BEHAVIOR: Benchmark for Everyday Household Activities in Virtual, Interactive, and Ecological Environments

Abstract

We introduce BEHAVIOR, a benchmark for embodied AI with 100 activities in simulation, spanning a range of everyday household chores such as cleaning, maintenance, and food preparation. These activities are designed to be realistic, diverse and complex, aiming to reproduce the challenges that agents must face in the real world. Building such a benchmark poses three fundamental difficulties for each activity: definition (it can differ by time, place, or person), instantiation in a simulator, and evaluation. BEHAVIOR addresses these with three innovations. First, we propose an object-centric, predicate logic-based description language for expressing an activity's initial and goal conditions, enabling generation of diverse instances for any activity. Second, we identify the simulator-agnostic features required by an underlying environment to support BEHAVIOR, and demonstrate its realization in one such simulator. Third, we introduce a set of metrics to measure task progress and efficiency, absolute and relative to human demonstrators. We include 500 human demonstrations in virtual reality (VR) to serve as the human ground truth. Our experiments demonstrate that even state-of-the-art embodied AI solutions struggle with the level of realism, diversity, and complexity imposed by the activities in our benchmark. We make BEHAVIOR publicly available at behavior.stanford.edu to facilitate and calibrate the development of new embodied AI solutions.

A Smart Home Digital Twin to Support the Recognition of Activities of Daily Living

“…Other simulators incorporate actionable objects, allowing agents to learn manipulation and interaction with objects. These advancements have generated growing interest in studying embedded intelligence in home environments and building robots capable of performing household tasks, following instructions, or collaborating with humans at home [41][42][43].…”