Multi-modal Situated Reasoning in 3D Scenes

Situation awareness is essential for understanding and reasoning about 3D scenes in embodied AI agents. However, existing datasets and benchmarks for situated understanding are limited in data modality, diversity, scale, and task scope. To address these limitations, we propose Multi-modal Situated Question Answering (MSQA), a large-scale multi-modal situated reasoning dataset, scalably collected leveraging 3D scene graphs and vision-language models (VLMs) across a diverse range of real-world 3D scenes. MSQA includes 251K situated question-answering pairs across 9 distinct question categories, covering complex scenarios within 3D scenes. We introduce a novel interleaved multi-modal input setting in our benchmark to provide text, image, and point cloud for situation and question description, resolving ambiguity in previous single-modality convention (e.g., text). Additionally, we devise the Multi-modal Situated Next-step Navigation (MSNN) benchmark to evaluate models' situated reasoning for navigation. Comprehensive evaluations on MSQA and MSNN highlight the limitations of existing vision-language models and underscore the importance of handling multi-modal interleaved inputs and situation modeling. Experiments on data scaling and cross-domain transfer further demonstrate the efficacy of leveraging MSQA as a pre-training dataset for developing more powerful situated reasoning models.

PhysPart: Physically Plausible Part Completion for Interactable Objects

Interactable objects are ubiquitous in our daily lives. Recent advances in 3D generative models make it possible to automate the modeling of these objects, benefiting a range of applications from 3D printing to the creation of robot simulation environments. However, while significant progress has been made in modeling 3D shapes and appearances, modeling object physics, particularly for interactable objects, remains challenging due to the physical constraints imposed by inter-part motions. In this paper, we tackle the problem of physically plausible part completion for interactable objects, aiming to generate 3D parts that not only fit precisely into the object but also allow smooth part motions. To this end, we propose a diffusion-based part generation model that utilizes geometric conditioning through classifier-free guidance and formulates physical constraints as a set of stability and mobility losses to guide the sampling process. Additionally, we demonstrate the generation of dependent parts, paving the way toward sequential part generation for objects with complex part-whole hierarchies. Experimentally, we introduce a new metric for measuring physical plausibility based on motion success rates. Our model outperforms existing baselines over shape and physical metrics, especially those that do not adequately model physical constraints. We also demonstrate our applications in 3D printing, robot manipulation, and sequential part generation, showing our strength in realistic tasks with the demand for high physical plausibility.

SlotLifter: Slot-guided Feature Lifting for Learning Object-centric Radiance Fields

The ability to distill object-centric abstractions from intricate visual scenes underpins human-level generalization. Despite the significant progress in object-centric learning methods, learning object-centric representations in the 3D physical world remains a crucial challenge. In this work, we propose SlotLifter, a novel object-centric radiance model addressing scene reconstruction and decomposition jointly via slot-guided feature lifting. Such a design unites object-centric learning representations and image-based rendering methods, offering state-of-the-art performance in scene decomposition and novel-view synthesis on four challenging synthetic and four complex real-world datasets, outperforming existing 3D object-centric learning methods by a large margin. Through extensive ablative studies, we showcase the efficacy of designs in SlotLifter, revealing key insights for potential future directions.

Task-oriented Sequential Grounding in 3D Scenes

Grounding natural language in physical 3D environments is essential for the advancement of embodied artificial intelligence. Current datasets and models for 3D visual grounding predominantly focus on identifying and localizing objects from static, object-centric descriptions. These approaches do not adequately address the dynamic and sequential nature of task-oriented grounding necessary for practical applications. In this work, we propose a new task: Task-oriented Sequential Grounding in 3D scenes, wherein an agent must follow detailed step-by-step instructions to complete daily activities by locating a sequence of target objects in indoor scenes. To facilitate this task, we introduce SG3D, a large-scale dataset containing 22,346 tasks with 112,236 steps across 4,895 real-world 3D scenes. The dataset is constructed using a combination of RGB-D scans from various 3D scene datasets and an automated task generation pipeline, followed by human verification for quality assurance. We adapted three state-of-the-art 3D visual grounding models to the sequential grounding task and evaluated their performance on SG3D. Our results reveal that while these models perform well on traditional benchmarks, they face significant challenges with task-oriented sequential grounding, underscoring the need for further research in this area.

Unifying 3D Vision-Language Understanding via Promptable Queries

A unified model for 3D vision-language (3D-VL) understanding is expected to take various scene representations and perform a wide range of tasks in a 3D scene. However, a considerable gap exists between existing methods and such a unified model, due to the independent application of representation and insufficient exploration of 3D multi-task training. In this paper, we introduce PQ3D, a unified model capable of using Promptable Queries to tackle a wide range of 3D-VL tasks, from low-level instance segmentation to high-level reasoning and planning. This is achieved through three key innovations: (1) unifying various 3D scene representations (i.e., voxels, point clouds, multi-view images) into a shared 3D coordinate space by segment-level grouping, (2) an attention-based query decoder for task-specific information retrieval guided by prompts, and (3) universal output heads for different tasks to support multi-task training. Tested across ten diverse 3D-VL datasets, PQ3D demonstrates impressive performance on these tasks, setting new records on most benchmarks. Particularly, PQ3D improves the state-of-the-art on ScanNet200 by 1.8% (AP), ScanRefer by 5.4% (acc@0.5), Multi3DRefer by 11.7% (F1@0.5), and Scan2Cap by 13.4% (CIDEr@0.5). Moreover, PQ3D supports flexible inference with individual or combined forms of available 3D representations, e.g., solely voxel input.

