INSIGHT Bench: Towards Grounded IN-SItu Guidance for Robotic ManipulaTion

Humans intuitively rely on text and symbols inscribed on objects (e.g. "PULL", "Squeeze and Turn") to perform tasks safely and correctly. In contrast, vision-languageaction models excel at following external language commands, but remain largely unaware of this object-centric information. This capability is essential for reliable robotic operation, yet progress remains unmeasured due to the absence of standardized benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce INSIGHT Bench, a benchmark that formalizes the task of "in-situ guide grounding". INSIGHT Bench provides a comprehensive taxonomy that evaluates how agents utilize diverse guide information, including action-direction cues and procedural instructions. It also includes a scalable simulation framework that procedurally generates tasks and programmatically links each visual guide to its corresponding physical constraint. We release both the benchmark and the resulting trajectory dataset to support future research. Our evaluation of recent VLA models reveals a critical limitation: their ability to ground in-situ guides is inconsistent and strongly dependent on the type of information. While models succeed on some guide categories, they frequently fail on others. However, performance improves substantially when the same information is provided as language instructions, indicating that in-situ guides could contribute to manipulation performance if VLAs were capable of interpreting them. These findings underscore the need for further research on understanding and grounding in-situ guides.