic Manipulation: A Benchmark and LLM-guided 3D Policy
• ManiSkill2: A Unified Benchmark for Generalizable Manipulation Skills
• Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learning
• RoboCasa: Large-Scale Simulation of Everyday Tasks for Generalist Robots
• LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learning
• VLABench: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Robotics Manipulation with Long-Horizon Reasoning Tasks
• Habitat 3.0: A Co-Habitat for Humans, Avatars and Robots
• EVA: An Embodied World Model for Future Video Anticipation
• EWMBench: Evaluating Scene, Motion, and Semantic Quality in Embodied World Models
• Do generative video models understand physical principles?
• Physion: Evaluating Physical Prediction from Vision in Humans and Machines
• Physion++: Evaluating Physical Scene Understanding that Requires Online Inference of Different Physical Properties
• VideoPhy: Evaluating Physical Commonsense for Video Generation
• WorldModelBench: Judging Video Generation Models As World Models
• WorldScore: A Unified Evaluation Benchmark for World Generation
• VBench-2.0: Advancing Video Generation Benchmark Suite for Intrinsic Faithfulness
• WorldPrediction: A Benchmark for High-level World Modeling and Long-horizon Procedural Planning

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• HRDexDB: A 4D Dexterous Grasping Dataset Across Human and Multiple Robot Embodiments
• APT: Action Expert Pretraining Improves Instruction Generalization of Vision-Language-Action Policies
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