EfficientEQA: An Efficient Approach to Open-Vocabulary Embodied Question Answering

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cheng, Kai, Li, Zhengyuan, Sun, Xingpeng, Min, Byung-Cheol, Bedi, Amrit Singh, Bera, Aniket
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Cheng, Kai
Li, Zhengyuan
Sun, Xingpeng
Min, Byung-Cheol
Bedi, Amrit Singh
Bera, Aniket
author_facet Cheng, Kai
Li, Zhengyuan
Sun, Xingpeng
Min, Byung-Cheol
Bedi, Amrit Singh
Bera, Aniket
contents Embodied Question Answering (EQA) is an essential yet challenging task for robot assistants. Large vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise for EQA, but existing approaches either treat it as static video question answering without active exploration or restrict answers to a closed set of choices. These limitations hinder real-world applicability, where a robot must explore efficiently and provide accurate answers in open-vocabulary settings. To overcome these challenges, we introduce EfficientEQA, a novel framework that couples efficient exploration with free-form answer generation. EfficientEQA features three key innovations: (1) Semantic-Value-Weighted Frontier Exploration (SFE) with Verbalized Confidence (VC) from a black-box VLM to prioritize semantically important areas to explore, enabling the agent to gather relevant information faster; (2) a BLIP relevancy-based mechanism to stop adaptively by flagging highly relevant observations as outliers to indicate whether the agent has collected enough information; and (3) a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) method for the VLM to answer accurately based on pertinent images from the agent's observation history without relying on predefined choices. Our experimental results show that EfficientEQA achieves over 15% higher answer accuracy and requires over 20% fewer exploration steps than state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/chengkaiAcademyCity/EfficientEQA
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_20263
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EfficientEQA: An Efficient Approach to Open-Vocabulary Embodied Question Answering
Cheng, Kai
Li, Zhengyuan
Sun, Xingpeng
Min, Byung-Cheol
Bedi, Amrit Singh
Bera, Aniket
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Embodied Question Answering (EQA) is an essential yet challenging task for robot assistants. Large vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise for EQA, but existing approaches either treat it as static video question answering without active exploration or restrict answers to a closed set of choices. These limitations hinder real-world applicability, where a robot must explore efficiently and provide accurate answers in open-vocabulary settings. To overcome these challenges, we introduce EfficientEQA, a novel framework that couples efficient exploration with free-form answer generation. EfficientEQA features three key innovations: (1) Semantic-Value-Weighted Frontier Exploration (SFE) with Verbalized Confidence (VC) from a black-box VLM to prioritize semantically important areas to explore, enabling the agent to gather relevant information faster; (2) a BLIP relevancy-based mechanism to stop adaptively by flagging highly relevant observations as outliers to indicate whether the agent has collected enough information; and (3) a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) method for the VLM to answer accurately based on pertinent images from the agent's observation history without relying on predefined choices. Our experimental results show that EfficientEQA achieves over 15% higher answer accuracy and requires over 20% fewer exploration steps than state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/chengkaiAcademyCity/EfficientEQA
title EfficientEQA: An Efficient Approach to Open-Vocabulary Embodied Question Answering
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.20263