Open-Ended Goal Inference through Actions and Language for Human-Robot Collaboration

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ghose, Debasmita, Gitelson, Oz, Vazquez, Marynel, Scassellati, Brian
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Ghose, Debasmita
Gitelson, Oz
Vazquez, Marynel
Scassellati, Brian
author_facet Ghose, Debasmita
Gitelson, Oz
Vazquez, Marynel
Scassellati, Brian
contents To collaborate with humans, robots must infer goals that are often ambiguous, difficult to articulate, or not drawn from a fixed set. Prior approaches restrict inference to a predefined goal set, rely only on observed actions, or depend exclusively on explicit instructions, making them brittle in real-world interactions. We present BALI (Bidirectional Action-Language Inference) for goal prediction, a method that integrates natural language preferences with observed human actions in a receding-horizon planning tree. BALI combines language and action cues from the human, asks clarifying questions only when the expected information gain from the answer outweighs the cost of interruption, and selects supportive actions that align with inferred goals. We evaluate the approach in collaborative cooking tasks, where goals may be novel to the robot and unbounded. Compared to baselines, BALI yields more stable goal predictions and significantly fewer mistakes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_04453
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Open-Ended Goal Inference through Actions and Language for Human-Robot Collaboration
Ghose, Debasmita
Gitelson, Oz
Vazquez, Marynel
Scassellati, Brian
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
To collaborate with humans, robots must infer goals that are often ambiguous, difficult to articulate, or not drawn from a fixed set. Prior approaches restrict inference to a predefined goal set, rely only on observed actions, or depend exclusively on explicit instructions, making them brittle in real-world interactions. We present BALI (Bidirectional Action-Language Inference) for goal prediction, a method that integrates natural language preferences with observed human actions in a receding-horizon planning tree. BALI combines language and action cues from the human, asks clarifying questions only when the expected information gain from the answer outweighs the cost of interruption, and selects supportive actions that align with inferred goals. We evaluate the approach in collaborative cooking tasks, where goals may be novel to the robot and unbounded. Compared to baselines, BALI yields more stable goal predictions and significantly fewer mistakes.
title Open-Ended Goal Inference through Actions and Language for Human-Robot Collaboration
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04453