BioVL-QR: Egocentric Biochemical Video-and-Language Dataset Using Micro QR Codes

This paper introduces a biochemical vision-and-language dataset, which consists of 24 egocentric experiment videos, corresponding protocols, and video-and-language alignments. The key challenge in the wet-lab domain is detecting equipment, reagents, and containers is difficult because the lab environment is scattered by filling objects on the table and some objects are indistinguishable. Therefore, previous studies assume that objects are manually annotated and given for downstream tasks, but this is costly and time-consuming. To address this issue, this study focuses on Micro QR Codes to detect objects automatically. From our preliminary study, we found that detecting objects only using Micro QR Codes is still difficult because the researchers manipulate objects, causing blur and occlusion frequently. To address this, we also propose a novel object labeling method by combining a Micro QR Code detector and an off-the-shelf hand object detector. As one of the applications of our dataset, we conduct the task of generating protocols from experiment videos and find that our approach can generate accurate protocols.

Text-driven Affordance Learning from Egocentric Vision

Visual affordance learning is a key component for robots to understand how to interact with objects. Conventional approaches in this field rely on pre-defined objects and actions, falling short of capturing diverse interactions in realworld scenarios. The key idea of our approach is employing textual instruction, targeting various affordances for a wide range of objects. This approach covers both hand-object and tool-object interactions. We introduce text-driven affordance learning, aiming to learn contact points and manipulation trajectories from an egocentric view following textual instruction. In our task, contact points are represented as heatmaps, and the manipulation trajectory as sequences of coordinates that incorporate both linear and rotational movements for various manipulations. However, when we gather data for this task, manual annotations of these diverse interactions are costly. To this end, we propose a pseudo dataset creation pipeline and build a large pseudo-training dataset: TextAFF80K, consisting of over 80K instances of the contact points, trajectories, images, and text tuples. We extend existing referring expression comprehension models for our task, and experimental results show that our approach robustly handles multiple affordances, serving as a new standard for affordance learning in real-world scenarios.

Automatic Construction of a Large-Scale Corpus for Geoparsing Using Wikipedia Hyperlinks

Geoparsing is the task of estimating the latitude and longitude (coordinates) of location expressions in texts. Geoparsing must deal with the ambiguity of the expressions that indicate multiple locations with the same notation. For evaluating geoparsing systems, several corpora have been proposed in previous work. However, these corpora are small-scale and suffer from the coverage of location expressions on general domains. In this paper, we propose Wikipedia Hyperlink-based Location Linking (WHLL), a novel method to construct a large-scale corpus for geoparsing from Wikipedia articles. WHLL leverages hyperlinks in Wikipedia to annotate multiple location expressions with coordinates. With this method, we constructed the WHLL corpus, a new large-scale corpus for geoparsing. The WHLL corpus consists of 1.3M articles, each containing about 7.8 unique location expressions. 45.6% of location expressions are ambiguous and refer to more than one location with the same notation. In each article, location expressions of the article title and those hyperlinks to other articles are assigned with coordinates. By utilizing hyperlinks, we can accurately assign location expressions with coordinates even with ambiguous location expressions in the texts. Experimental results show that there remains room for improvement by disambiguating location expressions.

Vision-Language Interpreter for Robot Task Planning

Large language models (LLMs) are accelerating the development of language-guided robot planners. Meanwhile, symbolic planners offer the advantage of interpretability. This paper proposes a new task that bridges these two trends, namely, multimodal planning problem specification. The aim is to generate a problem description (PD), a machine-readable file used by the planners to find a plan. By generating PDs from language instruction and scene observation, we can drive symbolic planners in a language-guided framework. We propose a Vision-Language Interpreter (ViLaIn), a new framework that generates PDs using state-of-the-art LLM and vision-language models. ViLaIn can refine generated PDs via error message feedback from the symbolic planner. Our aim is to answer the question: How accurately can ViLaIn and the symbolic planner generate valid robot plans? To evaluate ViLaIn, we introduce a novel dataset called the problem description generation (ProDG) dataset. The framework is evaluated with four new evaluation metrics. Experimental results show that ViLaIn can generate syntactically correct problems with more than 99% accuracy and valid plans with more than 58% accuracy.

