MFE-ETP: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multi-modal Foundation Models on Embodied Task Planning

TL;DR

This paper introduces MFE-ETP, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating multi-modal foundation models on embodied task planning, revealing their current limitations compared to human performance.

Contribution

The work develops a systematic evaluation framework, proposes a challenging benchmark, and provides an automated platform for assessing MFMs in embodied task planning.

Findings

State-of-the-art MFMs perform significantly below human levels.

The benchmark includes diverse, complex, and variable task scenarios.

The evaluation platform enables automated testing of multiple models.

Abstract

In recent years, Multi-modal Foundation Models (MFMs) and Embodied Artificial Intelligence (EAI) have been advancing side by side at an unprecedented pace. The integration of the two has garnered significant attention from the AI research community. In this work, we attempt to provide an in-depth and comprehensive evaluation of the performance of MFM s on embodied task planning, aiming to shed light on their capabilities and limitations in this domain. To this end, based on the characteristics of embodied task planning, we first develop a systematic evaluation framework, which encapsulates four crucial capabilities of MFMs: object understanding, spatio-temporal perception, task understanding, and embodied reasoning. Following this, we propose a new benchmark, named MFE-ETP, characterized its complex and variable task scenarios, typical yet diverse task types, task instances of varying difficulties, and rich test case types ranging from multiple embodied question answering to embodied task reasoning. Finally, we offer a simple and easy-to-use automatic evaluation platform that enables the automated testing of multiple MFMs on the proposed benchmark. Using the benchmark and evaluation platform, we evaluated several state-of-the-art MFMs and found that they significantly lag behind human-level performance. The MFE-ETP is a high-quality, large-scale, and challenging benchmark relevant to real-world tasks.