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Main Authors: Jayannavar, Prashant, Ren, Liliang, Hudspeth, Marisa, Sidhu, Risham, Lambert, Charlotte, Cordes, Ariel, Kaplan, Elizabeth, Narayan-Chen, Anjali, Hockenmaier, Julia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10836
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author Jayannavar, Prashant
Ren, Liliang
Hudspeth, Marisa
Sidhu, Risham
Lambert, Charlotte
Cordes, Ariel
Kaplan, Elizabeth
Narayan-Chen, Anjali
Hockenmaier, Julia
author_facet Jayannavar, Prashant
Ren, Liliang
Hudspeth, Marisa
Sidhu, Risham
Lambert, Charlotte
Cordes, Ariel
Kaplan, Elizabeth
Narayan-Chen, Anjali
Hockenmaier, Julia
contents Developing interactive agents that can understand language, perceive their surroundings, and act within the physical world is a long-standing goal of AI research. The Minecraft Collaborative Building Task (MCBT) (Narayan-Chen, Jayannavar, and Hockenmaier 2019), a two-player game in which an Architect (A) instructs a Builder (B) to construct a target structure in a simulated 3D Blocks World environment, offers a rich platform to work towards this goal. In this work, we focus on the Builder Action Prediction (BAP) subtask: predicting B's actions in a multimodal game context (Jayannavar, Narayan-Chen, and Hockenmaier 2020) - a challenging testbed for grounded instruction following, with limited training data. We holistically re-examine this task and introduce BAP v2 to address key challenges in evaluation, training data, and modeling. Specifically, we define an enhanced evaluation benchmark, featuring a cleaner test set and fairer, more insightful metrics that also reveal spatial reasoning as the primary performance bottleneck. To address data scarcity and to teach models basic spatial skills, we generate different types of synthetic MCBT data. We observe that current, LLM-based SOTA models trained on the human BAP dialogues fail on these simpler, synthetic BAP ones, but show that training models on this synthetic data improves their performance across the board. We also introduce a new SOTA model, Llama-CRAFTS, which leverages richer input representations, and achieves an F1 score of 53.0 on the BAP v2 task and strong performance on the synthetic data. While this result marks a notable 6 points improvement over previous work, it also underscores the task's remaining difficulty, establishing BAP v2 as a fertile ground for future research, and providing a useful measure of the spatial capabilities of current text-only LLMs in such embodied tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_10836
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BAP v2: An Enhanced Task Framework for Instruction Following in Minecraft Dialogues
Jayannavar, Prashant
Ren, Liliang
Hudspeth, Marisa
Sidhu, Risham
Lambert, Charlotte
Cordes, Ariel
Kaplan, Elizabeth
Narayan-Chen, Anjali
Hockenmaier, Julia
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Developing interactive agents that can understand language, perceive their surroundings, and act within the physical world is a long-standing goal of AI research. The Minecraft Collaborative Building Task (MCBT) (Narayan-Chen, Jayannavar, and Hockenmaier 2019), a two-player game in which an Architect (A) instructs a Builder (B) to construct a target structure in a simulated 3D Blocks World environment, offers a rich platform to work towards this goal. In this work, we focus on the Builder Action Prediction (BAP) subtask: predicting B's actions in a multimodal game context (Jayannavar, Narayan-Chen, and Hockenmaier 2020) - a challenging testbed for grounded instruction following, with limited training data. We holistically re-examine this task and introduce BAP v2 to address key challenges in evaluation, training data, and modeling. Specifically, we define an enhanced evaluation benchmark, featuring a cleaner test set and fairer, more insightful metrics that also reveal spatial reasoning as the primary performance bottleneck. To address data scarcity and to teach models basic spatial skills, we generate different types of synthetic MCBT data. We observe that current, LLM-based SOTA models trained on the human BAP dialogues fail on these simpler, synthetic BAP ones, but show that training models on this synthetic data improves their performance across the board. We also introduce a new SOTA model, Llama-CRAFTS, which leverages richer input representations, and achieves an F1 score of 53.0 on the BAP v2 task and strong performance on the synthetic data. While this result marks a notable 6 points improvement over previous work, it also underscores the task's remaining difficulty, establishing BAP v2 as a fertile ground for future research, and providing a useful measure of the spatial capabilities of current text-only LLMs in such embodied tasks.
title BAP v2: An Enhanced Task Framework for Instruction Following in Minecraft Dialogues
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10836