LabBuilder: Protocol-Grounded 3D Layout Generation for Interactable and Safe Laboratory

Automated laboratories hold the promise of accelerating scientific discovery, yet their deployment is bottlenecked by the difficulty of designing safe and executable environments. While simulator-based design offers scalability, existing 3D scene generation methods are primarily tailored for household settings, optimizing for visual plausibility while neglecting the protocol grounding and layout-level safety constraints essential for scientific experimentation. We present LabBuilder, an end-to-end system that generates and verifies 3D laboratory layouts from concise textual specifications. It operates through three tightly coupled components: LabForge first curates a meta-dataset of annotated assets and chemical knowledge, translating natural language specifications into structured protocols; building on these protocols, LabGen synthesizes laboratory layouts via an iterative, constraint-aware optimization strategy; finally, LabTouchstone evaluates the resulting layouts as a unified benchmark. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LabBuilder significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, producing laboratory environments that are realistic and valid under modeled geometric, chemical-safety, and navigation constraints.

Designing 3D laboratory scenes is challenging because a lab layout must be more than visually plausible: the objects should match the experimental procedure, be placed in sensible locations, and allow the required interactions to happen. Existing 3D scene generation methods often focus on ordinary indoor environments and may not capture the procedural and safety-related constraints that appear in laboratory settings. We propose LabBuilder, a method for generating 3D laboratory layouts grounded in experimental protocols. Given a protocol, LabBuilder identifies the relevant laboratory objects and uses the procedure to guide how these objects are arranged in the scene. The goal is to produce layouts that are not only visually reasonable, but also more consistent with the intended experimental workflow and interaction requirements. Our experiments show that LabBuilder improves the generation of laboratory scenes compared with existing layout generation approaches. This work provides a step toward protocol-aware 3D scene generation for laboratory environments.