HomeSafeBench: A Benchmark for Embodied Vision-Language Models in Free-Exploration Home Safety Inspection

Abstract: Embodied agents can identify and report safety hazards in the home environments. Accurately evaluating their capabilities in home safety inspection tasks is curcial, but existing benchmarks suffer from two key limitations. First, they oversimplify safety inspection tasks by using textual descriptions of the environment instead of direct visual information, which hinders the accurate evaluation of embodied agents based on Vision-LLMs (VLMs). Second, they use a single, static viewpoint for environmental observation, which restricts the agents' free exploration and cause the omission of certain safety hazards, especially those that are occluded from a fixed viewpoint. To alleviate these issues, we propose HomeSafeBench, a benchmark with 12,900 data points covering five common home safety hazards: fire, electric shock, falling object, trips, and child safety. HomeSafeBench provides dynamic first-person perspective images from simulated home environments, enabling the evaluation of VLM capabilities for home safety inspection. By allowing the embodied agents to freely explore the room, HomeSafeBench provides multiple dynamic perspectives in complex environments for a more thorough inspection. Our comprehensive evaluation of mainstream VLMs on HomeSafeBench reveals that even the best-performing model achieves an F1-score of only 10.23%, demonstrating significant limitations in current VLMs. The models particularly struggle with identifying safety hazards and selecting effective exploration strategies. We hope HomeSafeBench will provide valuable reference and support for future research related to home security inspections. Our dataset and code will be publicly available soon.