Active Perception for Embodied Disambiguation

Humans inherently understand the physical world through an active process. When sensory evidence is insufficient to infer physical properties, we naturally interact with the environment by deciding what information is missing, how to acquire it, and when sufficient evidence has been obtained. In stark contrast, existing multi-sensory robot systems mainly integrate sensory inputs rather than actively acquiring missing evidence through interactions. In this work, we introduce ROMA, an LLM-based system for Real-World Object-Centric Multi-Sensory Active Perception. ROMA integrates vision, audio, tactile, and force sensing into a reasoning-interaction-feedback loop. The model identifies missing evidence and determines the target objects, interactions, and modalities, while a physical interface executes the selected interactions and collects the multi-sensory feedback. To support this capability, we construct ROMI-2K, a large-scale real-world multi-sensory object interaction dataset covering nearly 2,000 objects and 6 atomic interactions with synchronized sensory feedback. Building on these data, we develop a two-stage training framework that aligns sensory modalities and equips the LLM to assess evidence sufficiency, select informative interactions, and reason over the multi-sensory feedback. We further characterize active perception as perception chains, where acquired evidence guides subsequent interactions and reasoning, and establish ROMA Bench to evaluate single-attribute, long-horizon multi-attribute, and intent-driven active perception. Experiments show that ROMA can actively acquire missing evidence and solve complex, long-chain multi-sensory perception tasks that existing methods struggle to handle, laying a strong perceptual foundation for active multi-sensory embodied agents.

Rapid progress in embodied intelligence has enabled increasingly capable robots to follow language instructions and manipulate diverse objects. However, strong results in structured environments do not automatically transfer to open-world conditions, where clutter, occlusion, and changing viewpoints can obscure the spatial relationships required for action. To address this perceptual gap, a virtual active-perception paradigm is introduced. AWAM, an Active World-Action Model actively plans where to observe and imagines what will be seen along the planned trajectory before acting. Task-related virtual camera motion is predicted and used as a structured query into a geometry-conditioned world model, producing a reusable spatial prior for manipulation, which is later compressed into a fixed memory and fused with live observations through cross-attention for diffusion-based action prediction. AWAM achieves competitive success rates with 75.9% on LIBERO-Occ, 62.4% on LIBERO-Plus, 76.5% on RLBench-OG Occlusion1, and 94.4% in real-robot trials. These results support improved robustness to the evaluated occlusions and distribution shifts, addressing part of the gap between structured manipulation and less controlled environments.

Interactive robot planning requires robots to infer and execute human intentions from natural language instructions that are often ambiguous, incomplete, or underspecified. Although large language models (LLMs) provide a powerful interface for clarification, relying on the generative model to drive an multi-turn conversation can introduce systematic failures. We propose a Bayesian framework that treats clarification as an active learning problem over grounded Signal Temporal Logic (STL) task specifications. Our method uses LLMs to initialize candidate formal specifications and translate informative contrasts into natural-language clarification questions, while Bayesian optimization maintains uncertainty estimation over user intent and selects queries that maximize information gain. After convergence, the inferred STL specification is passed to a formal planner to synthesize a verifiable robot trajectory. Across four simulated and real-world task domains, our approach generally achieves higher task satisfaction and requires fewer clarification rounds than LLM baselines, while helping smaller models close the performance gap against larger reasoning models.