Evaluating Vision-Language Models as Evaluators in Path Planning

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Main Authors: Aghzal, Mohamed, Yue, Xiang, Plaku, Erion, Yao, Ziyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Aghzal, Mohamed
Yue, Xiang
Plaku, Erion
Yao, Ziyu
author_facet Aghzal, Mohamed
Yue, Xiang
Plaku, Erion
Yao, Ziyu
contents Despite their promise to perform complex reasoning, large language models (LLMs) have been shown to have limited effectiveness in end-to-end planning. This has inspired an intriguing question: if these models cannot plan well, can they still contribute to the planning framework as a helpful plan evaluator? In this work, we generalize this question to consider LLMs augmented with visual understanding, i.e., Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce PathEval, a novel benchmark evaluating VLMs as plan evaluators in complex path-planning scenarios. Succeeding in the benchmark requires a VLM to be able to abstract traits of optimal paths from the scenario description, demonstrate precise low-level perception on each path, and integrate this information to decide the better path. Our analysis of state-of-the-art VLMs reveals that these models face significant challenges on the benchmark. We observe that the VLMs can precisely abstract given scenarios to identify the desired traits and exhibit mixed performance in integrating the provided information. Yet, their vision component presents a critical bottleneck, with models struggling to perceive low-level details about a path. Our experimental results show that this issue cannot be trivially addressed via end-to-end fine-tuning; rather, task-specific discriminative adaptation of these vision encoders is needed for these VLMs to become effective path evaluators.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_18711
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating Vision-Language Models as Evaluators in Path Planning
Aghzal, Mohamed
Yue, Xiang
Plaku, Erion
Yao, Ziyu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Despite their promise to perform complex reasoning, large language models (LLMs) have been shown to have limited effectiveness in end-to-end planning. This has inspired an intriguing question: if these models cannot plan well, can they still contribute to the planning framework as a helpful plan evaluator? In this work, we generalize this question to consider LLMs augmented with visual understanding, i.e., Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce PathEval, a novel benchmark evaluating VLMs as plan evaluators in complex path-planning scenarios. Succeeding in the benchmark requires a VLM to be able to abstract traits of optimal paths from the scenario description, demonstrate precise low-level perception on each path, and integrate this information to decide the better path. Our analysis of state-of-the-art VLMs reveals that these models face significant challenges on the benchmark. We observe that the VLMs can precisely abstract given scenarios to identify the desired traits and exhibit mixed performance in integrating the provided information. Yet, their vision component presents a critical bottleneck, with models struggling to perceive low-level details about a path. Our experimental results show that this issue cannot be trivially addressed via end-to-end fine-tuning; rather, task-specific discriminative adaptation of these vision encoders is needed for these VLMs to become effective path evaluators.
title Evaluating Vision-Language Models as Evaluators in Path Planning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.18711