# Butter-Bench: Evaluating LLM Controlled Robots for Practical Intelligence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21860 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21860/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [EmbodiedBench: Comprehensive Benchmarking Multi-modal Large Language Models for Vision-Driven Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09560/) (2025)
- [Winning Gold at IMO 2025 with a Model-Agnostic Verification-and-Refinement Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15855/) (2025)
- [Vending-Bench: A Benchmark for Long-Term Coherence of Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15840/) (2025)
- [EmbodiedEval: Evaluate Multimodal LLMs as Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11858/) (2025)
- [Predictive Scaling Laws for Efficient GRPO Training of Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18014/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Cooking Up Risks: Benchmarking and Reducing Food Safety Risks in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01444/) (2026)
- [Reasoning with Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16409/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Butter-Bench, a benchmark evaluating large language model (LLM) controlled robots for practical intelligence, defined as the ability to navigate the messiness of the physical world. Current state-of-the-art robotic systems use a hierarchical architecture with LLMs in charge of high-level reasoning, and a Vision Language Action (VLA) model for low-level control. Butter-Bench evaluates the LLM part in isolation from the VLA. Although LLMs have repeatedly surpassed humans in evaluations requiring analytical intelligence, we find humans still outperform LLMs on Butter-Bench. The best LLMs score 40% on Butter-Bench, while the mean human score is 95%. LLMs struggled the most with multi-step spatial planning and social understanding. We also evaluate LLMs that are fine-tuned for embodied reasoning and conclude that this training does not improve their score on Butter-Bench.