Interactive robots navigating photo-realistic environments need to be trained to effectively leverage and handle the dynamic nature of dialogue in addition to the challenges underlying vision-and-language navigation (VLN). In this paper, we present VISITRON, a multi-modal Transformer-based navigator better suited to the interactive regime inherent to Cooperative Vision-and-Dialog Navigation (CVDN). VISITRON is trained to: i) identify and associate object-level concepts and semantics between the environment and dialogue history, ii) identify when to interact vs. navigate via imitation learning of a binary classification head. We perform extensive pre-training and fine-tuning ablations with VISITRON to gain empirical insights and improve performance on CVDN. VISITRON's ability to identify when to interact leads to a natural generalization of the game-play mode introduced by Roman et al. (arXiv:2005.00728) for enabling the use of such models in different environments. VISITRON is competitive with models on the static CVDN leaderboard and attains state-of-the-art performance on the Success weighted by Path Length (SPL) metric.
@article{arxiv.2105.11589,
title = {VISITRON: Visual Semantics-Aligned Interactively Trained Object-Navigator},
author = {Ayush Shrivastava and Karthik Gopalakrishnan and Yang Liu and Robinson Piramuthu and Gokhan Tür and Devi Parikh and Dilek Hakkani-Tür},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.11589},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Accepted at Findings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2022, previous version accepted at Visually Grounded Interaction and Language (ViGIL) Workshop at NAACL 2021