38 accepted papers
We present HAND, a simple and time-efficient method for teaching robots new manipulation tasks through human hand demonstrations. Instead of relying on task-specific robot demonstrations collected via teleoperation, HAND uses easy-to-provide hand demonstrations to retrieve relevant behaviors from ta…
Multi-agent systems of large language models (LLMs) show promise for complex reasoning, but their effectiveness is often limited by fixed collaboration protocols. These frameworks typically focus on macro-level orchestration while overlooking agents’ internal deliberative capabilities. This critical
Robotic manipulation policies often fail to generalize because they must simultaneously learn where to attend, what actions to take, and how to execute them. We argue that high-level reasoning about where and what can be offloaded to vision-language models (VLMs), leaving policies to specialize in h…
We propose PSALM-V, the first autonomous neuro-symbolic learning system able to induce symbolic action semantics (i.e., pre- and post-conditions) in visual environments through interaction. PSALM-V bootstraps reliable symbolic planning without expert action definitions, using LLMs to generate heuris…
Through a controlled study, we identify a systematic deficiency in the multimodal grounding of Vision Language Models (VLMs). While VLMs can recall factual associations when provided a textual reference to an entity, their ability to do so is significantly diminished when the reference is visual ins
Evaluating learned robot control policies to determine their performance costs the experimenter time and effort. As robots become more capable in accomplishing diverse tasks, evaluating across all these tasks becomes more difficult as it is impractical to test every policy on every task multiple tim…
Symbolic planners can discover a sequence of actions from initial to goal states given expert-defined, domain-specific logical action semantics. Large Language Models (LLMs) can directly generate such sequences, but limitations in reasoning and state-tracking often result in plans that are insuffici…
Multi-label classification is prevalent in real-world settings, but the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) in this setting is understudied. We investigate how autoregressive LLMs perform multi-label classification, focusing on subjective tasks, by analyzing the output distributions of the mode
We introduce ReWiND, a framework for learning robot manipulation tasks solely from language instructions without per-task demonstrations. Standard reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning methods require expert supervision through human-designed reward functions or demonstrations for every…
Sign language models could make modern language technologies more accessible to those who sign, but the supply of accurately labeled data struggles to meet the demand associated with training large, end-to-end neural models. As an alternative to this approach, we explore how knowledge about the ling…
Low-bit weight-only quantization significantly reduces the memory footprint of large language models (LLMs), but disproportionately affects certain examples. We analyze diverse 3-4 bit methods on LLMs ranging from 7B-70B in size and find that the quantization errors of 50 pairs of methods are strong
Robot evaluations in language-guided, real world settings are time-consuming and often sample only a small space of potential instructions across complex scenes. In this work, we introduce contrast sets for robotics as an approach to make small, but specific, perturbations to otherwise independent,…
The concept of localization in LLMs is often mentioned in prior work; however, methods for localization have never been systematically and directly evaluated. We propose two complementary benchmarks that evaluate the ability of localization methods to pinpoint LLM components responsible for memorize…
Understanding visually situated language requires interpreting complex layouts of textual and visual elements. Pre-processing tools, such as optical character recognition (OCR), can map document image inputs to textual tokens, then large language models (LLMs) can reason over text.However, such meth…
Selective prediction minimizes incorrect predictions from vision-language models (VLMs) by allowing them to abstain from answering when uncertain. However, when deploying a vision-language system with low tolerance for inaccurate predictions, selective prediction may be over-cautious and abstain too…
To realize effective large-scale, real-world robotic applications, we must evaluate how well our robot policies adapt to changes in environmental conditions. Unfortunately, a majority of studies evaluate robot performance in environments closely resembling or even identical to the training setup. We…
Training robots to perform complex control tasks from high-dimensional pixel input using reinforcement learning (RL) is sample-inefficient, because image observations are comprised primarily of task-irrelevant information. By contrast, humans are able to visually attend to task-relevant objects and…
This paper studies in-context learning by decomposing the output of large language models into the individual contributions of attention heads and MLPs (components). We observe curious components: good-performing ones that individually do well on a classification task, even when the model performs p…
When connecting objects and their language referents in an embodied 3D environment, it is important to note that: (1) an object can be better characterized by leveraging comparative information between itself and other objects, and (2) an object’s appearance can vary with camera position. As such, w…
