Can LLM’s Generate Human-Like Wayfinding Instructions? Towards Platform-Agnostic Embodied Instruction Synthesis

Vishnu Sashank Dorbala, Sanjoy Chowdhury, Dinesh Manocha


Abstract
We present a novel approach to automatically synthesize “wayfinding instructions” for an embodied robot agent. In contrast to prior approaches that are heavily reliant on human-annotated datasets designed exclusively for specific simulation platforms, our algorithm uses in-context learning to condition an LLM to generate instructions using just a few references. Using an LLM-based Visual Question Answering strategy, we gather detailed information about the environment which is used by the LLM for instruction synthesis. We implement our approach on multiple simulation platforms including Matterport3D, AI Habitat and ThreeDWorld, thereby demonstrating its platform-agnostic nature. We subjectively evaluate our approach via a user study and observe that 83.3% of users find the synthesized instructions accurately capture the details of the environment and show characteristics similar to those of human-generated instructions. Further, we conduct zero-shot navigation with multiple approaches on the REVERIE dataset using the generated instructions, and observe very close correlation with the baseline on standard success metrics (< 1% change in SR), quantifying the viability of generated instructions in replacing human-annotated data. We finally discuss the applicability of our approach in enabling a generalizable evaluation of embodied navigation policies. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first LLM-driven approach capable of generating “human-like” instructions in a platform-agnostic manner, without training.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-short.24
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
258–271
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-short.24
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-short.24
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vishnu Sashank Dorbala, Sanjoy Chowdhury, and Dinesh Manocha. 2024. Can LLM’s Generate Human-Like Wayfinding Instructions? Towards Platform-Agnostic Embodied Instruction Synthesis. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 258–271, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can LLM’s Generate Human-Like Wayfinding Instructions? Towards Platform-Agnostic Embodied Instruction Synthesis (Dorbala et al., NAACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-short.24.pdf