How Should I Pick a Foundation Model for My Robot? In Favor of a Community Evaluation Framework for Social Robots
Researchers who seek to build social robot applications on foundation models are faced with a difficult question: how should we pick a model? Public leaderboards offer little guidance: the demands of real-time, embodied social interaction lie largely outside their focus. And direct evaluation is impractical at scale: each embodied study requires scarce participant, robot, and experimenter time. In this paper, we identify five evaluation dimensions for foundation models in social robots: (i) conversational competence, (ii) user safety, (iii) embodied character, (iv) target scene effectiveness, and (v) audience appropriateness. To make model selection cheaper and better informed, we propose...
| Authors | Eric Nichols, Alva Markelius, Hatice Gunes |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.RO |
| Published | 7 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 August 2026 |
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