SIFToM: Robust Spoken Instruction Following through Theory of Mind

Spoken language instructions are ubiquitous in agent collaboration. However, in human-robot collaboration, recognition accuracy for human speech is often influenced by various speech and environmental factors, such as background noise, the speaker's accents, and mispronunciation. When faced with noisy or unfamiliar auditory inputs, humans use context and prior knowledge to disambiguate the stimulus and take pragmatic actions, a process referred to as top-down processing in cognitive science. We present a cognitively inspired model, Speech Instruction Following through Theory of Mind (SIFToM), to enable robots to pragmatically follow human instructions under diverse speech conditions by inferring the human's goal and joint plan as prior for speech perception and understanding. We test SIFToM in simulated home experiments (VirtualHome 2). Results show that the SIFToM model outperforms state-of-the-art speech and language models, approaching human-level accuracy on challenging speech instruction following tasks. We then demonstrate its ability at the task planning level on a mobile manipulator for breakfast preparation tasks.

GOMA: Proactive Embodied Cooperative Communication via Goal-Oriented Mental Alignment

Verbal communication plays a crucial role in human cooperation, particularly when the partners only have incomplete information about the task, environment, and each other's mental state. In this paper, we propose a novel cooperative communication framework, Goal-Oriented Mental Alignment (GOMA). GOMA formulates verbal communication as a planning problem that minimizes the misalignment between the parts of agents' mental states that are relevant to the goals. This approach enables an embodied assistant to reason about when and how to proactively initialize communication with humans verbally using natural language to help achieve better cooperation. We evaluate our approach against strong baselines in two challenging environments, Overcooked (a multiplayer game) and VirtualHome (a household simulator). Our experimental results demonstrate that large language models struggle with generating meaningful communication that is grounded in the social and physical context. In contrast, our approach can successfully generate concise verbal communication for the embodied assistant to effectively boost the performance of the cooperation as well as human users' perception of the assistant.

Towards Increasing the Robustness of Predictive Steering-Control Autonomous Navigation Systems Against Dash Cam Image Angle Perturbations Due to Pothole Encounters

Vehicle manufacturers are racing to create autonomous navigation and steering control algorithms for their vehicles. These software are made to handle various real-life scenarios such as obstacle avoidance and lane maneuvering. There is some ongoing research to incorporate pothole avoidance into these autonomous systems. However, there is very little research on the effect of hitting a pothole on the autonomous navigation software that uses cameras to make driving decisions. Perturbations in the camera angle when hitting a pothole can cause errors in the predicted steering angle. In this paper, we present a new model to compensate for such angle perturbations and reduce any errors in steering control prediction algorithms. We evaluate our model on perturbations of publicly available datasets and show our model can reduce the errors in the estimated steering angle from perturbed images to 2.3%, making autonomous steering control robust against the dash cam image angle perturbations induced when one wheel of a car goes over a pothole.