๐Ÿ” RoboProcessBench: Benchmarking Process-Aware Understanding in Vision-Language Robotic Manipulation

1Shanghai AI Laboratory, 2Zhejiang University, 3Shanghai Jiaotong University, 4Tsinghua University, 5China University of Mining Technology, *Equal contribution, โ€ Corresponding authors
Shanghai AI Laboratory Zhejiang University Shanghai Jiaotong University Tsinghua University China University of Mining Technology

RoboProcessBench evaluates whether VLMs understand how robotic manipulation unfolds, not only whether it succeeds.

12
Diagnostic task families
Static Monitoring + Dynamic Reasoning
~58k
Process-aware QA pairs
260
Manipulation tasks

๐Ÿ” Overview

Process-aware evaluation

Evaluate contact, motion, progress, temporal order, and primitive-level process cues across 12 diagnostic families.

ProcessData-58k

A physically grounded QA corpus built from 260 manipulation execution traces.

Trainable evaluators

SFT on ProcessData turns benchmark supervision into VLM-based process evaluators.

โš–๏ธ Why process-aware?

Outcome-only evaluation

Did the task succeed?

Final-state judgment. Sparse signal.

Process-aware evaluation

Is the execution unfolding correctly?

Contact ยท motion ยท progress ยท temporal ยท primitive cues. Dense diagnostic signal.

๐Ÿงฉ Task taxonomy

The 12 tasks cover current-state monitoring, temporal reasoning, and primitive-aware extensions. Hover over each row to see the full question.

IDTaskInput
Static Monitoring
T1Phase RecognitionSingle frame
T2Contact DetectionSingle frame
T4Bimanual Coordination StateOrdered clip
T10โ€ Current Primitive RecognitionOrdered clip
Dynamic Reasoning
T3Motion Direction PredictionOrdered clip
T5Primitive-local ProgressOrdered clip
T6Motion State RecognitionOrdered clip
T7Operation Outcome PredictionOrdered clip
T8Temporal OrderingShuffled frames
T9Temporal Priority PredictionPairwise frames
T11โ€ Next Primitive PredictionOrdered clip
T12โ€ Primitive Chain RestorationOrdered clip

โ€  Primitive-aware extension. ยท Single ยท Ordered ยท Shuffled ยท Pairwise

๐Ÿ“Š Results

๐Ÿ’ก Key findings

Current VLMs are fragmented: they can recognize some local states, but struggle with primitive-local progress and temporal reasoning.

01

Strengths are fragmented

No single VLM excels across all 12 tasks; performance clusters by task family rather than model scale.

02

State easier than progress

VLMs recognize static states (contact, phase) but fail on within-primitive progress estimation (T5).

03

Temporal near chance

Temporal ordering (T8) and earlier-frame (T9) remain the hardest tasks across all models.

๐Ÿ“‹ Comprehensive evaluation on RoboProcessBench

๐Ÿ”„ From benchmark to supervision

ProcessData also enables SFT to build dedicated process evaluators. Fine-tuning on ProcessData-SFT yields task-family-level diagnostic gains on contact (T2), motion direction (T3), progress (T5), temporal ordering (T8), and next primitive (T11).

QwenIntern
Base VLMs
7B ยท 8B
โ†’
Training
ProcessData-SFT
12 families ยท ~58k QA
โ†’
Output
Process Evaluator
VLM process-aware
โ†’
Held-out
ProcessData-Eval
โ†’
Gains

โ†‘โ†‘ T1โ€“T4, T6โ€“T7, T10โ€“T11
โ†‘ T5, T12

๐Ÿš€ Release

๐Ÿ’พ Dataset

ProcessData-SFT & ProcessData-Eval, metadata, splits, annotation details.

Coming soon

๐Ÿงช Evaluation

Prompt templates, scoring scripts, per-task evaluation protocol.

Coming soon

๐Ÿง  Models

ProcessData-SFT-Qwen, ProcessData-SFT-Intern checkpoints.

Coming soon

๐Ÿ“– Documentation

Construction details, license, reproducibility guide.

Coming soon

๐Ÿ“ Citation

If you use RoboProcessBench, ProcessData, or the evaluation suite, please cite:

@article{xia2026roboprocessbench,
title = {RoboProcessBench: Benchmarking Process-Aware Understanding in Vision-Language
Robotic Manipulation},
author = {Xia, Dayu and Shi, Yue and Mu, Yao and Ji, Huiting and Ma, Chaofan and Zhou, Yingjie and
Chen, Hua and Liu, Yang and Cao, Jiezhang and Zhai, Guangtao},
journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.13040},
year = {2026},
}