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DialFRED: Dialogue-Enabled Agents for Embodied Instruction Following

Language-guided Embodied AI benchmarks requiring an agent to navigate an environment and manipulate objects typically allow one-way communication: the human user gives a natural language command to the agent, and the agent can only follow the command passively. In this work, we present DialFRED, a dialogue-enabled embodied instruction following benchmark based on the ALFRED benchmark. DialFRED allows an agent to actively ask questions to the human user; the additional information in the user’s response is used by the agent to better complete its task. We release a human-annotated dataset with 53K task-relevant questions and answers and an oracle to answer questions. To solve DialFRED, we propose a questioner-performer framework wherein the questioner is pre-trained with the human-annotated data and fine-tuned with reinforcement learning. Experimental results show that asking the right questions leads to significantly improved task performance.

Dependency

Inherited from the E.T. repo, the package is depending on:

Setup

Set up macro:

export DF_ROOT=$(pwd)
export LOGS=$DF_ROOT/logs
export DATA=$DF_ROOT/data
export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:$DF_ROOT

Install requirements:

virtualenv -p $(which python3.7) df_env
source df_env/bin/activate

cd $DF_ROOT
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements.txt

Downloading data and checkpoints

Download ALFRED dataset:

cd $DATA
sh download_data.sh json
sh download_data.sh json_feat

Copy pretrained checkpoints (check this issue https://github.com/alexpashevich/E.T./issues/13 if you have problem downloading the ET checkpoints):

wget http://pascal.inrialpes.fr/data2/apashevi/et_checkpoints.zip
unzip et_checkpoints.zip
mv pretrained $LOGS/

Render images:

cd $DF_ROOT
python -m alfred.gen.render_trajs

Prepare dataset

We provide the code to augment the Alfred data by merging low level actions into subgoals and spliting one subgoal into multiple ones. We also created new instructions to improve language variety.

python augment_data.py

We focus on three types of questions:

  1. location clarification question: where is the object?
  2. appearance clarification question: what does the object look like?
  3. direction clarification question: which direction should I turn to?

To answer these questions, we build an oracle to extract ground-truth information from the virtual environment and generate answers based on templates. Given the offline generated answers, we further modify the data by sampling QA combinations in addition to the instructions. We use the modified data to pre-train the performer.

python append_data.py

Following the ET pipeline, we can create the lmdb dataset

export EXP_NAME=augmented_human
export SUBGOAL=subgoal
export EVAL_TYPE=valid_unseen

# create lmdb dataset
python -m alfred.data.create_lmdb with args.visual_checkpoint=$LOGS/pretrained/fasterrcnn_model.pth args.data_output=lmdb_${EXP_NAME}_${SUBGOAL} args.vocab_path=$DF_ROOT/files/$EXP_NAME.vocab > ./logs/et_${EXP_NAME}_${SUBGOAL}.log 2>&1 &

Human QA data

We use crowd-sourcing to collect 53K human task-oriented questions and answers. The dataset are available at:

./data/dialfred_human_qa.csv

Each line contains one annotation for an augmented sub-goal. The definition of each columns are:

1   Data splits. Can be training, validation_seen or validation_unseen.
2   Task ID.
3   Trial ID.
4   Room type. 
5   Task type in the original ALFRED dataset.
6   Subgoal start time. Start time of the augmented sub-goal in the corresponding task video.    
7   Subgoal end time. End time of the augmented sub-goal in the corresponding task video.
8   Number of low level actions in the sub-goal. 
9   Sub-goal Index. The index of the sub-goal in the high-level task.
10  Instruction for the augmented subgoal.
11  Verb. The low level actions contained in the sub-goal.
12  Noun1. The first noun involved in the sub-goal.
13  Noun2. The optional second noun involved in the sub-goal.
14  Question type. The type of question asked by the annotator. Can be location, appearance, direction or other types.
15  Question. The question asked by the annotator.
16  Answer. The answer to the question provided by the annotator.
17  Necessary. Whether the annotator thinks the question and answer are necessary for the task completion.

Questioner and performer evaluation

Download checkpoints for finetuned questioner and pretrained performer.

scripts/fetch_model_checkpt.sh

For evaluating the pretrained models:

python train_eval.py --mode eval

Train the questioner and performer from scratch

Given the lmdb dataset, we can pre-train the performer

# train the ET performer
python -m alfred.model.train with exp.model=transformer exp.name=et_${EXP_NAME}_${SUBGOAL} exp.data.train=lmdb_${EXP_NAME}_${SUBGOAL} train.seed=1 > ./logs/et_${EXP_NAME}_${SUBGOAL}.log 2>&1 &

Given the human QA data we collected via crowd-sourcing, we can pretrain the questioner model.

python seq2seq_questioner_multimodel.py

Given the pretrained questioner and performer, we can finetune the questioner model using RL on valid seen.

# RL anytime: training the questioner to ask questions at anytime of the task
python train_eval.py --mode train --questioner-path ./logs/questioner_rl/pretrained_questioner.pt

Given the finetuned questioner and pretrained performer, we can evaluate the models on valid unseen.

# RL anytime: training the questioner to ask questions at anytime of the task
python train_eval.py --mode eval --questioner-path ./logs/questioner_rl/questioner_anytime_seen1.pt

CVPR 2023 Embodied AI Workshop DialFRED Challenge

We provide a testset to evaluate the model. The testset contains 1092 tasks. For each task, we provide json data and the oracle answers for the 3 types of questions in the paper (i.e. location, direction and appearance).

For an example to generate a submission file: generate_submission.py

Results can be submitted here for CVPR 2023 Embodied AI Workshop: DialFRED Challenge.

Citation

If you use our code or data, please consider citing our paper.

@article{gao2022dialfred,
  title={Dialfred: Dialogue-enabled agents for embodied instruction following},
  author={Gao, Xiaofeng and Gao, Qiaozi and Gong, Ran and Lin, Kaixiang and Thattai, Govind and Sukhatme, Gaurav S},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.13330},
  year={2022}
}