ConEQsA: Concurrent and Asynchronous Embodied Questions Scheduling and Answering

Abstract

This paper formulates the Embodied Questions Answering (EQsA) problem, introduces a corresponding benchmark, and proposes an agentic system to tackle the problem. Classical Embodied Question Answering (EQA) is typically formulated as answering one single question by actively exploring a 3D environment. Real deployments, however, often demand handling multiple questions that may arrive asynchronously and carry different urgencies. We formalize this setting as Embodied Questions Answering (EQsA) and present ConEQsA, an agentic framework for concurrent, urgency-aware scheduling and answering. ConEQsA leverages shared group memory to reduce redundant exploration, and a priority-planning method to dynamically schedule questions. To evaluate the EQsA setting fairly, we contribute the Concurrent Asynchronous Embodied Questions (CAEQs) benchmark containing 40 indoor scenes and five questions per scene (200 in total), featuring asynchronous follow-up questions and human-annotated urgency labels. We further propose metrics for EQsA performance: Direct Answer Rate (DAR), and Normalized Urgency-Weighted Latency (NUWL), which serve as a fair evaluation protocol for EQsA. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that ConEQsA consistently outperforms strong sequential baselines, and show that urgency-aware, concurrent scheduling is key to making embodied agents responsive and efficient under realistic, multi-question workloads. Code is available on https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ConEQsA.