ReferClaw: Disambiguating User Intent for Egocentric Assistance

Abstract

Users of egocentric AI assistants often ask short, ambiguous questions whose intended referents cannot be uniquely resolved from video and dialogue history. For example, "Where did I leave it?" may refer to several previously handled objects. Existing VideoQA systems typically commit to a single interpretation, risking plausible but intention-misaligned answers. We introduce ReferClaw, an agentic framework that formulates egocentric streaming QA as an interactive process: the assistant asks clarifying questions to resolve user intent before answering. Three cooperating agents identify candidate interpretations, request clarification, and generate answers grounded in the resolved intent and visual evidence. A bounded, cost-aware policy balances expected information gain against user effort while limiting clarification turns and question complexity. Referclaw learns from interaction through intent-specific skill updates and process-reward-guided policy optimization with agent-level credit assignment. Evaluations on augmented egocentric QA benchmarks demonstrate improved answer accuracy and joint answer-and-grounding performance over existing baselines, alongside zero-shot transfer across datasets. These findings support interactive clarification as a practical approach to resolving online user intent in egocentric streaming assistance.