Relational Scene Graphs for Object Grounding of Natural Language Commands

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Kuhn, Julia, Verdoja, Francesco, Mihaylova, Tsvetomila, Kyrki, Ville
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Kuhn, Julia
Verdoja, Francesco
Mihaylova, Tsvetomila
Kyrki, Ville
author_facet Kuhn, Julia
Verdoja, Francesco
Mihaylova, Tsvetomila
Kyrki, Ville
contents Robots are finding wider adoption in human environments, increasing the need for natural human-robot interaction. However, understanding a natural language command requires the robot to infer the intended task and how to decompose it into executable actions, and to ground those actions in the robot's knowledge of the environment, including relevant objects, agents, and locations. This challenge can be addressed by combining the capabilities of Large language models (LLMs) to understand natural language with 3D scene graphs (3DSGs) for grounding inferred actions in a semantic representation of the environment. However, many 3DSGs lack explicit spatial relations between objects, even though humans often rely on these relations to describe an environment. This paper investigates whether incorporating open- or closed-vocabulary spatial relations into 3DSGs can improve the ability of LLMs to interpret natural language commands. To address this, we propose an LLM-based pipeline for target object grounding from open-vocabulary language commands and a vision language model (VLM)-based pipeline to add open-vocabulary spatial edges to 3DSGs from images captured while mapping. Finally, two LLMs are evaluated in a study assessing their performance on the downstream task of target object grounding. Our study demonstrates that explicit spatial relations improve the ability of LLMs to ground objects. Moreover, open-vocabulary relation generation with VLMs proves feasible from robot-captured images, but their advantage over closed-vocabulary relations is found to be limited.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_04635
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Relational Scene Graphs for Object Grounding of Natural Language Commands
Kuhn, Julia
Verdoja, Francesco
Mihaylova, Tsvetomila
Kyrki, Ville
Robotics
Robots are finding wider adoption in human environments, increasing the need for natural human-robot interaction. However, understanding a natural language command requires the robot to infer the intended task and how to decompose it into executable actions, and to ground those actions in the robot's knowledge of the environment, including relevant objects, agents, and locations. This challenge can be addressed by combining the capabilities of Large language models (LLMs) to understand natural language with 3D scene graphs (3DSGs) for grounding inferred actions in a semantic representation of the environment. However, many 3DSGs lack explicit spatial relations between objects, even though humans often rely on these relations to describe an environment. This paper investigates whether incorporating open- or closed-vocabulary spatial relations into 3DSGs can improve the ability of LLMs to interpret natural language commands. To address this, we propose an LLM-based pipeline for target object grounding from open-vocabulary language commands and a vision language model (VLM)-based pipeline to add open-vocabulary spatial edges to 3DSGs from images captured while mapping. Finally, two LLMs are evaluated in a study assessing their performance on the downstream task of target object grounding. Our study demonstrates that explicit spatial relations improve the ability of LLMs to ground objects. Moreover, open-vocabulary relation generation with VLMs proves feasible from robot-captured images, but their advantage over closed-vocabulary relations is found to be limited.
title Relational Scene Graphs for Object Grounding of Natural Language Commands
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04635