Humanoid robots promise whole-body interaction in human-centered environments, but scalable policy learning remains difficult because task-level decision-making and whole-body dynamic execution are tightly coupled. A practical solution is hierarchical control, where a high-level policy predicts intermediate whole-body actions and low-level general motion trackers (GMTs) execute them as stable humanoid motion. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate the policy-tracker interface itself, leaving open whether intermediate whole-body actions are executable, robust under task distribution shifts, and transferable across different GMT backends. We introduce HumanoidArena, a simulation-first benchmark for egocentric hierarchical whole-body learning. The benchmark formulates policy learning as a hierarchical decision making problem: a high-level policy converts egocentric vision, proprioception, and instructions into a compact whole-body action, which is subsequently executed by a low-level GMT. Instead of treating the legs as planar transport tools, HumanoidArena emphasizes interactions where lower-body coordination is structurally necessary in task completion. We therefore design 7 leg-critical HOI/HSI tasks in which success requires foot placement, balance maintenance, posture adjustment, and whole-body reorientation. To further diagnose the hierarchical system, we evaluate policies from two complementary perspectives: perturbation-conditioned generalization and GMT-conditioned transfer. We benchmark representative imitation-learning and VLA-style policies under this shared interface. Experiments show that hierarchical control enables learned policies to solve diverse leg-critical interactions, but performance is strongly tracker-conditioned and cross-GMT transfer remains fragile. These results position HumanoidArena as a benchmark for studying transferable intermediate action representations and scalable egocentric whole-body policy learning.
Simulation-first benchmark for humanoid control
HumanoidArena:
Benchmarking Egocentric Hierarchical Whole-body Learning.
HumanoidArena is a simulation-first benchmark for egocentric hierarchical whole-body learning. It studies seven leg-critical HOI/HSI tasks where success depends on coordinated perception, foot placement, balance, posture adjustment, and whole-body motion, while exposing both perturbation-conditioned generalization and GMT-conditioned transfer.
- Task suite
- 7 leg-critical HOI/HSI tasks
- Evaluation axes
- Visual, Semantic, Execution, Cross-GMT
- Core stack
- TWIST2, SONIC, IsaacLab, LeRobot
Overview figure
Abstract
Paper abstract.
Task gallery
Seven tasks across both GMTs.
Pipeline
From teleop to benchmark.
1. Shared capture and retargeting
The operator receives the humanoid's egocentric video stream through a PICO headset. Human motion is captured and retargeted through GMR into a shared 35D robot-space reference signal for real-time consumption.
2. Backend-specific action interpretation
Inside Isaac Lab, backend-specific action providers interpret that shared signal into executable G1 targets using either TWIST2 or SONIC, exposing different low-level tracking dynamics under one common upstream interface.
3. Recording and canonicalization
A recording manager serializes episodes into NPZ archives with egocentric observations, state, action, and replayable trajectory data. Demonstrations are normalized into a 64D canonical state and 40D intermediate whole-body action.
4. Conversion, training, evaluation
Raw recordings are converted into LeRobot-compatible datasets, then used to train high-level policies that are evaluated under in-GMT, cross-GMT, visual, semantic, and execution protocols.
SONIC inference additionally provides an experimental latent-output mode for VLA policies trained on SONIC encoder representations. In this mode, the policy outputs 64D SONIC latent actions instead of the default 40D semantic whole-body commands. The raw dataset also preserves SONIC latent64 representations for each demonstration episode.
Evaluation protocol
Four tests plus cross-GMT.
Example task
P&PBox makes the perturbation axes concrete.
Results
Success, failure, recovery.
Leaderboard
How policy–tracker pairs compare.
All = mean SR across all seven tasks, (3 × HOI AVG + 4 × HSI AVG) / 7 AVG = suite average AFR = average fall rate (↓ is better) ± = standard deviation across seeds
Resources