UNOBench Challenge

Introduction

Autonomous robotic grasping in highly cluttered environments, such as industrial bins, warehouse logistics totes, or chaotic domestic spaces, remains a fundamental bottleneck in robotics. While modern vision systems excel at identifying isolated, clearly visible surface-level objects, achieving true operational autonomy requires models to process complex semantic and geometric physical hierarchies.

To grasp a buried or partially obscured item safely, an intelligent agent cannot merely rely on standard vision-language grounding. Instead, it must implicitly map the environment, reason systematically about obstructions and physical occlusions, and determine the exact sequence of clearing actions required to safely unlock an unobstructed trajectory to the target object.

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Key Objectives & Evaluation Pillars

Submissions will be evaluated and ranked based on their ability to identify all the objects that should be removed first to grasp a particular object (i.e., all the last object in the occluding chain).

The challenge offers two main track:

• Set of Marks (SoM): For this track the objects in the images are overlayed an ID that identifies them. The query object is also identified by its ID (i.e., "object 2"). The goal is to identify all objects that should removed first and return them as a list of object IDs (i.e., "[object 5, object 7]")
• Natural language (NL): For this track the objects in the images do not have overlayed IDs. The query object is also identified by a description (i.e., "the red and orange drill toy"). The goal is to identify all objects that should removed first and return them as a list of Object coordiantes (i.e., "[(x1,y1), (x2,y2)]")

Additional details regarding the images, data, and evaluation metrics are in their respective pages.

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Timelines

All deadlines are strictly enforced at 23:59 UTC on the dates listed below:

Phase / Milestone	Date	Details
Challenge & Data Launch	June 13, 2026	UNOBench challenge data, and baseline model (UNOGrasp) code released.
Evaluation Phase	July 1st, 2026	The evaluation server opens. Live public leaderboard tracks participant validation submissions.
Final Test Submissions	August 30, 2026	Final submission deadline.
Winner Announcement	September 1, 2026	Top performing architectures finalized following verification against cheating/overfitting.
Workshop Day	September 8, 2026	Winning teams present technical talks alongside invited keynotes at our official conference venue.

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@InProceedings{Jiao_2026_CVPR,
    author    = {Jiao, Runyu and Bortolon, Matteo and Giuliari, Francesco and Fasoli, Alice and Povoli, Sergio and Mei, Guofeng and Wang, Yiming and Poiesi, Fabio},
    title     = {Obstruction Reasoning for Robotic Grasping},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2026},
    pages     = {20755-20764}
}