# Watch-And-Help: A Challenge for Social Perception and Human-AI Collaboration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.09890 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09890/

## Key facts

- Cited by 133 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 133)

- [Building Cooperative Embodied Agents Modularly with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02485/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models as Commonsense Knowledge for Large-Scale Task Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14078/) (2023)
- [Habitat 3.0: A Co-Habitat for Humans, Avatars and Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13724/) (2023)
- [Pre-Trained Language Models for Interactive Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01771/) (2022)
- [Language Models Meet World Models: Embodied Experiences Enhance Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10626/) (2023)
- [SafeAgentBench: A Benchmark for Safe Task Planning of Embodied LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13178/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model-Based Game Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02039/) (2024)
- [MindAgent: Emergent Gaming Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09971/) (2023)
- [MMToM-QA: Multimodal Theory of Mind Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08743/) (2024)
- [Embodied LLM Agents Learn to Cooperate in Organized Teams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12482/) (2024)
- [Building Machines that Learn and Think with People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03943/) (2024)
- [LLM-Coordination: Evaluating and Analyzing Multi-agent Coordination Abilities in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03903/) (2023)
- [LLM-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Current and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11106/) (2024)
- [The ThreeDWorld Transport Challenge: A Visually Guided Task-and-Motion Planning Benchmark for Physically Realistic Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14025/) (2021)
- [ToM2C: Target-oriented Multi-agent Communication and Cooperation with Theory of Mind](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09189/) (2021)
- [LoTa-Bench: Benchmarking Language-oriented Task Planners for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08178/) (2024)
- [MuMA-ToM: Multi-modal Multi-Agent Theory of Mind](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12574/) (2024)
- [COMBO: Compositional World Models for Embodied Multi-Agent Cooperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10775/) (2024)
- [Retrospectives on the Embodied AI Workshop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06849/) (2022)
- [COHERENT: Collaboration of Heterogeneous Multi-Robot System with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15146/) (2024)
- [AGENT: A Benchmark for Core Psychological Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12321/) (2021)
- [CivRealm: A Learning and Reasoning Odyssey in Civilization for Decision-Making Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10568/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Planning: A Comprehensive and Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19683/) (2025)
- [Learning Human-to-Robot Handovers from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17592/) (2023)
- [Interactive Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13246/) (2023)
- [How Far Are We From AGI: Are LLMs All We Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10313/) (2024)
- [Pragmatic Instruction Following and Goal Assistance via Cooperative Language-Guided Inverse Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17930/) (2024)
- [EgoGen: An Egocentric Synthetic Data Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08739/) (2024)
- [Last-Mile Embodied Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11746/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Human-aware Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11650/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we introduce Watch-And-Help (WAH), a challenge for testing social intelligence in agents. In WAH, an AI agent needs to help a human-like agent perform a complex household task efficiently. To succeed, the AI agent needs to i) understand the underlying goal of the task by watching a single demonstration of the human-like agent performing the same task (social perception), and ii) coordinate with the human-like agent to solve the task in an unseen environment as fast as possible (human-AI collaboration). For this challenge, we build VirtualHome-Social, a multi-agent household environment, and provide a benchmark including both planning and learning based baselines. We evaluate the performance of AI agents with the human-like agent as well as with real humans using objective metrics and subjective user ratings. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed challenge and virtual environment enable a systematic evaluation on the important aspects of machine social intelligence at scale.
