Pro-Bench: Prompt-Robust Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding Across Real-World Heterogeneous Environments

Open-vocabulary visual grounding enables robots to localise task-relevant entities from natural-language queries without dependence on predefined perceptual taxonomies. However, existing benchmarks largely rely on short category labels and web-scraped imagery, leaving it unclear whether open-vocabulary models can robustly ground diverse queries and visual conditions under real deployments. We introduce Pro-Bench, a prompt-conditioned benchmark for open-vocabulary visual grounding in heterogeneous, real-world environments. Pro-Bench includes 13k+ RGB frames from independent robotic domains (subterranean, industrial, indoor, outdoor, urban), with 74.5k manual instance annotations and 515 target queries covering categorical, attributive, relational, affordance, state, part-whole, negative, and compositional semantics. We benchmarked 16 open-vocabulary model configurations in strict zero-shot inference, measuring localisation accuracy across IoU thresholds, end-to-end inference latency, prompt-induced performance variation, and target recovery consistency. Our results show that prompt-robustness is strongly architecture-dependent. Most model configurations (10/16) perform best with short category labels, whereas free-form queries yield the highest accuracy for only one. Moreover, similar aggregate mAP can conceal substantial differences in consistent target recovery across reformulations. Pro-Bench enables systematic evaluation of these gaps and supports prompt-robust visual grounding. Pro-Bench: https://pro-bench.github.io/.