Rethinking Intermediate Representation for VLM-based Robot Manipulation

Abstract

Vision-Language Model (VLM) is now an important component to enable robust robot manipulation. Yet, using it to translate human instructions into an action-resolvable intermediate representation often needs a tradeoff between VLM-comprehensibility and generalizability. Inspired by context-free grammar structure, we design the Semantic Assembly representation named SEAM, by decomposing the intermediate representation into vocabulary and grammar. Doing so leads us to a concise vocabulary of semantically-rich operations and a VLM-friendly grammar for handling diverse unseen tasks. Also, we design a novel open-vocabulary segmentation paradigm with an in-context learning strategy to precisely localize fine-grained object parts for manipulation (e.g., cup handle, teapot opening) effectively with the shortest inference time over all state-of-the-art parallel works. We then formulate new metrics for action-generalizability and VLM-comprehensibility to evaluate mainstream representations, demonstrating the strong performance of SEAM on both aspects. Extensive real-world experiments further manifest the SOTA performance of SEAM under varying settings and tasks.