Keisuke Shirai

Keisuke Shirai, Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez, Masashi Hamaya et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are accelerating the development of language-guided robot planners. Meanwhile, symbolic planners offer the advantage of interpretability. This paper proposes a new task that bridges these two trends, namely, multimodal planning problem specification. The aim is to generate a problem description (PD), a machine-readable file used by the planners to find a plan. By generating PDs from language instruction and scene observation, we can drive symbolic planners in a language-guided framework. We propose a Vision-Language Interpreter (ViLaIn), a new framework that generates PDs using state-of-the-art LLM and vision-language models. ViLaIn can refine generated PDs via error message feedback from the symbolic planner. Our aim is to answer the question: How accurately can ViLaIn and the symbolic planner generate valid robot plans? To evaluate ViLaIn, we introduce a novel dataset called the problem description generation (ProDG) dataset. The framework is evaluated with four new evaluation metrics. Experimental results show that ViLaIn can generate syntactically correct problems with more than 99\% accuracy and valid plans with more than 58\% accuracy. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/omron-sinicx/ViLaIn.

Masaki Murooka, Tomohiro Motoda, Ryoichi Nakajo et al.

We present RoboManipBaselines, an open-source software framework for imitation learning research in robotic manipulation. The framework supports the entire imitation learning pipeline, including data collection, policy training, and rollout, across both simulation and real-world environments. Its design emphasizes integration through a consistent workflow, generality across diverse environments and robot platforms, extensibility for easily adding new robots, tasks, and policies, and reproducibility through evaluations using publicly available datasets. RoboManipBaselines systematically implements the core components of imitation learning: environment, dataset, and policy. Through a unified interface, the framework supports multiple simulators and real robot environments, as well as multimodal sensors and a wide variety of policy models. We further present benchmark evaluations in both simulation and real-world environments and introduce several research applications, including data augmentation, integration with tactile models, interactive robotic systems, 3D sensing evaluation, and hardware extensions. These results demonstrate that RoboManipBaselines provides a useful foundation for advancing research and experimental validation in robotic manipulation using imitation learning. https://isri-aist.github.io/RoboManipBaselines-ProjectPage

Keisuke Shirai, Atsushi Hashimoto, Taichi Nishimura et al.

We present a new multimodal dataset called Visual Recipe Flow, which enables us to learn each cooking action result in a recipe text. The dataset consists of object state changes and the workflow of the recipe text. The state change is represented as an image pair, while the workflow is represented as a recipe flow graph (r-FG). The image pairs are grounded in the r-FG, which provides the cross-modal relation. With our dataset, one can try a range of applications, from multimodal commonsense reasoning and procedural text generation.

Jeremy Siburian, Keisuke Shirai, Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez et al.

While recent advances in vision-language models have accelerated the development of language-guided robot planners, their black-box nature often lacks safety guarantees and interpretability crucial for real-world deployment. Conversely, classical symbolic planners offer rigorous safety verification but require significant expert knowledge for setup. To bridge the current gap, this paper proposes ViLaIn-TAMP, a hybrid planning framework for enabling verifiable, interpretable, and autonomous robot behaviors. ViLaIn-TAMP comprises three main components: (1) a Vision-Language Interpreter (ViLaIn) adapted from previous work that converts multimodal inputs into structured problem specifications, (2) a modular Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) system that grounds these specifications in actionable trajectory sequences through symbolic and geometric constraint reasoning, and (3) a corrective planning (CP) module which receives concrete feedback on failed solution attempts and feed them with constraints back to ViLaIn to refine the specification. We design challenging manipulation tasks in a cooking domain and evaluate our framework. Experimental results demonstrate that ViLaIn-TAMP outperforms a VLM-as-a-planner baseline by 18% in mean success rate, and that adding the CP module boosts mean success rate by 32%.

Tomohiro Nishimoto, Taichi Nishimura, Koki Yamamoto et al.

This paper introduces BioVL-QR, a biochemical vision-and-language dataset comprising 23 egocentric experiment videos, corresponding protocols, and vision-and-language alignments. A major challenge in understanding biochemical videos is detecting equipment, reagents, and containers because of the cluttered environment and indistinguishable objects. Previous studies assumed manual object annotation, which is costly and time-consuming. To address the issue, we focus on Micro QR Codes. However, detecting objects using only Micro QR Codes is still difficult due to blur and occlusion caused by object manipulation. To overcome this, we propose an object labeling method combining a Micro QR Code detector with an off-the-shelf hand object detector. As an application of the method and BioVL-QR, we tackled the task of localizing the procedural steps in an instructional video. The experimental results show that using Micro QR Codes and our method improves biochemical video understanding. Data and code are available through https://nishi10mo.github.io/BioVL-QR/

Keyaki Ohno, Hirotaka Kameko, Keisuke Shirai et al.

Geoparsing is the task of estimating the latitude and longitude (coordinates) of location expressions in texts. Geoparsing must deal with the ambiguity of the expressions that indicate multiple locations with the same notation. For evaluating geoparsing systems, several corpora have been proposed in previous work. However, these corpora are small-scale and suffer from the coverage of location expressions on general domains. In this paper, we propose Wikipedia Hyperlink-based Location Linking (WHLL), a novel method to construct a large-scale corpus for geoparsing from Wikipedia articles. WHLL leverages hyperlinks in Wikipedia to annotate multiple location expressions with coordinates. With this method, we constructed the WHLL corpus, a new large-scale corpus for geoparsing. The WHLL corpus consists of 1.3M articles, each containing about 7.8 unique location expressions. 45.6% of location expressions are ambiguous and refer to more than one location with the same notation. In each article, location expressions of the article title and those hyperlinks to other articles are assigned with coordinates. By utilizing hyperlinks, we can accurately assign location expressions with coordinates even with ambiguous location expressions in the texts. Experimental results show that there remains room for improvement by disambiguating location expressions.

Keisuke Shirai, Hirotaka Kameko, Shinsuke Mori

Machine comprehension of procedural texts is essential for reasoning about the steps and automating the procedures. However, this requires identifying entities within a text and resolving the relationships between the entities. Previous work focused on the cooking domain and proposed a framework to convert a recipe text into a flow graph (FG) representation. In this work, we propose a framework based on the recipe FG for flow graph prediction of open-domain procedural texts. To investigate flow graph prediction performance in non-cooking domains, we introduce the wikiHow-FG corpus from articles on wikiHow, a website of how-to instruction articles. In experiments, we consider using the existing recipe corpus and performing domain adaptation from the cooking to the target domain. Experimental results show that the domain adaptation models achieve higher performance than those trained only on the cooking or target domain data.

Keisuke Shirai, Kazuma Hashimoto, Akiko Eriguchi et al.

Neural text generation models conditioning on given input (e.g. machine translation and image captioning) are usually trained by maximum likelihood estimation of target text. However, the trained models suffer from various types of errors at inference time. In this paper, we propose to suppress an arbitrary type of errors by training the text generation model in a reinforcement learning framework, where we use a trainable reward function that is capable of discriminating between references and sentences containing the targeted type of errors. We create such negative examples by artificially injecting the targeted errors to the references. In experiments, we focus on two error types, repeated and dropped tokens in model-generated text. The experimental results show that our method can suppress the generation errors and achieve significant improvements on two machine translation and two image captioning tasks.