VisGym: Diverse, Customizable, Scalable Environments for Multimodal Agents

Zirui Wang, Junyi Zhang, Jiaxin Ge, Long Lian, Letian Fu, Lisa Dunlap, Ken Goldberg, XuDong Wang, Ion Stoica, David M. Chan, Sewon Min, Joseph E. Gonzalez

Track: long paper (up to 8 pages)

Keywords: vision-language models, agents, environments

TL;DR: Progress in multimodal interactive intelligence requires rethinking how models explore, act, and learn from visual feedback.

Abstract: Modern Vision–Language Models (VLMs) remain poorly characterized in multi-step visual interactions, particularly in how they integrate perception, memory, and action over long horizons. We introduce VisGym, a gymnasium of 17 environments for evaluating and training VLMs. The suite spans symbolic puzzles, real-image understanding, navigation, and manipulation, and provides flexible controls over difficulty, input representation, planning horizon, and feedback. We also provide multi-step solvers that generate structured demonstrations, enabling supervised finetuning. Our evaluations show that all frontier models struggle in interactive settings, achieving low success rates in both the easy (26.8%) and hard (12.6%) configurations. Our experiments reveal notable limitations: models struggle to effectively leverage long context, performing worse with an unbounded history than with truncated windows. Furthermore, we find that several text-based symbolic tasks become substantially harder once rendered visually. However, explicit goal observations, textual feedback, and exploratory demonstrations in partially observable or unknown-dynamics settings for supervised finetuning yield consistent gains, and solver-generated multi-step demonstrations generalize across tasks and domains. Together, these results position VisGym as a principled and scalable foundation for diagnosing and training visually interactive agents.

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Submission Number: 5