# UESF-Bench: Benchmarking and Probing for Unified Embodied Seeking and Following

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13621 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13621/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06471/) (2025)
- [LM-Nav: Robotic Navigation with Large Pre-Trained Models of Language, Vision, and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04429/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models: An Action Tokenization Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01925/) (2025)
- [OVRL-V2: A simple state-of-art baseline for ImageNav and ObjectNav](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07798/) (2023)
- [Empowering Embodied Visual Tracking with Visual Foundation Models and Offline RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09857/) (2024)
- [VoicePilot: Harnessing LLMs as Speech Interfaces for Physically Assistive Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04066/) (2024)
- [TexDreamer: Towards Zero-Shot High-Fidelity 3D Human Texture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12906/) (2024)
- [ObjectReact: Learning Object-Relative Control for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09594/) (2025)
- [A Personalizable Controller for the Walking Assistive omNi-Directional Exo-Robot (WANDER)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04359/) (2024)
- [SOCRATES: Text-based Human Search and Approach using a Robot Dog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05324/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [UniTrackPLA: Unified Panorama-Language-Action Model for Instruction-Guided Navigation and Dynamic Person Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00878/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Language-guided human following is an important capability for embodied agents, but existing benchmarks typically assume that the target person is visible at the start of an episode. This setting simplifies the problem and overlooks a more realistic requirement: an agent often needs to first find a language-described target and then persistently follow that target in a dynamic environment. While recent work has started to study human search, existing settings are typically evaluated in task-specific scenarios and often rely on stronger prior knowledge of the environment. Moreover, they usually treat searching and following as separate tasks and still lack a unified benchmark for systematic evaluation. To address these limitations, we introduce the Unified Embodied Seeking and Following Benchmark (UESF-Bench), a large-scale and diverse benchmark for embodied human seeking and following. The benchmark requires agents to handle semantic-guided exploration, reliable behavior switching and recovery, and delayed identity grounding. To this end, we propose SeekFollow-VLA, a vision-language-action framework with a task-driven routing mechanism for latent phase inference and transition modeling between seeking and following. Experimental results show that SeekFollow-VLA achieves clear improvements over both single-head and dual-head baselines across single-person and multi-person environments, establishing a baseline for unified embodied seek-and-follow.