Embodied skills improve robot task success with selective control
Embodied Skill Bench: Benchmarking How Well Agents with Embodied Skills Perform on Physical Tasks
Robotics
Summary
Robots need different kinds of skills, like moving and seeing, to do physical jobs well. The authors grouped many such skills into a toolkit called embodied skills, which clearly say how and when to use them. They tested how well robots do tasks using just their usual controls, just the skills, or a mix where the robot chooses when to use skills. They found that skills help when they add new abilities but can slow down very good robots if forced to use them all the time. Letting robots decide when to use skills makes them more efficient without losing much success.
What this means in practice
- •For robot developers: Use embodied skill libraries to improve robot efficiency and success rates by selectively invoking specialized actions during physical tasks.
- •For industrial automation teams: Implement agent-directed skill reuse in robot workflows to reduce computational cost and time while maintaining high task completion rates.
Authors
Zhi Han, Zihan Guo, Chenxi Zeng, Zicai Cui, Yue Xin, Ming Zhou, Dongzhan Zhou, Weinan Zhang, Yang Li
Abstract
LLM agents increasingly control robots using VLA policies, perception models, and procedural knowledge. These modules are difficult to reuse because their interfaces, embodiment assumptions, and conditions of use differ, and their benefits on physical tasks remain unclear. We package them as embodied skills that extend agent skills with explicit embodiment assumptions and conditions of use, building 250 action, perception, and experience skills from 1,052 resources. On this basis we introduce EmbodiedSkillBench, which runs an agent in a closed observation-action loop and records success, actions, tokens, and wall-clock time. It supports three modes: native control, skill-only execution, and Agent-Directed Reuse (ADR), a mode we propose in which the agent keeps its native controls and decides for each skill whether to invoke, modify, or ignore it. Across four agents on 100 perturbed LIBERO-Pro tasks, we find that skills help an agent only as far as they exceed what it can already do. Skill-only execution lifts GPT-5.6-Sol from 11% to 63% and Kimi-K3 and Claude-Opus-5 by about 20 points, while cutting their token usage by 58% to 85%. Yet all four agents then end up between 61% and 64%, and GPT-6-Astra falls from 92% under native control to 61%. This suggests that as agents grow stronger, the role of embodied skills shifts from supplying missing capability to reducing cost: GPT-6-Astra already solves most tasks through native control, so restricting it to skills removes more than it adds. Under ADR, which lets it keep native control and call skills selectively, GPT-6-Astra recovers to 85%, within 7 points of native control, while using 14.1% fewer tokens and 11.9% less time. With Jev as a skill choosing motion directions and gripper actions, it reaches 81% with 50% fewer tokens and 57% less time. The code is available at https://github.com/HanZhi306/EmbodiedSkill-Bench.