No Arabic abstract
Vision-language Navigation (VLN) tasks require an agent to navigate step-by-step while perceiving the visual observations and comprehending a natural language instruction. Large data bias, which is caused by the disparity ratio between the small data scale and large navigation space, makes the VLN task challenging. Previous works have proposed various data augmentation methods to reduce data bias. However, these works do not explicitly reduce the data bias across different house scenes. Therefore, the agent would overfit to the seen scenes and achieve poor navigation performance in the unseen scenes. To tackle this problem, we propose the Random Environmental Mixup (REM) method, which generates cross-connected house scenes as augmented data via mixuping environment. Specifically, we first select key viewpoints according to the room connection graph for each scene. Then, we cross-connect the key views of different scenes to construct augmented scenes. Finally, we generate augmented instruction-path pairs in the cross-connected scenes. The experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our augmentation data via REM help the agent reduce its performance gap between the seen and unseen environment and improve the overall performance, making our model the best existing approach on the standard VLN benchmark.
Interaction and navigation defined by natural language instructions in dynamic environments pose significant challenges for neural agents. This paper focuses on addressing two challenges: handling long sequence of subtasks, and understanding complex human instructions. We propose Episodic Transformer (E.T.), a multimodal transformer that encodes language inputs and the full episode history of visual observations and actions. To improve training, we leverage synthetic instructions as an intermediate representation that decouples understanding the visual appearance of an environment from the variations of natural language instructions. We demonstrate that encoding the history with a transformer is critical to solve compositional tasks, and that pretraining and joint training with synthetic instructions further improve the performance. Our approach sets a new state of the art on the challenging ALFRED benchmark, achieving 38.4% and 8.5% task success rates on seen and unseen test splits.
Recently, numerous algorithms have been developed to tackle the problem of vision-language navigation (VLN), i.e., entailing an agent to navigate 3D environments through following linguistic instructions. However, current VLN agents simply store their past experiences/observations as latent states in recurrent networks, failing to capture environment layouts and make long-term planning. To address these limitations, we propose a crucial architecture, called Structured Scene Memory (SSM). It is compartmentalized enough to accurately memorize the percepts during navigation. It also serves as a structured scene representation, which captures and disentangles visual and geometric cues in the environment. SSM has a collect-read controller that adaptively collects information for supporting current decision making and mimics iterative algorithms for long-range reasoning. As SSM provides a complete action space, i.e., all the navigable places on the map, a frontier-exploration based navigation decision making strategy is introduced to enable efficient and global planning. Experiment results on two VLN datasets (i.e., R2R and R4R) show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several metrics.
Vision-language navigation (VLN) is the task of entailing an agent to carry out navigational instructions inside photo-realistic environments. One of the key challenges in VLN is how to conduct a robust navigation by mitigating the uncertainty caused by ambiguous instructions and insufficient observation of the environment. Agents trained by current approaches typically suffer from this and would consequently struggle to avoid random and inefficient actions at every step. In contrast, when humans face such a challenge, they can still maintain robust navigation by actively exploring the surroundings to gather more information and thus make more confident navigation decisions. This work draws inspiration from human navigation behavior and endows an agent with an active information gathering ability for a more intelligent vision-language navigation policy. To achieve this, we propose an end-to-end framework for learning an exploration policy that decides i) when and where to explore, ii) what information is worth gathering during exploration, and iii) how to adjust the navigation decision after the exploration. The experimental results show promising exploration strategies emerged from training, which leads to significant boost in navigation performance. On the R2R challenge leaderboard, our agent gets promising results all three VLN settings, i.e., single run, pre-exploration, and beam search.
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a task where agents must decide how to move through a 3D environment to reach a goal by grounding natural language instructions to the visual surroundings. One of the problems of the VLN task is data scarcity since it is difficult to collect enough navigation paths with human-annotated instructions for interactive environments. In this paper, we explore the use of counterfactual thinking as a human-inspired data augmentation method that results in robust models. Counterfactual thinking is a concept that describes the human propensity to create possible alternatives to life events that have already occurred. We propose an adversarial-driven counterfactual reasoning model that can consider effective conditions instead of low-quality augmented data. In particular, we present a model-agnostic adversarial path sampler (APS) that learns to sample challenging paths that force the navigator to improve based on the navigation performance. APS also serves to do pre-exploration of unseen environments to strengthen the models ability to generalize. We evaluate the influence of APS on the performance of different VLN baseline models using the room-to-room dataset (R2R). The results show that the adversarial training process with our proposed APS benefits VLN models under both seen and unseen environments. And the pre-exploration process can further gain additional improvements under unseen environments.
Language instruction plays an essential role in the natural language grounded navigation tasks. However, navigators trained with limited human-annotated instructions may have difficulties in accurately capturing key information from the complicated instruction at different timesteps, leading to poor navigation performance. In this paper, we exploit to train a more robust navigator which is capable of dynamically extracting crucial factors from the long instruction, by using an adversarial attacking paradigm. Specifically, we propose a Dynamic Reinforced Instruction Attacker (DR-Attacker), which learns to mislead the navigator to move to the wrong target by destroying the most instructive information in instructions at different timesteps. By formulating the perturbation generation as a Markov Decision Process, DR-Attacker is optimized by the reinforcement learning algorithm to generate perturbed instructions sequentially during the navigation, according to a learnable attack score. Then, the perturbed instructions, which serve as hard samples, are used for improving the robustness of the navigator with an effective adversarial training strategy and an auxiliary self-supervised reasoning task. Experimental results on both Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) and Navigation from Dialog History (NDH) tasks show the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the visualization analysis shows the effectiveness of the proposed DR-Attacker, which can successfully attack crucial information in the instructions at different timesteps. Code is available at https://github.com/expectorlin/DR-Attacker.