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Ask-to-Clarify: Resolving Instruction Ambiguity through Multi-turn Dialogue

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Embodied agents are intelligent systems designed to perceive, reason, and act within the physical world. While the robotics community has long strived to build such versatile agents, a fundamental limitation persists: most current VLA-based models operate under a rigid ``Listen-and-Act'' paradigm. These systems assume instructions are unambiguous and execute them in a passive fashion, preventing them from resolving uncertainty through dialogue. To address this, we propose Ask-to-Clarify, a unified end-to-end framework that seamlessly integrates multi-turn disambiguation dialogue with low-level visuomotor control, eliminating the reliance on high-level action primitives or external planners. Specifically, Ask-to-Clarify synergizes a VLM-based Cognitive Planner with a Diffusion-based Motor Executor. To bridge the disparity between high-level disambiguation and low-level execution, we introduce a Semantic-Visual Alignment Adapter, which functions as a cross-modal interface to synthesize semantic intent with visual perceptual streams. Furthermore, we observe severe catastrophic forgetting: visuomotor fine-tuning completely erases dialogue capabilities. To overcome this, we propose a two-stage knowledge-insulation training strategy, effectively decoupling dialogue logic from physical manipulation. Extensive evaluations across 11 real-world tasks demonstrate that \framework{} significantly outperforms existing methods, offering a promising path toward building truly collaborative embodied agents.

Xingyao Lin, Xinghao Zhu, Tianyi Lu, Guojin Zhong, Sicheng Xie, Hui Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang• 2025

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
stack blocksReal-world Robotic Tasks
Success Rate90
7
Water PouringReal-world robotic tasks Pour task
Success Rate (Red)95
4
Object PlacementReal-world Robotic Experiments (test)
Apple Placement Success Rate19
4
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