SleepWalk: A Three-Tier Benchmark for Stress-Testing Instruction-Guided Vision-Language Navigation

TL;DR

SleepWalk is a new benchmark for evaluating instruction-grounded navigation in 3D environments, revealing systematic failures in current vision-language models' spatial reasoning and embodied understanding.

Contribution

It introduces a three-tier benchmark for localized, interaction-centric embodied reasoning in 3D scenes, enabling detailed analysis of grounded spatial understanding.

Findings

Current VLMs struggle with occlusion and multi-step instructions.

Performance drops as task difficulty increases.

Models can produce spatially coherent and plausible trajectories, but often fail in complex scenarios.

Abstract

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have advanced rapidly in multimodal perception and language understanding, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably ground language into spatially coherent, plausibly executable actions in 3D digital environments. We introduce SleepWalk, a benchmark for evaluating instruction-grounded trajectory prediction in single-scene 3D worlds generated from textual scene descriptions and filtered for navigability. Unlike prior navigation benchmarks centered on long-range exploration across rooms, SleepWalk targets localized, interaction-centric embodied reasoning: given rendered visual observations and a natural-language instruction, a model must predict a trajectory that respects scene geometry, avoids collisions, and terminates at an action-compatible location. The benchmark covers diverse indoor and outdoor environments and organizes tasks into three tiers of spatial and temporal difficulty, enabling fine-grained analysis of grounding under increasing compositional complexity. Using a standardized pointwise judge-based evaluation protocol, we evaluate three frontier VLMs on 2,472 curated 3D environments with nine instructions per scene. Results reveal systematic failures in grounded spatial reasoning, especially under occlusion, interaction constraints, and multi-step instructions: performance drops as the difficulty level of the tasks increase. In general, current VLMs can somewhat produce trajectories that are simultaneously spatially coherent, plausibly executable, and aligned with intended actions. By exposing failures in a controlled yet scalable setting, SleepWalk provides a critical benchmark for advancing grounded multimodal reasoning, embodied planning, vision-language navigation, and action-capable agents in 3D environments.