Closed-Loop Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation with GPT-4V

Autonomous robot navigation and manipulation in open environments require reasoning and replanning with closed-loop feedback. We present COME-robot, the first closed-loop framework utilizing the GPT-4V vision-language foundation model for open-ended reasoning and adaptive planning in real-world scenarios. We meticulously construct a library of action primitives for robot exploration, navigation, and manipulation, serving as callable execution modules for GPT-4V in task planning. On top of these modules, GPT-4V serves as the brain that can accomplish multimodal reasoning, generate action policy with code, verify the task progress, and provide feedback for replanning. Such design enables COME-robot to (i) actively perceive the environments, (ii) perform situated reasoning, and (iii) recover from failures. Through comprehensive experiments involving 8 challenging real-world tabletop and manipulation tasks, COME-robot demonstrates a significant improvement in task success rate (~25%) compared to state-of-the-art baseline methods. We further conduct comprehensive analyses to elucidate how COME-robot's design facilitates failure recovery, free-form instruction following, and long-horizon task planning.

PhyScene: Physically Interactable 3D Scene Synthesis for Embodied AI

With recent developments in Embodied Artificial Intelligence (EAI) research, there has been a growing demand for high-quality, large-scale interactive scene generation. While prior methods in scene synthesis have prioritized the naturalness and realism of the generated scenes, the physical plausibility and interactivity of scenes have been largely left unexplored. To address this disparity, we introduce PhyScene, a novel method dedicated to generating interactive 3D scenes characterized by realistic layouts, articulated objects, and rich physical interactivity tailored for embodied agents. Based on a conditional diffusion model for capturing scene layouts, we devise novel physics- and interactivity-based guidance mechanisms that integrate constraints from object collision, room layout, and object reachability. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that PhyScene effectively leverages these guidance functions for physically interactable scene synthesis, outperforming existing state-of-the-art scene synthesis methods by a large margin. Our findings suggest that the scenes generated by PhyScene hold considerable potential for facilitating diverse skill acquisition among agents within interactive environments, thereby catalyzing further advancements in embodied AI research. Project website: http://physcene.github.io.

Move as You Say, Interact as You Can: Language-guided Human Motion Generation with Scene Affordance

Despite significant advancements in text-to-motion synthesis, generating language-guided human motion within 3D environments poses substantial challenges. These challenges stem primarily from (i) the absence of powerful generative models capable of jointly modeling natural language, 3D scenes, and human motion, and (ii) the generative models' intensive data requirements contrasted with the scarcity of comprehensive, high-quality, language-scene-motion datasets. To tackle these issues, we introduce a novel two-stage framework that employs scene affordance as an intermediate representation, effectively linking 3D scene grounding and conditional motion generation. Our framework comprises an Affordance Diffusion Model (ADM) for predicting explicit affordance map and an Affordance-to-Motion Diffusion Model (AMDM) for generating plausible human motions. By leveraging scene affordance maps, our method overcomes the difficulty in generating human motion under multimodal condition signals, especially when training with limited data lacking extensive language-scene-motion pairs. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms all baselines on established benchmarks, including HumanML3D and HUMANISE. Additionally, we validate our model's exceptional generalization capabilities on a specially curated evaluation set featuring previously unseen descriptions and scenes.

SceneVerse: Scaling 3D Vision-Language Learning for Grounded Scene Understanding

3D vision-language grounding, which focuses on aligning language with the 3D physical environment, stands as a cornerstone in the development of embodied agents. In comparison to recent advancements in the 2D domain, grounding language in 3D scenes faces several significant challenges: (i) the inherent complexity of 3D scenes due to the diverse object configurations, their rich attributes, and intricate relationships; (ii) the scarcity of paired 3D vision-language data to support grounded learning; and (iii) the absence of a unified learning framework to distill knowledge from grounded 3D data. In this work, we aim to address these three major challenges in 3D vision-language by examining the potential of systematically upscaling 3D vision-language learning in indoor environments. We introduce the first million-scale 3D vision-language dataset, SceneVerse, encompassing about 68K 3D indoor scenes and comprising 2.5M vision-language pairs derived from both human annotations and our scalable scene-graph-based generation approach. We demonstrate that this scaling allows for a unified pre-training framework, Grounded Pre-training for Scenes (GPS), for 3D vision-language learning. Through extensive experiments, we showcase the effectiveness of GPS by achieving state-of-the-art performance on all existing 3D visual grounding benchmarks. The vast potential of SceneVerse and GPS is unveiled through zero-shot transfer experiments in the challenging 3D vision-language tasks. Project website: https://scene-verse.github.io .

An Embodied Generalist Agent in 3D World

Leveraging massive knowledge and learning schemes from large language models (LLMs), recent machine learning models show notable successes in building generalist agents that exhibit the capability of general-purpose task solving in diverse domains, including natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics. However, a significant challenge remains as these models exhibit limited ability in understanding and interacting with the 3D world. We argue this limitation significantly hinders the current models from performing real-world tasks and further achieving general intelligence. To this end, we introduce an embodied multi-modal and multi-task generalist agent that excels in perceiving, grounding, reasoning, planning, and acting in the 3D world. Our proposed agent, referred to as LEO, is trained with shared LLM-based model architectures, objectives, and weights in two stages: (i) 3D vision-language alignment and (ii) 3D vision-language-action instruction tuning. To facilitate the training, we meticulously curate and generate an extensive dataset comprising object-level and scene-level multi-modal tasks with exceeding scale and complexity, necessitating a deep understanding of and interaction with the 3D world. Through rigorous experiments, we demonstrate LEO's remarkable proficiency across a wide spectrum of tasks, including 3D captioning, question answering, embodied reasoning, embodied navigation, and robotic manipulation. Our ablation results further provide valuable insights for the development of future embodied generalist agents.