Lightweight Visual Reasoning for Socially-Aware Robots

Abstract: Robots operating in shared human environments must not only navigate, interact, and detect their surroundings, they must also interpret and respond to dynamic, and often unpredictable, human behaviours. Although recent advances have shown promise in enhancing robotic perception and instruction-following using Vision-LLMs (VLMs), they remain limited in addressing the complexities of multimodal human-robot interactions (HRI). Motivated by this challenge, we introduce a lightweight language-to-vision feedback module that closes the loop between an LLM and the vision encoder in VLMs. The module projects image-token hidden states through a gated Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) back into the encoder input, prompting a second pass that reinterprets the scene under text context. We evaluate this approach on three robotics-centred tasks: navigation in a simulated environment (Habitat), sequential scene description (Mementos-Robotics), and human-intention recognition (our HRI dataset). Results show that our method improves Qwen 2.5 (7B) by $3.3\%$ (less distance), $+0.057$ description score, and $+2.93\%$ accuracy, with less than $3\%$ extra parameters; Gemma 3 (4B) and LLaVA OV 1.5 (4B) show mixed navigation results but gains $+0.111,+0.055$ and $+10.81\%,+4.79\%$ on the latter two tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/alessioGalatolo/VLM-Reasoning-for-Robotics