CALVIN: A Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Policy Learning for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation Tasks
This addresses the problem of enabling general-purpose robots to follow complex language commands for daily tasks, though it is incremental as it builds on existing vision-and-language datasets.
The authors introduced CALVIN, a simulated benchmark for training robots to perform long-horizon manipulation tasks based on human language instructions, and found that a baseline model performed poorly, indicating a need for improved agents.
General-purpose robots coexisting with humans in their environment must learn to relate human language to their perceptions and actions to be useful in a range of daily tasks. Moreover, they need to acquire a diverse repertoire of general-purpose skills that allow composing long-horizon tasks by following unconstrained language instructions. In this paper, we present CALVIN (Composing Actions from Language and Vision), an open-source simulated benchmark to learn long-horizon language-conditioned tasks. Our aim is to make it possible to develop agents that can solve many robotic manipulation tasks over a long horizon, from onboard sensors, and specified only via human language. CALVIN tasks are more complex in terms of sequence length, action space, and language than existing vision-and-language task datasets and supports flexible specification of sensor suites. We evaluate the agents in zero-shot to novel language instructions and to novel environments and objects. We show that a baseline model based on multi-context imitation learning performs poorly on CALVIN, suggesting that there is significant room for developing innovative agents that learn to relate human language to their world models with this benchmark.