# Why Build an Assistant in Minecraft?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.09273 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09273/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Learning Rewards from Linguistic Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14715/) (2020)
- [Learning to Execute Actions or Ask Clarification Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08373/) (2022)
- [Interactive Grounded Language Understanding in a Collaborative Environment: IGLU 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02388/) (2022)
- [NeurIPS 2021 Competition IGLU: Interactive Grounded Language Understanding in a Collaborative Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06536/) (2021)
- [Transforming Human-Centered AI Collaboration: Redefining Embodied Agents Capabilities through Interactive Grounded Language Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10783/) (2023)
- [LEBP -- Language Expectation & Binding Policy: A Two-Stream Framework for Embodied Vision-and-Language Interaction Task Learning Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04637/) (2022)
- [AssistanceZero: Scalably Solving Assistance Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07091/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models as Minecraft Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08392/) (2024)
- [A LLM Benchmark based on the Minecraft Builder Dialog Agent Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12734/) (2024)
- [MDC-R: The Minecraft Dialogue Corpus with Reference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22062/) (2025)
- [Modular Procedural Generation for Voxel Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08890/) (2021)
- [A Data Source for Reasoning Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07974/) (2023)
- [IDAT: A Multi-Modal Dataset and Toolkit for Building and Evaluating Interactive Task-Solving Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08898/) (2024)
- [Towards Controllable Agent in MOBA Games with Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08093/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this document we describe a rationale for a research program aimed at building an open "assistant" in the game Minecraft, in order to make progress on the problems of natural language understanding and learning from dialogue.