{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/hribench-benchmarking-vision-language-models","title":"HRIBench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Real-Time Human Perception in Human-Robot Interaction","arxiv_id":"2506.20566","date":"2025-06-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zhonghao Shi","Enyu Zhao","Nathaniel Dennler","Jingzhen Wang","Xinyang Xu","Kaleen Shrestha","Mengxue Fu","Daniel Seita","Maja Matarić"],"abstract":"Real-time human perception is crucial for effective human-robot interaction (HRI). Large vision-language models (VLMs) offer promising generalizable perceptual capabilities but often suffer from high latency, which negatively impacts user experience and limits VLM applicability in real-world scenarios. To systematically study VLM capabilities in human perception for HRI and performance-latency trade-offs, we introduce HRIBench, a visual question-answering (VQA) benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs across a diverse set of human perceptual tasks critical for HRI. HRIBench covers five key domains: (1) non-verbal cue understanding, (2) verbal instruction understanding, (3) human-robot object relationship understanding, (4) social navigation, and (5) person identification. To construct HRIBench, we collected data from real-world HRI environments to curate questions for non-verbal cue understanding, and leveraged publicly available datasets for the remaining four domains. We curated 200 VQA questions for each domain, resulting in a total of 1000 questions for HRIBench. We then conducted a comprehensive evaluation of both state-of-the-art closed-source and open-source VLMs (N=11) on HRIBench. Our results show that, despite their generalizability, current VLMs still struggle with core perceptual capabilities essential for HRI. Moreover, none of the models within our experiments demonstrated a satisfactory performance-latency trade-off suitable for real-time deployment, underscoring the need for future research on developing smaller, low-latency VLMs with improved human perception capabilities. HRIBench and our results can be found in this Github repository: https://github.com/interaction-lab/HRIBench.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20566v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20566v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"hribench-benchmarking-vision-language-models","repo_url":"https://github.com/interaction-lab/hribench","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"benchmarking","task_name":"Benchmarking"},{"task_slug":"person-identification","task_name":"Person Identification"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"social-navigation","task_name":"Social Navigation"},{"task_slug":"visual-question-answering-1","task_name":"Visual Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"visual-question-answering","task_name":"Visual Question Answering (VQA)"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"set","method_name":"SET"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2506.20566","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}