RoboProcessBench: Benchmarking Process-Aware Understanding in Vision-Language Robotic Manipulation

Abstract

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly explored as visual critics, reward generators, and failure detectors in robotic manipulation. These roles implicitly require models to judge not only final task success, but also how a manipulation execution is physically and temporally progressing. However, existing evaluations fail to test whether VLMs possess fine-grained process understanding. To address this gap, we present RoboProcessBench, a benchmark for process-aware understanding in vision-language robotic manipulation. RoboProcessBench decomposes such capability into two complementary dimensions, \emph{static monitoring} and \emph{dynamic reasoning}, instantiated as 12 diagnostic question families covering phase, contact, motion, coordination, primitive-local progress, temporal order, outcome, and primitive-level transitions. Built from physically grounded execution traces, the curated benchmark corpus ProcessData contains \textasciitilde 58k question-answer pairs across 260 manipulation tasks, which is further split into ProcessData-SFT and ProcessData-Eval for post-training and evaluation purposes. Extensive evaluation of various VLMs on ProcessData-Eval reveals broad limitations across 12 diagnostic task families, suggesting current models still lack robust process-aware understanding of manipulation executions. But with ProcessData-SFT, the post-trained \textit{Qwen2.5-VL-7B} and \textit{InternVL-3-8B} exhibit consistent gains on local state, motion, progress, and primitive-aware cues. These results demonstrate that RoboProcessBench serves as both an evaluation benchmark and a learnable supervision source for developing VLMs capable of monitoring and evaluating robotic manipulation processes. Project webpage: \href{https://processbench-2026.github.io/RoboProcessBench-Web/}{https://processbench-2026.github.io}.