Xiaoye Zhu, Weixin Li, Junan Huo +5cs.CV cs.AI cs.CL cs.GR cs.MA
A fundamental intent asymmetry plagues modern 3D asset creation: while state-of-the-art 3D toolchains demand precise, executable parameters, ordinary users typically provide vague, underspecified instructions. Current 3D agents treat this ambiguity as noise, defaulting to blind execution under a single-turn assumption. To address this limitation, we introduce CLARE, a clarification-aware and evolutionary 3D agent that treats intent asymmetry not as an execution error, but as an opportunity for strategic dialogue. By decoupling the generation pipeline into four specialized cognitive roles, CLARE intercepts and resolves underspecified instructions before invoking computationally expensive 3D tools to seamlessly execute tasks across five diverse domains: text-to-3D generation, single-view reconstruction, multi-view reconstruction, point cloud editing, and post-processing. Crucially, rather than relying on rigid manual rules, CLARE self-evolves its clarification policy via simulated multi-turn interactions. By optimizing a Multi-turn Reward, the agent internalizes the delicate balance between interaction efficiency and task completion. To rigorously test this, we construct 3D-Clarify, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 620 interaction scenarios with systematically injected ambiguity, missing information, and mistaken details. CLARE achieves state-of-the-art performance, with 60.40% and 43.34% success rates on single-step and multi-step tasks, respectively, more than doubling existing baselines. Both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that proactive clarification is the missing key to robust 3D execution. Code is available at https://github.com/xyzhu1225/CLARE.
Composed image retrieval (CIR) uses a reference image and a text modification to search for a target image. However, such queries often describe several possible images rather than one exact target, making the user's intent ambiguous. Recent methods address this by using conformal prediction to estimate ambiguity and by asking users clarifying text questions. However, these methods have two limitations: their coverage guarantee only holds at the first interaction, and text questions are often insufficient for resolving fine-grained visual differences such as appearance, attributes, or viewpoint. We propose CLARA, a clarification framework that resolves ambiguity by showing users a small panel of visual alternatives. Instead of answering text questions, the user simply selects the prototype image closest to the intended target. This provides a direct visual signal and avoids relying on a model to predict the user's answer. To maintain valid conformal guarantees across multiple interaction rounds, CLARA reweights calibration using the likelihood ratio induced by the user's selection. The displayed prototypes are also constrained to represent the current candidate set and are snapped to real corpus images, ensuring that generated images cannot artificially improve coverage. Experiments on open-domain and fashion benchmarks show that CLARA matches single-turn state-of-the-art retrieval performance, maintains nominal coverage across interaction rounds, and finds the intended target in fewer rounds than strong text-question baselines. Its advantage is especially clear when ambiguity involves viewpoint or fine-grained attributes, where visual clarification is more effective than textual questioning.