Watch My IEEE RO-MAN 2026 Talk on Ask-to-Act

I recently shared a little about my time at IEEE RO-MAN 2026. Here’s a recording of my presentation on Ask-to-Act.

The question behind the work is simple: when someone gives a robot an ambiguous instruction, should it act on its best guess or ask for clarification first?

Our approach gives the robot a budget of one targeted question. It asks when that question is likely to change the action it chooses. In the talk, I walk through how we tested that decision using grounded instructions, scene images, and the SCOUT++ dataset.

This is an offline evaluation, so the next step is to test what happens when people and a physical robot are in the loop. For now, I’m glad to be able to share the work and the presentation.

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Originally posted on LinkedIn.