Towards Flow Graph Prediction of Open-Domain Procedural Texts

Machine comprehension of procedural texts is essential for reasoning about the steps and automating the procedures. However, this requires identifying entities within a text and resolving the relationships between the entities. Previous work focused on the cooking domain and proposed a framework to convert a recipe text into a flow graph (FG) representation. In this work, we propose a framework based on the recipe FG for flow graph prediction of open-domain procedural texts. To investigate flow graph prediction performance in non-cooking domains, we introduce the wikiHow-FG corpus from articles on wikiHow, a website of how-to instruction articles. In experiments, we consider using the existing recipe corpus and performing domain adaptation from the cooking to the target domain. Experimental results show that the domain adaptation models achieve higher performance than those trained only on the cooking or target domain data.

Recipe Generation from Unsegmented Cooking Videos

This paper tackles recipe generation from unsegmented cooking videos, a task that requires agents to (1) extract key events in completing the dish and (2) generate sentences for the extracted events. Our task is similar to dense video captioning (DVC), which aims at detecting events thoroughly and generating sentences for them. However, unlike DVC, in recipe generation, recipe story awareness is crucial, and a model should output an appropriate number of key events in the correct order. We analyze the output of the DVC model and observe that although (1) several events are adoptable as a recipe story, (2) the generated sentences for such events are not grounded in the visual content. Based on this, we hypothesize that we can obtain correct recipes by selecting oracle events from the output events of the DVC model and re-generating sentences for them. To achieve this, we propose a novel transformer-based joint approach of training event selector and sentence generator for selecting oracle events from the outputs of the DVC model and generating grounded sentences for the events, respectively. In addition, we extend the model by including ingredients to generate more accurate recipes. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art DVC models. We also confirm that, by modeling the recipe in a story-aware manner, the proposed model output the appropriate number of events in the correct order.

Visual Recipe Flow: A Dataset for Learning Visual State Changes of Objects with Recipe Flows

We present a new multimodal dataset called Visual Recipe Flow, which enables us to learn each cooking action result in a recipe text. The dataset consists of object state changes and the workflow of the recipe text. The state change is represented as an image pair, while the workflow is represented as a recipe flow graph (r-FG). The image pairs are grounded in the r-FG, which provides the cross-modal relation. With our dataset, one can try a range of applications, from multimodal commonsense reasoning and procedural text generation.

Neural Text Generation with Artificial Negative Examples

Neural text generation models conditioning on given input (e.g. machine translation and image captioning) are usually trained by maximum likelihood estimation of target text. However, the trained models suffer from various types of errors at inference time. In this paper, we propose to suppress an arbitrary type of errors by training the text generation model in a reinforcement learning framework, where we use a trainable reward function that is capable of discriminating between references and sentences containing the targeted type of errors. We create such negative examples by artificially injecting the targeted errors to the references. In experiments, we focus on two error types, repeated and dropped tokens in model-generated text. The experimental results show that our method can suppress the generation errors and achieve significant improvements on two machine translation and two image captioning tasks.

Analysis of the Effect of Dependency Information on Predicate-Argument Structure Analysis and Zero Anaphora Resolution

This paper investigates and analyzes the effect of dependency information on predicate-argument structure analysis (PASA) and zero anaphora resolution (ZAR) for Japanese, and shows that a straightforward approach of PASA and ZAR works effectively even if dependency information was not available. We constructed an analyzer that directly predicts relationships of predicates and arguments with their semantic roles from a POS-tagged corpus. The features of the system are designed to compensate for the absence of syntactic information by using features used in dependency parsing as a reference. We also constructed analyzers that use the oracle dependency and the real dependency parsing results, and compared with the system that does not use any syntactic information to verify that the improvement provided by dependencies is not crucial.