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


Xuning Yang, Rishit Dagli, Alex Zook, Hugo Hadfield, Ankit Goyal, Stan Birchfield, Fabio Ramos, Jonathan Tremblay

Paper ID 96

Session Datasets and Benchmarks

Poster session details TBA

Abstract: 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 Robot Question and Answering (RQA) benchmark, consisting of∼80 tasks categorized into four task axes: visual, procedural, relational, and complexity. 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.