Reference Wording Shapes Retrieval of Robot Task Instructions

Abstract:Identifying a robot task from a short instruction is sensitive to which descriptions are available for retrieval. We investigate this effect in the natural-language instructions included with the RLBench manipulation benchmark. We extract 296 fixed descriptions from 62 publicly available task files and compare five training-free lexical rankers over 80 random choices of one indexed description per task. Exact strings assigned to conflicting task labels are excluded from the primary score. Character n-gram TF-IDF achieves 61.3% mean top-1 accuracy on the resulting held-out instructions, compared with 55.6% for BM25 and 54.9% for word TF-IDF. Across gallery choices, character TF-IDF ranges from 55.2% to 66.8%; its 5th-95th percentile range is 56.9%-64.8%. Adding a second indexed description improves character TF-IDF by 7.0 percentage points on matched queries. These results quantify the influence of reference wording and representation choice on instruction-to-task retrieval under a consistent evaluation protocol.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.17549 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2610.17549v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.17549 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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