CLAD: Constrained Latent Action Diffusion for Vision-Language Procedure Planning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Shi, Lei, Bulling, Andreas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915189467643904
author Shi, Lei
Bulling, Andreas
author_facet Shi, Lei
Bulling, Andreas
contents We propose CLAD -- a Constrained Latent Action Diffusion model for vision-language procedure planning in instructional videos. Procedure planning is the challenging task of predicting intermediate actions given a visual observation of a start and a goal state. However, future interactive AI systems must also be able to plan procedures using multi-modal input, e.g., where visual observations are augmented with language descriptions. To tackle this vision-language procedure planning task, our method uses a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to learn the latent representation of actions and observations as constraints and integrate them into the diffusion process. This approach exploits that the latent space of diffusion models already has semantics that can be used. We use the latent constraints to steer the diffusion model to better generate actions. We report extensive experiments on the popular CrossTask, Coin, and NIV datasets and show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. By evaluating ablated versions of our method, we further show that the proposed integration of the action and observation representations learnt in the VAE latent space is key to these performance improvements.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_06637
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CLAD: Constrained Latent Action Diffusion for Vision-Language Procedure Planning
Shi, Lei
Bulling, Andreas
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We propose CLAD -- a Constrained Latent Action Diffusion model for vision-language procedure planning in instructional videos. Procedure planning is the challenging task of predicting intermediate actions given a visual observation of a start and a goal state. However, future interactive AI systems must also be able to plan procedures using multi-modal input, e.g., where visual observations are augmented with language descriptions. To tackle this vision-language procedure planning task, our method uses a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to learn the latent representation of actions and observations as constraints and integrate them into the diffusion process. This approach exploits that the latent space of diffusion models already has semantics that can be used. We use the latent constraints to steer the diffusion model to better generate actions. We report extensive experiments on the popular CrossTask, Coin, and NIV datasets and show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. By evaluating ablated versions of our method, we further show that the proposed integration of the action and observation representations learnt in the VAE latent space is key to these performance improvements.
title CLAD: Constrained Latent Action Diffusion for Vision-Language Procedure Planning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06637