{"ID":2880360,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14893","arxiv_id":"2508.14893","title":"Virtual Community: An Open World for Humans, Robots, and Society","abstract":"The rapid progress in AI and Robotics may lead to a profound societal transformation, as humans and robots begin to coexist within shared communities, introducing both opportunities and challenges. To explore this future, we present Virtual Community-an open-world platform for humans, robots, and society-built on a universal physics engine and grounded in real-world 3D scenes. With Virtual Community, we aim to enable the study of embodied social intelligence at scale. To support these, Virtual Community features: 1) An open-source multi-agent physics simulator that supports robots, humans, and their interactions within a society; 2) A large-scale, real-world aligned community generation pipeline, including vast outdoor space, diverse indoor scenes, and a community of grounded agents with rich characters and appearances. Leveraging Virtual Community, we propose two novel challenges. The Community Planning Challenge evaluates multi-agent reasoning and planning ability in open-world settings, such as cooperating to help agents with daily activities and efficiently connecting other agents. The Community Robot Challenge requires multiple heterogeneous robots to collaborate in solving complex open-world tasks. We evaluate various baselines on these tasks and demonstrate the challenges in both high-level open-world task planning and low-level cooperation controls. We hope that Virtual Community will unlock further study of human-robot coexistence within open-world environments.","short_abstract":"The rapid progress in AI and Robotics may lead to a profound societal transformation, as humans and robots begin to coexist within shared communities, introducing both opportunities and challenges. To explore this future, we present Virtual Community-an open-world platform for humans, robots, and society-built on a uni...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14893","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14893v3","authors":"[\"Qinhong Zhou\",\"Hongxin Zhang\",\"Xiangye Lin\",\"Zheyuan Zhang\",\"Yutian Chen\",\"Wenjun Liu\",\"Zunzhe Zhang\",\"Sunli Chen\",\"Lixing Fang\",\"Qiushi Lyu\",\"Xinyu Sun\",\"Jincheng Yang\",\"Zeyuan Wang\",\"Bao Chi Dang\",\"Zhehuan Chen\",\"Daksha Ladia\",\"Quang Vinh Dang\",\"Jiageng Liu\",\"Chuang Gan\"]","published":"2025-08-20T17:59:32Z","proceeding":"cs.CV","tasks":"[\"cs.CV\",\"cs.CL\",\"cs.RO\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}