Training a reinforcement learning agent to carry out natural language instructions is limited by the available supervision, i.e. knowing when the instruction has been carried out. We adapt the CLEVR visual question answering dataset to generate complex natural language navigation instructions and accompanying scene graphs, yielding an environment-agnostic supervised dataset. To demonstrate the use of this data set, we map the scenes to the VizDoom environment and use the architecture in \citet{gatedattention} to train an agent to carry out these more complex language instructions.
Modern robotics applications that involve human-robot interaction require robots to be able to communicate with humans seamlessly and effectively. Natural language provides a flexible and efficient medium through which robots can exchange information with their human partners. Significant advancements have been made in developing robots capable of interpreting free-form instructions, but less attention has been devoted to endowing robots with the ability to generate natural language. We propose a navigational guide model that enables robots to generate natural language instructions that allow …
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…
Hamburg University of Technology（汉堡工业大学）；University of Hamburg（汉堡大学）
This paper focuses on robotic reinforcement learning with sparse rewards for natural language goal representations. An open problem is the sample-inefficiency that stems from the compositionality of natural language, and from the grounding of language in sensory data and actions. We address these issues with three contributions. We first present a mechanism for hindsight instruction replay utilizing expert feedback. Second, we propose a seq2seq model to generate linguistic hindsight instructions. Finally, we present a novel class of language-focused learning tasks. We show that hindsight instr…
NavGPT-2: Unleashing Navigational Reasoning Capability for Large Vision-Language Models
AIML, University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学AIML）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）；University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；University of California, Santa Cruz（加利福尼亚大学圣克鲁兹分校）
In the real world, linguistic agents are also embodied agents: they perceive and act in the physical world. The notion of Language Grounding questions the interactions between language and embodiment: how do learning agents connect or ground linguistic representations to the physical world ? This question has recently been approached by the Reinforcement Learning community under the framework of instruction-following agents. In these agents, behavioral policies or reward functions are conditioned on the embedding of an instruction expressed in natural language. This paper proposes another appr…
In this work, we analyze the performance of general deep reinforcement learning algorithms for a task-oriented language grounding problem, where language input contains multiple sub-goals and their order of execution is non-linear. We generate a simple instructional language for the GridWorld environment, that is built around three language elements (order connectors) defining the order of execution: one linear - "comma" and two non-linear - "but first", "but before". We apply one of the deep reinforcement learning baselines - Double DQN with frame stacking and ablate several extensions such a…
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Deepwise AI Lab（深度思考人工智能实验室）
Humans learn from life events to form intuitions towards the understanding of visual environments and languages. Envision that you are instructed by a high-level instruction, "Go to the bathroom in the master bedroom and replace the blue towel on the left wall", what would you possibly do to carry out the task? Intuitively, we comprehend the semantics of the instruction to form an overview of where a bathroom is and what a blue towel is in mind; then, we navigate to the target location by consistently matching the bathroom appearance in mind with the current scene. In this paper, we present an…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Amazon Alexa AI（亚马逊Alexa人工智能部门）
Household environments are visually diverse. Embodied agents performing Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) in the wild must be able to handle this diversity, while also following arbitrary language instructions. Recently, Vision-Language models like CLIP have shown great performance on the task of zero-shot object recognition. In this work, we ask if these models are also capable of zero-shot language grounding. In particular, we utilize CLIP to tackle the novel problem of zero-shot VLN using natural language referring expressions that describe target objects, in contrast to past work that u…
MIMO: A medical vision language model with visual referring multimodal input and pixel grounding multimodal output
School of Software & Microelectronics, Peking University（软件与微电子学院，北京大学）；School of Computer Science, Peking University（计算机学院，北京大学）；National Engineering Research Center for Software Engineering, Peking University（软件工程国家工程研究中心，北京大学）；Peking University Sixth Hospital（北京大学第六医院）；Augusta University（奥古斯塔大学）；Peking University First Hospital（北京大学第一医院）
RECIPE: Procedural Planning via Grounding in Instructional Video
Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston（东北大学北斯托顿学院计算机科学学院）；Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Catania, Italy（卡塔尼亚大学数学与计算机科学系）
This paper presents INGRESS, a robot system that follows human natural language instructions to pick and place everyday objects. The core issue here is the grounding of referring expressions: infer objects and their relationships from input images and language expressions. INGRESS allows for unconstrained object categories and unconstrained language expressions. Further, it asks questions to disambiguate referring expressions interactively. To achieve these, we take the approach of grounding by generation and propose a two-stage neural network model for grounding. The first stage uses a neural…
Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations
Mila - Quebec AI Institute（魁北克AI研究所）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；ServiceNow Research（ServiceNow研究）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Polytechnique Montréal（蒙特利尔理工学院）；École de Technologie Supérieure（高级技术学院）；CIFAR AI Chair（CIFAR人工智能主席）
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究院）
We propose a neural sequence-to-sequence model for direction following, a task that is essential to realizing effective autonomous agents. Our alignment-based encoder-decoder model with long short-term memory recurrent neural networks (LSTM-RNN) translates natural language instructions to action sequences based upon a representation of the observable world state. We introduce a multi-level aligner that empowers our model to focus on sentence "regions" salient to the current world state by using multiple abstractions of the input sentence. In contrast to existing methods, our model uses no spec…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京智源人工智能研究院）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学信息科学研究所）
What Happens Before Decoding? Prefill Determines GUI Grounding in VLMs
Guangming Laboratory（光明实验室）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））
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 …
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…
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…
Boston University（波士顿大学）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, IBM Research（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室，IBM研究院）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）
We introduce the task of spatially localizing narrated interactions in videos. Key to our approach is the ability to learn to spatially localize interactions with self-supervision on a large corpus of videos with accompanying transcribed narrations. To achieve this goal, we propose a multilayer cross-modal attention network that enables effective optimization of a contrastive loss during training. We introduce a divided strategy that alternates between computing inter- and intra-modal attention across the visual and natural language modalities, which allows effective training via directly cont…
