36 accepted papers
In this study, we address the problem of openvocabulary mobile manipulation, where a robot is required to carry a wide range of objects to receptacles based on freeform natural language instructions. This task is challenging, as it involves understanding visual semantics and the affordance of manipu
In this study, we address the problem of open-vocabulary mobile manipulation, where a robot is required to carry a wide range of objects to receptacles based on free-form natural language instructions. This task is challenging, as it involves understanding visual semantics and the affordance of mani…
Clarifying the neural basis of speech intelligibility is critical for computational neuroscience and digital speech processing. Recent neuroimaging studies have shown that intelligibility modulates cortical activity beyond simple acoustics, primarily in the superior temporal and inferior frontal gyr…
We address language-conditioned robotic manipulation using flow-based trajectory generation, which enables training on human and web videos of object manipulation and requires only minimal embodiment-specific data. This task is challenging, as object trajectory generation from pre-manipulation image
We focus on the automatic evaluation of image captions in both reference-based and reference-free settings. Existing metrics based on large language models (LLMs) favor their own generations; therefore, the neutrality is in question. Most LLM-free metrics do not suffer from such an issue, whereas th
We consider the problem of generating mobile manipulation instructions based on a target object image and receptacle image. Conventional image captioning models are not able to generate appropriate instructions because their architectures are typically optimized for single-image. In this study, we p…
Growing labor shortages are increasing the demand for domestic service robots (DSRs) to assist in various settings. In this study, we develop a DSR that transports everyday objects to specified pieces of furniture based on open-vocabulary instructions. Our approach focuses on retrieving images of ta…
While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, long-form video understanding remains a significant challenge.In this study, we focus on video understanding by MLLMs.This task is challenging because processing a full stream of RGB frames is
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often generate hallucinations, where the output deviates from the visual content. Given that these hallucinations can take diverse forms, detecting hallucinations at a fine-grained level is essential for comprehensive evaluation and analysis. To this end, we
Accurate, reliable solar flare prediction is crucial for mitigating potential disruptions to critical infrastructure, while predicting solar flares remains a significant challenge. Existing methods based on heuristic physical features often lack representation learning from solar images. On the othe…
We focus on the task of identifying the location of target regions from a natural language instruction and a front camera image captured by a mobility. This task is challenging because it requires both existence prediction and segmentation mask generation, particularly for stuff-type target regions…
Understanding human actions could allow robots to perform a large spectrum of complex manipulation tasks and make collaboration with humans easier. Recently, multimodal scene understanding using audio-visual Transformers has been used to generate robot action sequences from videos of human demonstra…
We consider the problem of generating free-form mobile manipulation instructions based on a target object image and receptacle image. Conventional image captioning models are not able to generate appropriate instructions because their architectures are typically optimized for single-image. In this s
Advancements in vehicle automation technology are expected to significantly impact how humans interact with vehicles. In this study, we propose a method to create user-friendly control interfaces for autonomous vehicles in urban environments. The proposed model predicts the vehicle's destination on
Growing labor shortages are increasing the demand for domestic service robots (DSRs) to assist in various settings. In this study, we develop a DSR that transports everyday objects to specified pieces of furniture based on open-vocabulary instructions. Our approach focuses on retrieving images of ta
In this study, we focus on the automatic evaluation of long and detailed image captions generated by multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Most existing automatic evaluation metrics for image captioning are primarily designed for short captions and are not suitable for evaluating long captions.
