NormAct: A Benchmark for Hidden Social Norm Compliance in Embodied Planning

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 26 Jun 2026] NormAct: A Benchmark for Hidden Social Norm Compliance in Embodied Planning Shiyun Zhao, Xinwei Song, Tianyu Guo, Xiaomeng Gao, Mingyuan Liu, Xu Han, Yuanyuan Zhang, Zhenliang Zhang, Xue Feng, Bo Dai Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed as embodied planners in egocentric environments, where task success requires not only achieving instructed goals but also acting in socially appropriate ways. While explicit goals may render certain actions optimal, implicit social norms often impose hidden constraints. Existing evaluations typically focus on explicit goal achievement or direct norm knowledge, seldom assessing whether planners can infer and apply these hidden constraints within action sequences. We introduce NormAct, a benchmark for embodied social-norm interactions that evaluates plans on Goal Achievement, Norm Compliance, and overall Task Success. NormAct uniquely embeds hidden norms within ordinary tasks, testing whether models can realize them without explicit instruction. Experiments with state-of-the-art MLLMs (GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3 Pro) reveal a significant gap: models achieve explicit goals in 67.3\% of cases, but comply with hidden norms in only 26.4\%. Cue-condition experiments indicate that this gap stems not from a lack of general social knowledge, but from challenges in activating and grounding relevant norms in context. To address this, we propose NormPerceptor, a context-conditioned cue generator that infers scene-relevant norms prior to planning, increasing Task Success from 24.2\% to 46.7\%. Our results underscore the importance of enabling embodied agents to proactively detect hidden norms, ground them in visual evidence, and integrate them as action-planning constraints. Our benchmark is publicly available at this https URL. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2606.27826 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2606.27826v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.27826 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Shiyun Zhao [view email] [v1] Fri, 26 Jun 2026 08:10:39 UTC (5,280 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)