Position: Olfaction Standardization is Essential for the Advancement of Embodied Artificial Intelligence
Kordel K. France, Rohith Peddi, Nik Dennler, Ovidiu Daescu

TL;DR
This paper emphasizes the importance of integrating olfactory perception into AI systems, highlighting current gaps and proposing a multidisciplinary effort to develop standards, datasets, and benchmarks for machine olfaction to achieve truly embodied intelligence.
Contribution
It advocates for formalizing olfactory benchmarks and datasets, and for cross-disciplinary collaboration to incorporate smell into AI, addressing a significant overlooked sensory modality.
Findings
Olfaction is crucial for embodied AI but remains underdeveloped.
Standardization and datasets for olfaction are lacking.
Cross-disciplinary efforts are needed to advance machine olfaction.
Abstract
Despite extraordinary progress in artificial intelligence (AI), modern systems remain incomplete representations of human cognition. Vision, audition, and language have received disproportionate attention due to well-defined benchmarks, standardized datasets, and consensus-driven scientific foundations. In contrast, olfaction - a high-bandwidth, evolutionarily critical sense - has been largely overlooked. This omission presents a foundational gap in the construction of truly embodied and ethically aligned super-human intelligence. We argue that the exclusion of olfactory perception from AI architectures is not due to irrelevance but to structural challenges: unresolved scientific theories of smell, heterogeneous sensor technologies, lack of standardized olfactory datasets, absence of AI-oriented benchmarks, and difficulty in evaluating sub-perceptual signal processing. These obstacles…
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Taxonomy
TopicsOlfactory and Sensory Function Studies
MethodsSoftmax · Attention Is All You Need
