Publications

You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.

Books

[Ph.D Thesis] Active Clarification in Human-Robot Interaction via Object State Perception and Reasoning

Published in Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky (SUB Hamburg), 2026

Keywords: Embodied Agents, Human-Robot Interaction, Ambiguity, Object State Perception, Active Clarification, and Artificial Intelligence

Recommended citation: Sun, X. W. “Active clarification in human-robot interaction via object state perception and reasoning,” Ph.D. dissertation, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://ediss.sub.uni-hamburg.de/handle/ediss/12538.
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Journal Articles

[Preprint] StateVLM: A State-Aware Vision-Language Model for Robotic Affordance Reasoning

Published in arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.03927, 2026

Keywords: Vision-Language Models, Referring Expression Comprehension, Visual Perception, Object-State Understanding, and Affordance Reasoning

Recommended citation: Sun, X. W., Kerzel, M., Li, M. D., Zhao, X. F, Striker, P., & Wermter, S. (2026). StateVLM: A State-Aware Vision-Language Model for Robotic Affordance Reasoning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.03927.
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Conference Papers

Uncertainty, Vagueness, and Ambiguity in Human-Robot Interaction: Why Conceptualization Matters

Published in 2nd Interactive AI for Human-Centered Robotics Workshop at HRI, 2026

Keywords: Human-Robot Interaction, Embodied Agents, Uncertainty, Vagueness, and Ambiguity,

Recommended citation: Sun, X. W., Weber, C., Kerzel, M., Josua, S., & Wermter, S. (2026). Uncertainty, Vagueness, and Ambiguity in Human-Robot Interaction: Why Conceptualization Matters. Interactive AI for Human-Centered Robotics Workshop at Human-Robot Interaction 2026.
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A Framework for Adapting Human-Robot Interaction to Diverse User Groups

Published in International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR 2024), 2024

Keywords: Social Robotics, Symbolic Planning, Age Recognition, Large Language Models, and Human-Robot Interaction

Recommended citation: Pekarek Rosin, T. et al. (2025). A Framework for Adapting Human-Robot Interaction to Diverse User Groups. In: Palinko, O., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR + AI 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 15563. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-3525-2_3
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Details Make a Difference: Object State-Sensitive Neurorobotic Task Planning

Published in 33rd International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN 2024), 2024

Keywords: Object State Identification, Robotic Task Planning, Large Language Models, and Multimodality

Recommended citation: Sun, X. W., Zhao, X. F., Lee, J. H., Lu, W. H., Kerzel, M., & Wermter, S. (2024). Details make a difference: Object state-sensitive neurorobotic task planning. 33rd International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN), pp. 261–275.
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Learning Visually Grounded Human-Robot Dialog in a Hybrid Neural Architecture

Published in 31st International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN 2022), 2022

Keywords: Human-Robot Interaction, Visual Dialog Generation, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and Recurrent Neural Networks

Recommended citation: Sun, X. W., Weber, C., Kerzel, M., Weber, T., Li, M. D., Wermter, S. (2022). Learning Visually Grounded Human-Robot Dialog in a Hybrid Neural Architecture. In: Pimenidis, E., Angelov, P., Jayne, C., Papaleonidas, A., Aydin, M. (eds) Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning – ICANN 2022. ICANN 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13530. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15931-2_22.
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Xiaowen Sun