QuASH: Using Natural-Language Heuristics to Query Visual-Language Robotic Maps

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pekkanen, Matti, Verdoja, Francesco, Kyrki, Ville
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914096373301248
author Pekkanen, Matti
Verdoja, Francesco
Kyrki, Ville
author_facet Pekkanen, Matti
Verdoja, Francesco
Kyrki, Ville
contents Embeddings from Visual-Language Models are increasingly utilized to represent semantics in robotic maps, offering an open-vocabulary scene understanding that surpasses traditional, limited labels. Embeddings enable on-demand querying by comparing embedded user text prompts to map embeddings via a similarity metric. The key challenge in performing the task indicated in a query is that the robot must determine the parts of the environment relevant to the query. This paper proposes a solution to this challenge. We leverage natural-language synonyms and antonyms associated with the query within the embedding space, applying heuristics to estimate the language space relevant to the query, and use that to train a classifier to partition the environment into matches and non-matches. We evaluate our method through extensive experiments, querying both maps and standard image benchmarks. The results demonstrate increased queryability of maps and images. Our querying technique is agnostic to the representation and encoder used, and requires limited training.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_14546
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle QuASH: Using Natural-Language Heuristics to Query Visual-Language Robotic Maps
Pekkanen, Matti
Verdoja, Francesco
Kyrki, Ville
Robotics
Embeddings from Visual-Language Models are increasingly utilized to represent semantics in robotic maps, offering an open-vocabulary scene understanding that surpasses traditional, limited labels. Embeddings enable on-demand querying by comparing embedded user text prompts to map embeddings via a similarity metric. The key challenge in performing the task indicated in a query is that the robot must determine the parts of the environment relevant to the query. This paper proposes a solution to this challenge. We leverage natural-language synonyms and antonyms associated with the query within the embedding space, applying heuristics to estimate the language space relevant to the query, and use that to train a classifier to partition the environment into matches and non-matches. We evaluate our method through extensive experiments, querying both maps and standard image benchmarks. The results demonstrate increased queryability of maps and images. Our querying technique is agnostic to the representation and encoder used, and requires limited training.
title QuASH: Using Natural-Language Heuristics to Query Visual-Language Robotic Maps
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14546