Multi-Task Domain Adaptation for Language Grounding with 3D Objects

The existing works on object-level language grounding with 3D objects mostly focus on improving performance by utilizing the off-the-shelf pre-trained models to capture features, such as viewpoint selection or geometric priors. However, they have failed to consider exploring the cross-modal representation of language-vision alignment in the cross-domain field. To answer this problem, we propose a novel method called Domain Adaptation for Language Grounding (DA4LG) with 3D objects. Specifically, the proposed DA4LG consists of a visual adapter module with multi-task learning to realize vision-language alignment by comprehensive multimodal feature representation. Experimental results demonstrate that DA4LG competitively performs across visual and non-visual language descriptions, independent of the completeness of observation. DA4LG achieves state-of-the-art performance in the single-view setting and multi-view setting with the accuracy of 83.8% and 86.8% respectively in the language grounding benchmark SNARE. The simulation experiments show the well-practical and generalized performance of DA4LG compared to the existing methods. Our project is available at https://sites.google.com/view/da4lg.

Flickr30K-CFQ: A Compact and Fragmented Query Dataset for Text-image Retrieval

With the explosive growth of multi-modal information on the Internet, unimodal search cannot satisfy the requirement of Internet applications. Text-image retrieval research is needed to realize high-quality and efficient retrieval between different modalities. Existing text-image retrieval research is mostly based on general vision-language datasets (e.g. MS-COCO, Flickr30K), in which the query utterance is rigid and unnatural (i.e. verbosity and formality). To overcome the shortcoming, we construct a new Compact and Fragmented Query challenge dataset (named Flickr30K-CFQ) to model text-image retrieval task considering multiple query content and style, including compact and fine-grained entity-relation corpus. We propose a novel query-enhanced text-image retrieval method using prompt engineering based on LLM. Experiments show that our proposed Flickr30-CFQ reveals the insufficiency of existing vision-language datasets in realistic text-image tasks. Our LLM-based Query-enhanced method applied on different existing text-image retrieval models improves query understanding performance both on public dataset and our challenge set Flickr30-CFQ with over 0.9% and 2.4% respectively. Our project can be available anonymously in https://sites.google.com/view/Flickr30K-cfq.

Learning 6-DoF Fine-grained Grasp Detection Based on Part Affordance Grounding

Robotic grasping is a fundamental ability for a robot to interact with the environment. Current methods focus on how to obtain a stable and reliable grasping pose in object wise, while little work has been studied on part (shape)-wise grasping which is related to fine-grained grasping and robotic affordance. Parts can be seen as atomic elements to compose an object, which contains rich semantic knowledge and a strong correlation with affordance. However, lacking a large part-wise 3D robotic dataset limits the development of part representation learning and downstream application. In this paper, we propose a new large Language-guided SHape grAsPing datasEt (named Lang-SHAPE) to learn 3D part-wise affordance and grasping ability. We design a novel two-stage fine-grained robotic grasping network (named PIONEER), including a novel 3D part language grounding model, and a part-aware grasp pose detection model. To evaluate the effectiveness, we perform multi-level difficulty part language grounding grasping experiments and deploy our proposed model on a real robot. Results show our method achieves satisfactory performance and efficiency in reference identification, affordance inference, and 3D part-aware grasping. Our dataset and code are available on our project website https://sites.google.com/view/lang-shape

Human-in-the-loop Robotic Grasping using BERT Scene Representation

Current NLP techniques have been greatly applied in different domains. In this paper, we propose a human-in-the-loop framework for robotic grasping in cluttered scenes, investigating a language interface to the grasping process, which allows the user to intervene by natural language commands. This framework is constructed on a state-of-the-art rasping baseline, where we substitute a scene-graph representation with a text representation of the scene using BERT. Experiments on both simulation and physical robot show that the proposed method outperforms conventional object-agnostic and scene-graph based methods in the literature. In addition, we find that with human intervention, performance can be significantly improved.

Multimodal Aggregation Approach for Memory Vision-Voice Indoor Navigation with Meta-Learning

Vision and voice are two vital keys for agents' interaction and learning. In this paper, we present a novel indoor navigation model called Memory Vision-Voice Indoor Navigation (MVV-IN), which receives voice commands and analyzes multimodal information of visual observation in order to enhance robots' environment understanding. We make use of single RGB images taken by a first-view monocular camera. We also apply a self-attention mechanism to keep the agent focusing on key areas. Memory is important for the agent to avoid repeating certain tasks unnecessarily and in order for it to adapt adequately to new scenes, therefore, we make use of meta-learning. We have experimented with various functional features extracted from visual observation. Comparative experiments prove that our methods outperform state-of-the-art baselines.

Deep Robotic Prediction with hierarchical RGB-D Fusion

Robotic arm grasping is a fundamental operation in robotic control task goals. Most current methods for robotic grasping focus on RGB-D policy in the table surface scenario or 3D point cloud analysis and inference in the 3D space. Comparing to these methods, we propose a novel real-time multimodal hierarchical encoder-decoder neural network that fuses RGB and depth data to realize robotic humanoid grasping in 3D space with only partial observation. The quantification of raw depth data's uncertainty and depth estimation fusing RGB is considered. We develop a general labeling method to label ground-truth on common RGB-D datasets. We evaluate the effectiveness and performance of our method on a physical robot setup and our method achieves over 90\% success rate in both table surface and 3D space scenarios.