Visually Grounding Language Instruction for History-Dependent Manipulation
Transdisciplinary Institute of Medicine & Advanced Technology（医学与先进技术跨学科研究所）；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）；Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics（机器人与机电一体化研究所）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
This paper emphasizes the importance of a robot's ability to refer to its task history, especially when it executes a series of pick-and-place manipulations by following language instructions given one by one. The advantage of referring to the manipulation history can be categorized into two folds: (1) the language instructions omitting details but using expressions referring to the past can be interpreted, and (2) the visual information of objects occluded by previous manipulations can be inferred. For this, we introduce a history-dependent manipulation task which objective is to visually ground a series of language instructions for proper pick-and-place manipulations by referring to the past. We also suggest a relevant dataset and model which can be a baseline, and show that our model trained with the proposed dataset can also be applied to the real world based on the CycleGAN. Our dataset and code are publicly available on the project website: https://sites.google.com/view/history-dependent-manipulation.
Grounding natural language instructions on the web to perform previously unseen tasks enables accessibility and automation. We introduce a task and dataset to train AI agents from open-domain, step-by-step instructions originally written for people. We build RUSS (Rapid Universal Support Service) to tackle this problem. RUSS consists of two models: First, a BERT-LSTM with pointers parses instructions to ThingTalk, a domain-specific language we design for grounding natural language on the web. Then, a grounding model retrieves the unique IDs of any webpage elements requested in ThingTalk. RUSS …
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）；Macquarie University（麦考瑞大学）
A robot that can carry out a natural-language instruction has been a dream since before the Jetsons cartoon series imagined a life of leisure mediated by a fleet of attentive robot helpers. It is a dream that remains stubbornly distant. However, recent advances in vision and language methods have made incredible progress in closely related areas. This is significant because a robot interpreting a natural-language navigation instruction on the basis of what it sees is carrying out a vision and language process that is similar to Visual Question Answering. Both tasks can be interpreted as visual…
Affordance2Action: Task-Conditioned Scene-level Affordance Grounding for Real-Time Manipulation
Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University-New Brunswick（罗格斯大学新布朗斯维尔回声分校计算机科学系）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (GZ)（香港科学与技术大学（GZ））；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
We present a new problem: grounding natural language instructions to mobile user interface actions, and create three new datasets for it. For full task evaluation, we create PIXELHELP, a corpus that pairs English instructions with actions performed by people on a mobile UI emulator. To scale training, we decouple the language and action data by (a) annotating action phrase spans in HowTo instructions and (b) synthesizing grounded descriptions of actions for mobile user interfaces. We use a Transformer to extract action phrase tuples from long-range natural language instructions. A grounding Tr…
Embodied instruction following is a challenging problem requiring an agent to infer a sequence of primitive actions to achieve a goal environment state from complex language and visual inputs. Action Learning From Realistic Environments and Directives (ALFRED) is a recently proposed benchmark for this problem consisting of step-by-step natural language instructions to achieve subgoals which compose to an ultimate high-level goal. Key challenges for this task include localizing target locations and navigating to them through visual inputs, and grounding language instructions to visual appearanc…
We present a new method, PARsing And visual GrOuNding (ParaGon), for grounding natural language in object placement tasks. Natural language generally describes objects and spatial relations with compositionality and ambiguity, two major obstacles to effective language grounding. For compositionality, ParaGon parses a language instruction into an object-centric graph representation to ground objects individually. For ambiguity, ParaGon uses a novel particle-based graph neural network to reason about object placements with uncertainty. Essentially, ParaGon integrates a parsing algorithm into a p…
We study the problem of learning a robot policy to follow natural language instructions that can be easily extended to reason about new objects. We introduce a few-shot language-conditioned object grounding method trained from augmented reality data that uses exemplars to identify objects and align them to their mentions in instructions. We present a learned map representation that encodes object locations and their instructed use, and construct it from our few-shot grounding output. We integrate this mapping approach into an instruction-following policy, thereby allowing it to reason about pr…
OpenMap: Instruction Grounding via Open-Vocabulary Visual-Language Mapping
School of Software, Tsinghua University（清华大学软件学院）；School of computer science and engineering, Central South University（中南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Inspur Yunzhou Industrial Internet Co., Ltd（Inspur Yunzhou工业互联网有限公司）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
To perform tasks specified by natural language instructions, autonomous agents need to extract semantically meaningful representations of language and map it to visual elements and actions in the environment. This problem is called task-oriented language grounding. We propose an end-to-end trainable neural architecture for task-oriented language grounding in 3D environments which assumes no prior linguistic or perceptual knowledge and requires only raw pixels from the environment and the natural language instruction as input. The proposed model combines the image and text representations using…
University of Freiburg（弗赖堡大学）；Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）
Controlling robots to perform tasks via natural language is one of the most challenging topics in human-robot interaction. In this work, we present a robot system that follows unconstrained language instructions to pick and place arbitrary objects and effectively resolves ambiguities through dialogues. Our approach infers objects and their relationships from input images and language expressions and can place objects in accordance with the spatial relations expressed by the user. Unlike previous approaches, we consider grounding not only for the picking but also for the placement of everyday o…
Spoken language is a convenient interface for commanding a mobile robot. Yet for this to work a number of base terms must be grounded in perceptual and motor skills. We detail the language processing used on our robot ELI and explain how this grounding is performed, how it interacts with user gestures, and how it handles phenomena such as anaphora. More importantly, however, there are certain concepts which the robot cannot be preprogrammed with, such as the names of various objects in a household or the nature of specific tasks it may be requested to perform. In these cases it is vital that t…
Referring expressions are commonly used when referring to a specific target in people's daily dialogue. In this paper, we develop a novel task of audio-visual grounding referring expression for robotic manipulation. The robot leverages both the audio and visual information to understand the referring expression in the given manipulation instruction and the corresponding manipulations are implemented. To solve the proposed task, an audio-visual framework is proposed for visual localization and sound recognition. We have also established a dataset which contains visual data, auditory data and ma…
Human-robot interaction often occurs in the form of instructions given from a human to a robot. For a robot to successfully follow instructions, a common representation of the world and objects in it should be shared between humans and the robot so that the instructions can be grounded. Achieving this representation can be done via learning, where both the world representation and the language grounding are learned simultaneously. However, in robotics this can be a difficult task due to the cost and scarcity of data. In this paper, we tackle the problem by separately learning the world represe…
Instruction-Augmented Long-Horizon Planning: Embedding Grounding Mechanisms in Embodied Mobile Manipulation
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Ningbo Institute of Digital Twin, Eastern Institute of Technology（东方理工大学宁波数字孪生研究院）；Great Bay University（大湾区大学）；Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
