Interactive and embodied tasks pose at least two fundamental challenges to existing Vision & Language (VL) models, including 1) grounding language in trajectories of actions and observations, and 2) referential disambiguation. To tackle these challenges, we propose an Embodied MultiModal Agent (EMMA): a unified encoder-decoder model that reasons over images and trajectories, and casts action prediction as multimodal text generation. By unifying all tasks as text generation, EMMA learns a language of actions which facilitates transfer across tasks. Different to previous modular approaches with independently trained components, we use a single multitask model where each task contributes to goal completion. EMMA performs on par with similar models on several VL benchmarks and sets a new state-of-the-art performance (36.81% success rate) on the Dialog-guided Task Completion (DTC), a benchmark to evaluate dialog-guided agents in the Alexa Arena.

We demonstrate EMMA, an embodied multimodal agent which has been developed for the Alexa Prize SimBot challenge. The agent acts within a 3D simulated environment for household tasks. EMMA is a unified and multimodal generative model aimed at solving embodied tasks. In contrast to previous work, our approach treats multiple multimodal tasks as a single multimodal conditional text generation problem, where a model learns to output text given both language and visual input. Furthermore, we showcase that a single generative agent can solve tasks with visual inputs of varying length, such as answering questions about static images, or executing actions given a sequence of previous frames and dialogue utterances. The demo system will allow users to interact conversationally with EMMA in embodied dialogues in different 3D environments from the TEACh dataset.