We propose Chain-of-Questions, a framework that trains a model to robustly answer multistep questions by generating and answering sub-questions. We obtain supervision for sub-questions from human-annotated question decomposition meaning representation (QDMR), but QDMR does not include annotated answ…
We present Iterative Vision-and-Language Navigation (IVLN), a paradigm for evaluating language-guided agents navigating in a persistent environment over time. Existing Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) benchmarks erase the agent's memory at the beginning of every episode, testing the ability to p…
Task planning can require defining myriad domain knowledge about the world in which a robot needs to act. To ameliorate that effort, large language models (LLMs) can be used to score potential next actions during task planning, and even generate action sequences directly, given an instruction in nat…
Household robots operate in the same space for years. Such robots incrementally build dynamic maps that can be used for tasks requiring remote object localization. However, benchmarks in robot learning often test generalization through inference on tasks in unobserved environments. In an observed en…
The size and the computational load of fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained neural network are becoming two major obstacles in adopting machine learning in many applications. Continual learning (CL) can serve as a remedy through enabling knowledge-transfer across sequentially arriving tasks which rel…
Embodied Vision and Language Task Completion requires an embodied agent to interpret natural language instructions and egocentric visual observations to navigate through and interact with environments. In this work, we examine ALFRED, a challenging benchmark for embodied task completion, with the go…
Current state-of-the-art vision-and-language models are evaluated on tasks either individually or in a multi-task setting, overlooking the challenges of continually learning (CL) tasks as they arrive. Existing CL benchmarks have facilitated research on task adaptation and mitigating "catastrophic fo…
For vision-and-language reasoning tasks, both fully connectionist, end-to-end methods and hybrid, neuro-symbolic methods have achieved high in-distribution performance. In which out-of-distribution settings does each paradigm excel? We investigate this question on both single-image and multi-image v…
Robots operating in human spaces must be able to engage in natural language interaction, both understanding and executing instructions, and using conversation to resolve ambiguity and correct mistakes. To study this, we introduce TEACh, a dataset of over 3,000 human-human, interactive dialogues to c…
A long-term goal of AI research is to build intelligent agents that can communicate with humans in natural language, perceive the environment, and perform real-world tasks. Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a fundamental and interdisciplinary research topic towards this goal, and receives incr…
Seemingly simple natural language requests to a robot are generally underspecified, for example "Can you bring me the wireless mouse?" Flat images of candidate mice may not provide the discriminative information needed for "wireless." The world, and objects in it, are not flat images but complex 3D…
We present ALFRED (Action Learning From Realistic Environments and Directives), a benchmark for learning a mapping from natural language instructions and egocentric vision to sequences of actions for household tasks. ALFRED includes long, compositional tasks with non-reversible state changes to shri…
Autonomous robot systems for applications from search and rescue to assistive guidance should be able to engage in natural language dialog with people. To study such cooperative communication, we introduce Robot Simultaneous Localization and Mapping with Natural Language (RobotSlang), a benchmark of
Some robots can interact with humans using natural language, and identify service requests through human-robot dialog. However, few robots are able to improve their language capabilities from this experience. In this paper, we develop a dialog agent for robots that is able to interpret user commands…
Natural language understanding for robotics can require substantial domain- and platform-specific engineering. For example, for mobile robots to pick-and-place objects in an environment to satisfy human commands, we can specify the language humans use to issue such commands, and connect concept word…
We use static object data to improve success detection for stacking objects on and nesting objects in one another. Such actions are necessary for certain robotics tasks, e.g., clearing a dining table or packing a warehouse bin. However, using an RGB-D camera to detect success can be insufficient: sa…
High-level human instructions often correspond to behaviors with multiple implicit steps. In order for robots to be useful in the real world, they must be able to to reason over both motions and intermediate goals implied by human instructions. In this work, we propose a framework for learning repre…
Robots navigating in human environments should use language to ask for assistance and be able to understand human responses. To study this challenge, we introduce Cooperative Vision-and-Dialog Navigation, a dataset of over 2k embodied, human-human dialogs situated in simulated, photorealistic home e
Active learning identifies data points from a pool of unlabeled examples whose labels, if made available, are most likely to improve the predictions of a supervised model. Most research on active learning assumes that an agent has access to the entire pool of unlabeled data and can ask for labels of