Towards Evaluating Generalist Agents: An Automated Benchmark in Open World

Evaluating generalist agents presents significant challenges due to their wide-ranging abilities and the limitations of current benchmarks in assessing true generalization. We introduce the Minecraft Universe (MCU), a fully automated benchmarking framework set within the open-world game Minecraft. MCU dynamically generates and evaluates a broad spectrum of tasks, offering three core components: 1) a task generation mechanism that provides high degrees of freedom and variability, 2) an ever-expanding set of over 3K composable atomic tasks, and 3) a general evaluation framework that supports open-ended task assessment. By integrating large language models (LLMs), MCU dynamically creates diverse environments for each evaluation, fostering agent generalization. The framework uses a vision-language model (VLM) to automatically generate evaluation criteria, achieving over 90% agreement with human ratings across multi-dimensional assessments, which demonstrates that MCU is a scalable and explainable solution for evaluating generalist agents. Additionally, we show that while state-of-the-art foundational models perform well on specific tasks, they often struggle with increased task diversity and difficulty.