Details Make a Difference: Object State-Sensitive Neurorobotic Task Planning

The state of an object reflects its current status or condition and is important for a robot's task planning and manipulation. However, detecting an object's state and generating a state-sensitive plan for robots is challenging. Recently, pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in generating plans. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is hardly any investigation on whether LLMs or VLMs can also generate object state-sensitive plans. To study this, we introduce an Object State-Sensitive Agent (OSSA), a task-planning agent empowered by pre-trained neural networks. We propose two methods for OSSA: (i) a modular model consisting of a pre-trained vision processing module (dense captioning model, DCM) and a natural language processing model (LLM), and (ii) a monolithic model consisting only of a VLM. To quantitatively evaluate the performances of the two methods, we use tabletop scenarios where the task is to clear the table. We contribute a multimodal benchmark dataset that takes object states into consideration. Our results show that both methods can be used for object state-sensitive tasks, but the monolithic approach outperforms the modular approach. The code for OSSA is available at \url{https://github.com/Xiao-wen-Sun/OSSA}

Teaching Text-to-Image Models to Communicate

Various works have been extensively studied in the research of text-to-image generation. Although existing models perform well in text-to-image generation, there are significant challenges when directly employing them to generate images in dialogs. In this paper, we first highlight a new problem: dialog-to-image generation, that is, given the dialog context, the model should generate a realistic image which is consistent with the specified conversation as response. To tackle the problem, we propose an efficient approach for dialog-to-image generation without any intermediate translation, which maximizes the extraction of the semantic information contained in the dialog. Considering the characteristics of dialog structure, we put segment token before each sentence in a turn of a dialog to differentiate different speakers. Then, we fine-tune pre-trained text-to-image models to enable them to generate images conditioning on processed dialog context. After fine-tuning, our approach can consistently improve the performance of various models across multiple metrics. Experimental results on public benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of our method.