ML Anthology

Virtual Community: An Open World for Humans, Robots, and Society

Qinhong Zhou, Hongxin Zhang, Xiangye Lin, Zheyuan Zhang, Yutian Chen, Wenjun Liu, Zunzhe Zhang, Sunli Chen, Lixing Fang, Qiushi Lyu, Xinyu Sun, Jincheng Yang, Zeyuan Wang, Bao Chi Dang, Zhehuan Chen, Daksha Ladia, Quang Vinh Dang, Jiageng Liu, Chuang Gan
ICLR 2026
/iclr/2026/zhou2026iclr-virtual/

Abstract

The rapid progress of AI and robotics may profoundly transform society, as humans and robots begin to coexist in shared communities, bringing both opportunities and challenges. To explore this future, we present Virtual Community—an open-world platform for humans, robots, and society—built on a universal physics engine and grounded in real-world 3D scenes. With Virtual Community, we aim to enable the study of embodied social intelligence at scale. To support these, Virtual Community features: 1) An open-source multi-agent physics simulator that supports robot, human, and their interactions within a society; 2) A large‑scale, real‑world aligned environment generation pipeline, including vast outdoor space, diverse indoor scenes, and a community of grounded agents with rich characters and appearances. Leveraging Virtual Community, we propose two novel challenges. The Community Planning Challenge evaluates multi‑agent reasoning and planning in open‑world settings, such as cooperating to help agents with daily activities and efficiently connecting other agents. The Community Robot Challenge requires multiple heterogeneous robots to collaborate in solving complex open‑world tasks. We evaluate various baselines and demonstrate the challenges in both high‑level open‑world task planning and low‑level cooperation controls. We have open-sourced our project and hope that Virtual Community will unlock further study of human-robot coexistence in open worlds.

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Cite

Text

Zhou et al. "Virtual Community: An Open World for Humans, Robots, and Society." International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.

Markdown

[Zhou et al. "Virtual Community: An Open World for Humans, Robots, and Society." International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.](https://mlanthology.org/iclr/2026/zhou2026iclr-virtual/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{zhou2026iclr-virtual,
  title     = {{Virtual Community: An Open World for Humans, Robots, and Society}},
  author    = {Zhou, Qinhong and Zhang, Hongxin and Lin, Xiangye and Zhang, Zheyuan and Chen, Yutian and Liu, Wenjun and Zhang, Zunzhe and Chen, Sunli and Fang, Lixing and Lyu, Qiushi and Sun, Xinyu and Yang, Jincheng and Wang, Zeyuan and Dang, Bao Chi and Chen, Zhehuan and Ladia, Daksha and Dang, Quang Vinh and Liu, Jiageng and Gan, Chuang},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Learning Representations},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/iclr/2026/zhou2026iclr-virtual/}
}