Investigating the Role of Instruction Variety and Task Difficulty in Robotic Manipulation Tasks

Amit Parekh, Nikolas Vitsakis, Alessandro Suglia, Ioannis Konstas


Abstract
Evaluating the generalisation capabilities of multimodal models based solely on their performance on out-of-distribution data fails to capture their true robustness. This work introduces a comprehensive evaluation framework that systematically examines the role of instructions and inputs in the generalisation abilities of such models, considering architectural design, input perturbations across language and vision modalities, and increased task complexity. The proposed framework uncovers the resilience of multimodal models to extreme instruction perturbations and their vulnerability to observational changes, raising concerns about overfitting to spurious correlations. By employing this evaluation framework on current Transformer-based multimodal models for robotic manipulation tasks, we uncover limitations and suggest future advancements should focus on architectural and training innovations that better integrate multimodal inputs, enhancing a model’s generalisation prowess by prioritising sensitivity to input content over incidental correlations.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.1080
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
19389–19424
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1080
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Amit Parekh, Nikolas Vitsakis, Alessandro Suglia, and Ioannis Konstas. 2024. Investigating the Role of Instruction Variety and Task Difficulty in Robotic Manipulation Tasks. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 19389–19424, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Investigating the Role of Instruction Variety and Task Difficulty in Robotic Manipulation Tasks (Parekh et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1080.pdf