# NormAct: Benchmarking Embodied Agents' Proactive Compliance with Unspoken Social Norms

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27826 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27826/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (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 34 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [Aligning AI With Shared Human Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02275/) (2020)
- [V*: Guided Visual Search as a Core Mechanism in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14135/) (2023)
- [Social Chemistry 101: Learning to Reason about Social and Moral Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00620/) (2020)
- [Habitat 3.0: A Co-Habitat for Humans, Avatars and Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13724/) (2023)
- [EmbodiedBench: Comprehensive Benchmarking Multi-modal Large Language Models for Vision-Driven Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09560/) (2025)
- [iGibson 2.0: Object-Centric Simulation for Robot Learning of Everyday Household Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03272/) (2021)
- [AgentSociety: Large-Scale Simulation of LLM-Driven Generative Agents Advances Understanding of Human Behaviors and Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08691/) (2025)
- [Seedance 2.0: Advancing Video Generation for World Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14148/) (2026)
- [Moral Stories: Situated Reasoning about Norms, Intents, Actions, and their Consequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15738/) (2020)
- [OASIS: Open Agent Social Interaction Simulations with One Million Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11581/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Active Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02729/) (2016)
- [Dark, Beyond Deep: A Paradigm Shift to Cognitive AI with Humanlike Common Sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09044/) (2020)
- [NormBank: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17008/) (2023)
- [IS-Bench: Evaluating Interactive Safety of VLM-Driven Embodied Agents in Daily Household Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16402/) (2025)
- [LLMs Can't Handle Peer Pressure: Crumbling under Multi-Agent Social Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18321/) (2025)
- [EgoNormia: Benchmarking Physical Social Norm Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20490/) (2025)
- [MORALISE: A Structured Benchmark for Moral Alignment in Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14728/) (2025)
- [SocialNav-SUB: Benchmarking VLMs for Scene Understanding in Social Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08757/) (2025)
- [Reading Books is Great, But Not if You Are Driving! Visually Grounded Reasoning about Defeasible Commonsense Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10418/) (2023)
- [Casevo: A Cognitive Agents and Social Evolution Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19498/) (2024)
- [MFTCXplain: A Multilingual Benchmark Dataset for Evaluating the Moral Reasoning of LLMs through Multi-hop Hate Speech Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19073/) (2025)

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

- [Who Owns That? Evaluating Ownership Intuitions in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39483/) (2026)
- [EmbodiedCLBench: Evaluating Continual Learning for Self-Evolving Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13021/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Embodied agents driven by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can often complete everyday tasks from visual observations, but goal achievement does not establish whether they proactively respect unstated social norms. Existing benchmarks assess explicit norm judgments or constrained behavior, but rarely test whether agents infer and apply scene-relevant norms during ordinary tasks. We introduce NormAct, a benchmark of 550 TongSim scenarios in which the same goal permits norm-compliant or norm-violating action sequences. Norm-relevant evidence is embedded in each scenario while the applicable rule is omitted from the goal instruction. By progressively increasing normative guidance while holding the goal and scene fixed, NormAct tests whether compliant behavior emerges autonomously or only after prompting. Across three MLLM planners, goal achievement substantially exceeds norm compliance without guidance (67.4% versus 24.7%), while both broad and rule-specific guidance improve compliance, indicating that planners can often comply when prompted but not reliably on their own. With a fixed planner, general-norm retrieval is less effective than norm-relevant scene descriptions or generated norm cues, suggesting that identifying relevant visual evidence is a greater challenge than accessing general norm knowledge. NormAct therefore supports the development of embodied agents that pursue everyday goals while proactively respecting unstated social norms.