ESI-Bench: Towards Embodied Spatial Intelligence that Closes the Perception-Action Loop

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Hong, Yining, Liu, Jiageng, Yin, Han, Li, Manling, Guibas, Leonidas, Fei-Fei, Li, Wu, Jiajun, Choi, Yejin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Hong, Yining
Liu, Jiageng
Yin, Han
Li, Manling
Guibas, Leonidas
Fei-Fei, Li
Wu, Jiajun
Choi, Yejin
author_facet Hong, Yining
Liu, Jiageng
Yin, Han
Li, Manling
Guibas, Leonidas
Fei-Fei, Li
Wu, Jiajun
Choi, Yejin
contents Spatial intelligence unfolds through a perception-action loop: agents act to acquire observations, and reason about how observations vary as a function of action. Rather than passively processing what is seen, they actively uncover what is unseen - occluded structure, dynamics, containment, and functionality that cannot be resolved from passive sensing alone. We move beyond prior formulations of spatial intelligence that assume oracle observations by recasting the observer as an actor. We introduce ESI-BENCH, a comprehensive benchmark for embodied spatial intelligence spanning 10 task categories and 29 subcategories built on OmniGibson, grounded in Spelke's core knowledge systems. Agents must decide what abilities to deploy - perception, locomotion, and manipulation - and how to sequence them to actively accumulate task-relevant evidence. We conduct extensive experiments on state-of-the-art MLLMs and find that active exploration substantially outperforms passive counterparts, with agents spontaneously discovering emergent spatial strategies without explicit instructions, while random multi-view often adds noise rather than signal despite consuming far more images. Most failures stem not from weak perception but from action blindness: poor action choices lead to poor observations, which in turn drive cascading errors. While explicit 3D grounding stabilizes reasoning on depth-sensitive tasks, imperfect 3D representation proves more harmful than 2D baselines by distorting spatial relations. Human studies further reveal that unlike humans who seek falsifying viewpoints and revise beliefs under contradiction, models commit prematurely with high confidence regardless of evidence quality, exposing a metacognitive gap that neither better perception nor more embodied interaction alone can close.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_18746
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ESI-Bench: Towards Embodied Spatial Intelligence that Closes the Perception-Action Loop
Hong, Yining
Liu, Jiageng
Yin, Han
Li, Manling
Guibas, Leonidas
Fei-Fei, Li
Wu, Jiajun
Choi, Yejin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Robotics
Spatial intelligence unfolds through a perception-action loop: agents act to acquire observations, and reason about how observations vary as a function of action. Rather than passively processing what is seen, they actively uncover what is unseen - occluded structure, dynamics, containment, and functionality that cannot be resolved from passive sensing alone. We move beyond prior formulations of spatial intelligence that assume oracle observations by recasting the observer as an actor. We introduce ESI-BENCH, a comprehensive benchmark for embodied spatial intelligence spanning 10 task categories and 29 subcategories built on OmniGibson, grounded in Spelke's core knowledge systems. Agents must decide what abilities to deploy - perception, locomotion, and manipulation - and how to sequence them to actively accumulate task-relevant evidence. We conduct extensive experiments on state-of-the-art MLLMs and find that active exploration substantially outperforms passive counterparts, with agents spontaneously discovering emergent spatial strategies without explicit instructions, while random multi-view often adds noise rather than signal despite consuming far more images. Most failures stem not from weak perception but from action blindness: poor action choices lead to poor observations, which in turn drive cascading errors. While explicit 3D grounding stabilizes reasoning on depth-sensitive tasks, imperfect 3D representation proves more harmful than 2D baselines by distorting spatial relations. Human studies further reveal that unlike humans who seek falsifying viewpoints and revise beliefs under contradiction, models commit prematurely with high confidence regardless of evidence quality, exposing a metacognitive gap that neither better perception nor more embodied interaction alone can close.
title ESI-Bench: Towards Embodied Spatial Intelligence that Closes the Perception-Action Loop
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18746