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EmboCoach-Bench: Benchmarking AI Agents on Developing Embodied Robots

Artificial Intelligence 2026-01-30 v1 Robotics

Abstract

The field of Embodied AI is witnessing a rapid evolution toward general-purpose robotic systems, fueled by high-fidelity simulation and large-scale data collection. However, this scaling capability remains severely bottlenecked by a reliance on labor-intensive manual oversight from intricate reward shaping to hyperparameter tuning across heterogeneous backends. Inspired by LLMs' success in software automation and science discovery, we introduce \textsc{EmboCoach-Bench}, a benchmark evaluating the capacity of LLM agents to autonomously engineer embodied policies. Spanning 32 expert-curated RL and IL tasks, our framework posits executable code as the universal interface. We move beyond static generation to assess a dynamic closed-loop workflow, where agents leverage environment feedback to iteratively draft, debug, and optimize solutions, spanning improvements from physics-informed reward design to policy architectures such as diffusion policies. Extensive evaluations yield three critical insights: (1) autonomous agents can qualitatively surpass human-engineered baselines by 26.5\% in average success rate; (2) agentic workflow with environment feedback effectively strengthens policy development and substantially narrows the performance gap between open-source and proprietary models; and (3) agents exhibit self-correction capabilities for pathological engineering cases, successfully resurrecting task performance from near-total failures through iterative simulation-in-the-loop debugging. Ultimately, this work establishes a foundation for self-evolving embodied intelligence, accelerating the paradigm shift from labor-intensive manual tuning to scalable, autonomous engineering in embodied AI field.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.21570,
  title  = {EmboCoach-Bench: Benchmarking AI Agents on Developing Embodied Robots},
  author = {Zixing Lei and Genjia Liu and Yuanshuo Zhang and Qipeng Liu and Chuan Wen and Shanghang Zhang and Wenzhao Lian and Siheng Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.21570},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

37 pages, 13 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:25:31.072Z