Behavior Challenge Charts the Way Forward for Domestic Robotics (hai.stanford.edu)

Stanford researchers in the Vision and Learning Lab have released BEHAVIOR, a large-scale benchmark and the 2025 BEHAVIOR Challenge that frames domestic robotics around 1,000 everyday tasks simulated across 50 richly detailed environments (houses, gardens, restaurants, offices) with over 10,000 interactive objects and realistic physics. The competition asks teams (academic, independent, industry) to solve a curated subset of 50 tasks—defined by initial conditions, required objects, and clear success criteria—with scoring based on aggregate performance across all tasks. Submissions are due November 15, 2025; winners are announced at NeurIPS 2025 (top prize $1,000). All simulator assets, demonstrations, and baselines are open-sourced. BEHAVIOR is significant because it shifts benchmarking from isolated manipulation or perception problems to long-horizon, mobile-manipulation tasks that mirror real human needs (from making toast to tidying rooms). By providing a high-fidelity, shared evaluation suite and live competition, the project aims to create a "North Star" for embodied AI, stress-test current hardware/software stacks, and accelerate community progress toward generalist, human-centered robots. Technically, the challenge emphasizes integrated planning, perception, and control over extended task sequences in complex scenes—revealing where current approaches fall short and encouraging reproducible, comparable advances across institutions.