Relational Semantic Reasoning on 3D Scene Graphs for Open World Interactive Object Search

Abstract: Open-world interactive object search in household environments requires understanding semantic relationships between objects and their surrounding context to guide exploration efficiently. Prior methods either rely on vision-language embeddings similarity, which does not reliably capture task-relevant relational semantics, or LLMs, which are too slow and costly for real-time deployment. We introduce SCOUT: Scene Graph-Based Exploration with Learned Utility for Open-World Interactive Object Search, a novel method that searches directly over 3D scene graphs by assigning utility scores to rooms, frontiers, and objects using relational exploration heuristics such as room-object containment and object-object co-occurrence. To make this practical without sacrificing open-vocabulary generalization, we propose an offline procedural distillation framework that extracts structured relational knowledge from LLMs into lightweight models for on-robot inference. Furthermore, we present SymSearch, a scalable symbolic benchmark for evaluating semantic reasoning in interactive object search tasks. Extensive evaluations across symbolic and simulation environments show that SCOUT outperforms embedding similarity-based methods and matches LLM-level performance while remaining computationally efficient. Finally, real-world experiments demonstrate effective transfer to physical environments, enabling open-world interactive object search under realistic sensing and navigation constraints.