LADDER: A Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation Benchmark
Petko Petkov, Giuliano Albanese, Nikolay Nikolov, Luc Van Gool, Jonathan Tremblay, Danda Pani Paudel
Abstract
General-purpose robot manipulation policies learn short-horizon skills effectively, but degrade rapidly on long-horizon tasks. Existing benchmarks cannot isolate failures because task horizon is either too short or entangled with scene and object variations. We propose LADDER, a long-horizon robot manipulation benchmark scaling from 1 to 10 subgoals within the same environment over three suites (SimplerEnv-Long, RobotArena-$\infty$-Long, and RoboLab-Long), 145 tasks, eight categories, two embodiments, and 2,024 simulated episodes per system. We evaluate two orchestration paradigms: text subgoals for learned low-level policies (VoLo) and tool selection orchestration (CaP-X, GPT-Policy, PSP-Agent, TiPToP). Given the full instruction directly, low-level policies achieve 85.4% on single-subgoal tasks, but drop to near zero on extended tasks. While orchestration remedies this, it remains bounded by physical execution errors of the low-level policy rather than high-level planning and achieves only ~25%. Tool selection orchestration with GPT-Policy on GPT-6 Astra significantly outperforms learned-policy methods, but incurs significant time and cost budget and succeeds only ~62%. Real-world experiments across two embodiments confirm the collapse of the low-level policy and the gain from orchestration. Project website: https://ladder.insait.ai