CLON: Cue-Calibrated Linguistic Object Onboarding for Zero-Shot 6D Pose Front-Ends

arXiv:2609.04784v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Novel-object 6D pose pipelines depend on front-end hypotheses that retain target instances under clutter and occlusion without overwhelming downstream pose estimation. We introduce Cue-Calibrated Linguistic Object Onboarding (CLON), a training-free proposal-and-matching front-end. CLON converts multi-view CAD renderings into compact linguistic memories that provide object-specific conditioning to a frozen proposal generator. Constructed offline and reused across scenes, these memories augment generic prompts before segmentation; subsequent template verification assigns object identity. As a complementary onboarding step, CLON derives fixed cue weights from template statistics for semantic, appearance, and geometric verification. On seven BOP-Classic-Core datasets, CLON improves detection AP by 8.2 percentage points (pp), segmentation AP by 6.2 pp, and downstream pose AR by up to 4.1 pp over the evaluated CNOS and SAM-6D front-ends. In a real-world localization-to-grasp study under clutter and occlusion with 100 trials per method, CLON's improved localization doubles grasp success relative to the strongest evaluated baseline. Controlled ablations evaluate linguistic conditioning, multi-view construction, and verification. Analysis of a smaller candidate set with higher class-agnostic recall on five datasets.