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Main Authors: Mahdi, Imen, Cassinelli, Matteo, Despinoy, Fabien, Welschehold, Tim, Valada, Abhinav
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05642
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author Mahdi, Imen
Cassinelli, Matteo
Despinoy, Fabien
Welschehold, Tim
Valada, Abhinav
author_facet Mahdi, Imen
Cassinelli, Matteo
Despinoy, Fabien
Welschehold, Tim
Valada, Abhinav
contents Open-world interactive object search in household environments requires understanding semantic relationships between objects and their surrounding context to guide exploration efficiently. Prior methods either rely on vision-language embeddings similarity, which does not reliably capture task-relevant relational semantics, or large language models (LLMs), which are too slow and costly for real-time deployment. We introduce SCOUT: Scene Graph-Based Exploration with Learned Utility for Open-World Interactive Object Search, a novel method that searches directly over 3D scene graphs by assigning utility scores to rooms, frontiers, and objects using relational exploration heuristics such as room-object containment and object-object co-occurrence. To make this practical without sacrificing open-vocabulary generalization, we propose an offline procedural distillation framework that extracts structured relational knowledge from LLMs into lightweight models for on-robot inference. Furthermore, we present SymSearch, a scalable symbolic benchmark for evaluating semantic reasoning in interactive object search tasks. Extensive evaluations across symbolic and simulation environments show that SCOUT outperforms embedding similarity-based methods and matches LLM-level performance while remaining computationally efficient. Finally, real-world experiments demonstrate effective transfer to physical environments, enabling open-world interactive object search under realistic sensing and navigation constraints.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_05642
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Relational Semantic Reasoning on 3D Scene Graphs for Open World Interactive Object Search
Mahdi, Imen
Cassinelli, Matteo
Despinoy, Fabien
Welschehold, Tim
Valada, Abhinav
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
68T40
I.2.9
Open-world interactive object search in household environments requires understanding semantic relationships between objects and their surrounding context to guide exploration efficiently. Prior methods either rely on vision-language embeddings similarity, which does not reliably capture task-relevant relational semantics, or large language models (LLMs), which are too slow and costly for real-time deployment. We introduce SCOUT: Scene Graph-Based Exploration with Learned Utility for Open-World Interactive Object Search, a novel method that searches directly over 3D scene graphs by assigning utility scores to rooms, frontiers, and objects using relational exploration heuristics such as room-object containment and object-object co-occurrence. To make this practical without sacrificing open-vocabulary generalization, we propose an offline procedural distillation framework that extracts structured relational knowledge from LLMs into lightweight models for on-robot inference. Furthermore, we present SymSearch, a scalable symbolic benchmark for evaluating semantic reasoning in interactive object search tasks. Extensive evaluations across symbolic and simulation environments show that SCOUT outperforms embedding similarity-based methods and matches LLM-level performance while remaining computationally efficient. Finally, real-world experiments demonstrate effective transfer to physical environments, enabling open-world interactive object search under realistic sensing and navigation constraints.
title Relational Semantic Reasoning on 3D Scene Graphs for Open World Interactive Object Search
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
68T40
I.2.9
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05642