Toward Visually Realistic Simulation: A Benchmark for Evaluating Robot Manipulation in Simulation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06311v1
• Date: Thu, 07 May 2026 14:13:05 GMT
• Title: Toward Visually Realistic Simulation: A Benchmark for Evaluating Robot Manipulation in Simulation
• Abstract summary: Existing benchmarks lack visual realism, creating a large domain gap between simulation and reality.<n>We propose VISER, a visually realistic benchmark for evaluating robot manipulation in simulation.<n>VISER features a high-fidelity dataset of over 1,000 3D assets with physically-based rendering (PBR) materials, along with 3D scenes created from these assets through curated layouts or generation.
• Score: 62.51953630639423
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Reliable simulation evaluation of robot manipulation policies serves as a high-fidelity proxy for real-world performance. Although existing benchmarks cover a wide range of task categories, they lack visual realism, creating a large domain gap between simulation and reality. This undermines the reliability of simulation-based evaluation in predicting real-world performance. To mitigate the sim-to-real visual gap, we conduct a systematic analysis to isolate the effects of lighting and material. Our results show that these factors play a critical role in geometric reasoning and spatial grounding, yet are largely overlooked in existing benchmarks. Motivated by the analysis, we propose VISER, a visually realistic benchmark for evaluating robot manipulation in simulation. VISER features a high-fidelity dataset of over 1,000 3D assets with physically-based rendering (PBR) materials, along with 3D scenes created from these assets through curated layouts or generation. To this end, we propose an automated pipeline leveraging Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for material-aware part segmentation and material retrieval, enabling scalable generation of physically plausible assets. Building on the high-fidelity 3D asset dataset, we construct diverse evaluation tasks, such as grasping, placing, and long-horizon tasks, enabling scalable and reproducible assessment of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. Our benchmark shows a strong correlation between simulation and real-world performance, achieving an average Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.92 across different policies.

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