ACL 2025long0 citations

Agent-RewardBench: Towards a Unified Benchmark for Reward Modeling across Perception, Planning, and Safety in Real-World Multimodal Agents

Tianyi Men, Zhuoran Jin, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao

Abstract

As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) advance, multimodal agents show promise in real-world tasks like web navigation and embodied intelligence. However, due to limitations in a lack of external feedback, these agents struggle with self-correction and generalization. A promising approach is to use reward models as external feedback, but there is no clear on how to select reward models for agents. Thus, there is an urgent need to build a reward bench targeted at agents. To address these challenges, we propose Agent-RewardBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate reward modeling ability in MLLMs. The benchmark is characterized by three key features: (1) Multiple dimensions and real-world agent scenarios evaluation. It covers perception, planning, and safety with 7 scenarios; (2) Step-level reward evaluation. It allows for the assessment of agent capabilities at the individual steps of a task, providing a more granular view of performance during the planning process; and (3) Appropriately difficulty and high-quality. We carefully sample from 10 diverse models, difficulty control to maintain task challenges, and manual verification to ensure the integrity of the data. Experiments demonstrate that even state-of-the-art multimodal models show limited performance, highlighting the need for specialized training in agent reward modeling. Code is available at github.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{men-etal-2025-agent,
    title = "Agent-{R}eward{B}ench: Towards a Unified Benchmark for Reward Modeling across Perception, Planning, and Safety in Real-World Multimodal Agents",
    author = "Men, Tianyi  and
      Jin, Zhuoran  and
      Cao, Pengfei  and
      Chen, Yubo  and
      Liu, Kang  and
      Zhao, Jun",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.857/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.857",
    pages = "17521--17541",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}
Agent-RewardBench: Towards a Unified Benchmark for Reward Modeling across Perception, Planning, and Safety in Real-World Multimodal Agents · ACL 2025