ROAIApr 14

RoboLab: A High-Fidelity Simulation Benchmark for Analysis of Task Generalist Policies

NVIDIA
arXiv:2604.0986091.41 citationsh-index: 27
AI Analysis

For robotics researchers, RoboLab provides a more rigorous benchmark to test true generalization and robustness of foundation models, addressing saturation and domain overlap issues in existing benchmarks.

RoboLab introduces a high-fidelity simulation benchmark with 120 tasks across three competency axes to evaluate task-generalist robotic policies, revealing significant performance gaps in current state-of-the-art models.

The pursuit of general-purpose robotics has yielded impressive foundation models, yet simulation-based benchmarking remains a bottleneck due to rapid performance saturation and a lack of true generalization testing. Existing benchmarks often exhibit significant domain overlap between training and evaluation, trivializing success rates and obscuring insights into robustness. We introduce RoboLab, a simulation benchmarking framework designed to address these challenges. Concretely, our framework is designed to answer two questions: (1) to what extent can we understand the performance of a real-world policy by analyzing its behavior in simulation, and (2) which external factors most strongly affect that behavior under controlled perturbations. First, RoboLab enables human-authored and LLM-enabled generation of scenes and tasks in a robot- and policy-agnostic manner within a physically realistic and photorealistic simulation. With this, we propose the RoboLab-120 benchmark, consisting of 120 tasks categorized into three competency axes: visual, procedural, relational competency, across three difficulty levels. Second, we introduce a systematic analysis of real-world policies that quantify both their performance and the sensitivity of their behavior to controlled perturbations, indicating that high-fidelity simulation can serve as a proxy for analyzing performance and its dependence on external factors. Evaluation with RoboLab exposes significant performance gap in current state-of-the-art models. By providing granular metrics and a scalable toolset, RoboLab offers a scalable framework for evaluating the true generalization capabilities of task-generalist robotic policies.

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