I See What You Want: Decoding Hierarchical Operator Intent from Visual Teleoperation History

원문 초록

Vision-language models (VLMs) have become a powerful foundation for robotic scene understanding, task planning, and language-conditioned control. A natural question follows: can these models also decode what a human operator intends while teleoperating a robot, without any explicit instruction? We formulate this as hierarchical intent prediction, jointly inferring the ongoing atomic action and the broader mission it serves from a short visual teleoperation history. To study this, we introduce VI AMO (Vision Intention Action and Mission Ongoing), a dataset of 6,600 episodes from eleven robot sources with 13,653 temporally aligned action annotations and 9,702 mission annotations. Large proprietary models struggle with this problem: on held-out episodes, GPT-4o reaches Sentence-BERT similarities of only 0.563 and 0.470 for action and mission, and GPT-5.6 Luna achieves only 0.581 and 0.554. Fine-tuning a VLM on VI AMO yields our Vision-Intention Model (VIM), which raises these scores to 0.825 and 0.821 and still reaches 0.726 and 0.717 on the 35.4% of test actions with both labels absent from training. Finally, as a downstream application, VIM's predicted mission enables a vision-language-action (VLA) policy to take over from the operator mid-task in a real-world environment unseen during VIM fine-tuning, reducing human teleoperation time by 34.6% relative to GPT-4o and 39.8% relative to GPT-5.6 Luna, while cutting intent-prediction latency by roughly 70% on average.