# Alexa Arena: A User-Centric Interactive Platform for Embodied AI

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01586 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01586/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in World models for navigation, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 38 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2023.

## Placed in

- World models / [World models for navigation](https://mlsanity.com/wm/world-models-for-navigation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05608/) (2022)
- [Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07207/) (2022)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01734/) (2019)
- [ProgPrompt: Generating Situated Robot Task Plans using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11302/) (2022)
- [SAPIEN: A SimulAted Part-based Interactive ENvironment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08515/) (2020)
- [Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14405/) (2021)
- [Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10654/) (2018)
- [VirtualHome: Simulating Household Activities via Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07011/) (2018)
- [Describe, Explain, Plan and Select: Interactive Planning with Large Language Models Enables Open-World Multi-Task Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01560/) (2023)
- [CRIS: CLIP-Driven Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15174/) (2021)
- [On the Utility of Learning about Humans for Human-AI Coordination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05789/) (2019)
- [ThreeDWorld: A Platform for Interactive Multi-Modal Physical Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04954/) (2020)
- [RoboTurk: A Crowdsourcing Platform for Robotic Skill Learning through Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02790/) (2018)
- [TEACh: Task-driven Embodied Agents that Chat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00534/) (2021)
- [BEHAVIOR: Benchmark for Everyday Household Activities in Virtual, Interactive, and Ecological Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03332/) (2021)
- [Episodic Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06453/) (2021)
- [FILM: Following Instructions in Language with Modular Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07342/) (2021)
- [Mapping Instructions to Actions in 3D Environments with Visual Goal Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00786/) (2018)
- [Help, Anna! Visual Navigation with Natural Multimodal Assistance via Retrospective Curiosity-Encouraging Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01871/) (2019)
- [Executing Instructions in Situated Collaborative Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03655/) (2019)
- [DialFRED: Dialogue-Enabled Agents for Embodied Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13330/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Understanding World or Predicting Future? A Comprehensive Survey of World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14499/) (2024)
- [VLM Agents Generate Their Own Memories: Distilling Experience into Embodied Programs of Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14596/) (2024)
- [Interactive Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13246/) (2023)
- [TeamCraft: A Benchmark for Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Systems in Minecraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05255/) (2024)
- [Towards Understanding Visual Grounding in Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10345/) (2025)
- [Multitask Multimodal Prompted Training for Interactive Embodied Task Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04067/) (2023)
- [Planning as In-Painting: A Diffusion-Based Embodied Task Planning Framework for Environments under Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01097/) (2023)
- [HELPER-X: A Unified Instructable Embodied Agent to Tackle Four Interactive Vision-Language Domains with Memory-Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19065/) (2024)
- [SIGMA: An Open-Source Interactive System for Mixed-Reality Task Assistance Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13035/) (2024)
- [Investigating the Role of Instruction Variety and Task Difficulty in Robotic Manipulation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03967/) (2024)
- [Collaborative Instance Object Navigation: Leveraging Uncertainty-Awareness to Minimize Human-Agent Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01250/) (2024)
- [Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06589/) (2025)
- [Alexa, play with robot: Introducing the First Alexa Prize SimBot Challenge on Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05221/) (2023)
- [Repairs in a Block World: A New Benchmark for Handling User Corrections with Multi-Modal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14247/) (2024)
- [The Future of Intelligent Healthcare: A Systematic Analysis and Discussion on the Integration and Impact of Robots Using Large Language Models for Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03287/) (2024)
- [Mixed-Initiative Dialog for Human-Robot Collaborative Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05535/) (2025)
- [Dialogue with Robots: Proposals for Broadening Participation and Research in the SLIVAR Community](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01158/) (2024)
- [Do World Models Make Better Robots? A Survey of Evaluation Benchmarks for Predictive Embodied Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29669/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Alexa Arena, a user-centric simulation platform for Embodied AI (EAI) research. Alexa Arena provides a variety of multi-room layouts and interactable objects, for the creation of human-robot interaction (HRI) missions. With user-friendly graphics and control mechanisms, Alexa Arena supports the development of gamified robotic tasks readily accessible to general human users, thus opening a new venue for high-efficiency HRI data collection and EAI system evaluation. Along with the platform, we introduce a dialog-enabled instruction-following benchmark and provide baseline results for it. We make Alexa Arena publicly available to facilitate research in building generalizable and assistive embodied agents.