# SleepWalk: A Three-Tier Benchmark for Stress-Testing Instruction-Guided Vision-Language Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10376 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10376/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 11 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 May 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)
- [MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14795/) (2023)
- [HunyuanImage 3.0 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23951/) (2025)
- [TLControl: Trajectory and Language Control for Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17135/) (2023)
- [TopViewRS: Vision-Language Models as Top-View Spatial Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02537/) (2024)
- [iVISPAR -- An Interactive Visual-Spatial Reasoning Benchmark for VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03214/) (2025)
- [Point-It-Out: Benchmarking Embodied Reasoning for Vision Language Models in Multi-Stage Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25794/) (2025)
- [Navigating the Nuances: A Fine-grained Evaluation of Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17313/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have advanced rapidly in multimodal perception and language understanding, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably ground language into spatially coherent, plausibly executable actions in 3D digital environments. We introduce SleepWalk, a benchmark for evaluating instruction-grounded trajectory prediction in single-scene 3D worlds generated from textual scene descriptions and filtered for navigability. Unlike prior navigation benchmarks centered on long-range exploration across rooms, SleepWalk targets localized, interaction-centric embodied reasoning: given rendered visual observations and a natural-language instruction, a model must predict a trajectory that respects scene geometry, avoids collisions, and terminates at an action-compatible location. The benchmark covers diverse indoor and outdoor environments and organizes tasks into three tiers of spatial and temporal difficulty, enabling fine-grained analysis of grounding under increasing compositional complexity. Using a standardized pointwise judge-based evaluation protocol, we evaluate three frontier VLMs on 2,472 curated 3D environments with nine instructions per scene. Results reveal systematic failures in grounded spatial reasoning, especially under occlusion, interaction constraints, and multi-step instructions: performance drops as the difficulty level of the tasks increase. In general, current VLMs can somewhat produce trajectories that are simultaneously spatially coherent, plausibly executable, and aligned with intended actions. By exposing failures in a controlled yet scalable setting, SleepWalk provides a critical benchmark for advancing grounded multimodal reasoning, embodied planning, vision-language navigation, and action-capable agents in 3D environments.