Realistic Synthetic Household Data Generation at Scale

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable generative framework for creating realistic synthetic household datasets that model the dynamic interplay between human behavior and environment, supporting Embodied AI research.

Contribution

The framework uniquely models bidirectional influence between human personas and household environments, enabling natural language-driven, large-scale synthetic data generation with rich static and temporal context.

Findings

Synthetic data shows high similarity to real datasets (cosine similarity 0.60)

Intervention analysis confirms measurable environmental and behavioral differences

Framework enables scalable, configurable household data generation for AI development

Abstract

Advancements in foundation models have catalyzed research in Embodied AI to develop interactive agents capable of environmental reasoning and interaction. Developing such agents requires diverse, large-scale datasets. Prior frameworks generate synthetic data for long-term human-robot interactions but fail to model the bidirectional influence between human behavior and household environments. Our proposed generative framework creates household datasets at scale through loosely coupled generation of long-term human-robot interactions and environments. Human personas influence environment generation, while environment schematics and semantics shape human-robot interactions. The generated 3D data includes rich static context such as object and environment semantics, and temporal context capturing human and agent behaviors over extended periods. Our flexible tool allows users to define dataset characteristics via natural language prompts, enabling configuration of environment and human activity data through natural language specifications. The tool creates variations of user-defined configurations, enabling scalable data generation. We validate our framework through statistical evaluation using multi-modal embeddings and key metrics: cosine similarity, mutual information gain, intervention analysis, and iterative improvement validation. Statistical comparisons show good alignment with real-world datasets (HOMER) with cosine similarity (0.60), while synthetic datasets (Wang et al.) show moderate alignment (0.27). Intervention analysis across age, organization, and sleep pattern changes shows statistically significant effects (p < 0.001) with large effect sizes (Cohen's d = 0.51-1.12), confirming bidirectional coupling translates persona traits into measurable environmental and behavioral differences. These contributions enable development and testing of household smart devices at scale.