Self-Explainable Affordance Learning with Embodied Caption

In the field of visual affordance learning, previous methods mainly used abundant images or videos that delineate human behavior patterns to identify action possibility regions for object manipulation, with a variety of applications in robotic tasks. However, they encounter a main challenge of action ambiguity, illustrated by the vagueness like whether to beat or carry a drum, and the complexities involved in processing intricate scenes. Moreover, it is important for human intervention to rectify robot errors in time. To address these issues, we introduce Self-Explainable Affordance learning (SEA) with embodied caption. This innovation enables robots to articulate their intentions and bridge the gap between explainable vision-language caption and visual affordance learning. Due to a lack of appropriate dataset, we unveil a pioneering dataset and metrics tailored for this task, which integrates images, heatmaps, and embodied captions. Furthermore, we propose a novel model to effectively combine affordance grounding with self-explanation in a simple but efficient manner. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate our method's effectiveness.

One for All: One-stage Referring Expression Comprehension with Dynamic Reasoning

Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) is one of the most important tasks in visual reasoning that requires a model to detect the target object referred by a natural language expression. Among the proposed pipelines, the one-stage Referring Expression Comprehension (OSREC) has become the dominant trend since it merges the region proposal and selection stages. Many state-of-the-art OSREC models adopt a multi-hop reasoning strategy because a sequence of objects is frequently mentioned in a single expression which needs multi-hop reasoning to analyze the semantic relation. However, one unsolved issue of these models is that the number of reasoning steps needs to be pre-defined and fixed before inference, ignoring the varying complexity of expressions. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Multi-step Reasoning Network, which allows the reasoning steps to be dynamically adjusted based on the reasoning state and expression complexity. Specifically, we adopt a Transformer module to memorize & process the reasoning state and a Reinforcement Learning strategy to dynamically infer the reasoning steps. The work achieves the state-of-the-art performance or significant improvements on several REC datasets, ranging from RefCOCO (+, g) with short expressions, to Ref-Reasoning, a dataset with long and complex compositional expressions.