Domestic service robots offer a solution to the increasing demand for daily care and support. A human-in-the-loop approach that combines automation and operator intervention is considered to be a realistic approach to their use in society. Therefore, we focus on the task of retrieving target objects
We consider the task of generating segmentation masks for the target object from an object manipulation instruction, which allows users to give open vocabulary instructions to domestic service robots. Conventional segmentation generation approaches often fail to account for objects outside the camer…
Establishing an automatic evaluation metric that closely aligns with human judgments is essential for effectively developing image captioning models. Recent data-driven metrics have demonstrated a stronger correlation with human judgments than classic metrics such as CIDEr; however they lack suffici…
In this study, we consider the problem of predicting task success for open-vocabulary manipulation by a manipulator, based on instruction sentences and egocentric images before and after manipulation. Conventional approaches, including multimodal large language models (MLLMs), often fail to appropri…
In this study, we develop a model that enables mobilities to have more friendly interactions with users. Specifically, we focus on the referring navigable regions task in which a model grounds navigable regions of the road using the mobility's camera image and natural language navigation instruction
In this study, we aim to develop a model that comprehends a natural language instruction (e.g., “Go to the living room and get the nearest pillow to the radio art on the wall”) and generates a segmentation mask for the target everyday object. The task is challenging because it requires (1) the under…
Although domestic service robots are expected to assist individuals who require support, they cannot currently interact smoothly with people through natural language. For example, given the instruction “Bring me a bottle from the kitchen,” it is difficult for such robots to specify the bottle in an…
This paper describes a domestic service robot (DSR) that fetches everyday objects and carries them to specified destinations according to free-form natural language instructions. Given an instruction such as “Move the bottle on the left side of the plate to the empty chair,” the DSR is expected to i…
For human-safe robot control in human-to-robot handover, the physical properties of containers and fillings should be accurately estimated. In this paper, we propose a Transformer encoder that shares the same architecture and parameters for filling level and type estimation. We also propose a mask-b…
There have been many studies in robotics to improve the communication skills of domestic service robots. Most studies, however, have not fully benefited from recent advances in deep neural networks because the training datasets are not large enough. In this letter, our aim is crossmodal language gen
Navigation guided by natural language instructions is particularly suitable for Domestic Service Robots that interacts naturally with users. This task involves the prediction of a sequence of actions that leads to a specified destination given a natural language navigation instruction. The task thus
Currently, domestic service robots have an insufficient ability to interact naturally through language. This is because understanding human instructions is complicated by various ambiguities. In existing methods, the referring expressions that specify the relationships between objects were insuffici
Building an interactive artificial intelligence that can ask questions about the real world is one of the biggest challenges for vision and language problems. In particular, goal-oriented visual dialogue, where the aim of the agent is to seek information by asking questions during a turn-taking dial…
In this study, we focus on multimodal language understanding for fetching instructions in the domestic service robots context. This task consists of predicting a target object, as instructed by the user, given an image and an unstructured sentence, such as “Bring me the yellow box (from the wooden c
Domestic service robots (DSRs) are a promising solution to the shortage of home care workers. However, one of the main limitations of DSRs is their inability to interact naturally through language. Recently, data-driven approaches have been shown to be effective for tackling this limitation; however
In this paper, we address the automatic sentence generation of fetching instructions for domestic service robots. Typical fetching commands such as “bring me the yellow toy from the upper part of the white shelf” includes referring expressions, i.e., “from the white upper part of the white shelf”. T
In this letter, we address multimodal language understanding with unconstrained fetching instruction for domestic service robots. A typical fetching instruction such as “Bring me the yellow toy from the white shelf” requires to infer the user intention, i.e., what object (target) to fetch and from w
This letter focuses on a multimodal language understanding method for carry-and-place tasks with domestic service robots. We address the case of ambiguous instructions, that is, when the target area is not specified. For instance “put away the milk and cereal” is a natural instruction where there is
To meet the immediate needs of environmental monitoring or hazardous event detection, we consider the automatic deployment of a group of low-cost or disposable sensors by a drone. Introducing sensors by drones to an environment instead of humans has advantages in terms of worker safety and time requ
To build conversational robots, roboticists are required to have deep knowledge of both robotics and spoken dialogue systems. Although they can use existing cloud services that were built for other services, e.g., voice search, it will be difficult to share robotics-specific speech corpora obtained…