Multitask Multimodal Prompted Training for Interactive Embodied Task Completion

Georgios Pantazopoulos, Malvina Nikandrou, Amit Parekh, Bhathiya Hemanthage, Arash Eshghi, Ioannis Konstas, Verena Rieser, Oliver Lemon, Alessandro Suglia

Submission Type: Regular Long Paper

Submission Track: Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond

Submission Track 2: Dialogue and Interactive Systems

Keywords: Vision and Language, Embodied AI, Natural Language Interaction

Abstract: 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.

Submission Number: 3735