OceanGym: A Benchmark Environment for Underwater Embodied Agents

Abstract:We introduce OceanGym, the first comprehensive benchmark for ocean underwater embodied agents, designed to advance AI in one of the most demanding real-world environments. Unlike terrestrial or aerial domains, underwater settings present extreme perceptual and decision-making challenges, including low visibility, dynamic ocean currents, making effective agent deployment exceptionally difficult. OceanGym encompasses eight realistic task domains and a unified agent framework driven by Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), which integrates perception, memory, and sequential decision-making. Agents are required to comprehend optical and sonar data, autonomously explore complex environments, and accomplish long-horizon objectives under these harsh conditions. Extensive experiments reveal substantial gaps between state-of-the-art MLLM-driven agents and human experts, highlighting the persistent difficulty of perception, planning, and adaptability in ocean underwater environments. By providing a high-fidelity, rigorously designed platform, OceanGym establishes a testbed for developing robust embodied AI and transferring these capabilities to real-world autonomous ocean underwater vehicles, marking a decisive step toward intelligent agents capable of operating in one of Earth's last unexplored frontiers. The code and data are available at this https URL.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2509.26536 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2509.26536v3 [cs.CL] for this version)