Break Out the Silverware -- Semantic Understanding of Stored Household Items
About
``Bring me a plate.'' For domestic service robots, this simple command reveals a complex challenge: inferring where everyday items are stored, often out of sight in drawers, cabinets, or closets. Despite advances in vision and manipulation, robots still lack the commonsense reasoning needed to complete this task. We introduce the Stored Household Item Challenge, a benchmark task for evaluating service robots' cognitive capabilities: given a household scene and a queried item, predict its most likely storage location. Our benchmark includes two datasets: (1) a real-world evaluation set of 100 item-image pairs with human-annotated ground truth from participants' kitchens, and (2) a development set of 6,500 item-image pairs annotated with storage polygons over public kitchen images. These datasets support realistic modeling of household organization and enable comparative evaluation across agent architectures. To begin tackling this challenge, we introduce NOAM (Non-visible Object Allocation Model), a hybrid agent pipeline that combines structured scene understanding with large language model inference. NOAM converts visual input into natural language descriptions of spatial context and visible containers, then prompts a language model (e.g., GPT-4) to infer the most likely hidden storage location. This integrated vision-language agent exhibits emergent commonsense reasoning and is designed for modular deployment within broader robotic systems. We evaluate NOAM against baselines including random selection, vision-language pipelines (Grounding-DINO + SAM), leading multimodal models (e.g., Gemini, GPT-4o, Kosmos-2, LLaMA, Qwen), and human performance. NOAM significantly improves prediction accuracy and approaches human-level results, highlighting best practices for deploying cognitively capable agents in domestic environments.