To guide a learner in mastering action skills, it is crucial for a coach to 1) reason through the learner's action execution and technical points (TechPoints), and 2) provide detailed, comprehensible feedback on what is done well and what can be improved. However, existing score-based action assessment methods are still far from reaching this practical scenario. To bridge this gap, we investigate a new task termed Descriptive Action Coaching (DescCoach) which requires the model to provide detailed commentary on what is done well and what can be improved beyond a simple quality score for action execution. To this end, we first build a new dataset named EE4D-DescCoach. Through an automatic annotation pipeline, our dataset goes beyond the existing action assessment datasets by providing detailed TechPoint-level commentary. Furthermore, we propose TechCoach, a new framework that explicitly incorporates TechPoint-level reasoning into the DescCoach process. The central to our method lies in the Context-aware TechPoint Reasoner, which enables TechCoach to learn TechPoint-related quality representation by querying visual context under the supervision of TechPoint-level coaching commentary. By leveraging the visual context and the TechPoint-related quality representation, a unified TechPoint-aware Action Assessor is then employed to provide the overall coaching commentary together with the quality score. Combining all of these, we establish a new benchmark for DescCoach and evaluate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments.

Error detection in procedural activities is essential for consistent and correct outcomes in AR-assisted and robotic systems. Existing methods often focus on temporal ordering errors or rely on static prototypes to represent normal actions. However, these approaches typically overlook the common scenario where multiple, distinct actions are valid following a given sequence of executed actions. This leads to two issues: (1) the model cannot effectively detect errors using static prototypes when the inference environment or action execution distribution differs from training; and (2) the model may also use the wrong prototypes to detect errors if the ongoing action label is not the same as the predicted one. To address this problem, we propose an Adaptive Multiple Normal Action Representation (AMNAR) framework. AMNAR predicts all valid next actions and reconstructs their corresponding normal action representations, which are compared against the ongoing action to detect errors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AMNAR achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the effectiveness of AMNAR and the importance of modeling multiple valid next actions in error detection. The code is available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/AMNAR.

In general, humans would grasp an object differently for different tasks, e.g., “grasping the handle of a knife to cut” vs. “grasping the blade to hand over”. In the field of robotic grasp pose detection research, some existing works consider this task-oriented grasping and made some progress, but they are generally constrained by low-DoF gripper type or non-cluttered setting, which is not applicable for human assistance in real life. With an aim to get more general and practical grasp models, in this paper, we investigate the problem named Task-Oriented 6-DoF Grasp Pose Detection in Clutters (TO6DGC), which extends the task-oriented problem to a more general 6-DOF Grasp Pose Detection in Cluttered (multi-object) scenario. To this end, we construct a large-scale 6-DoF task-oriented grasping dataset, 6-DoF Task Grasp (6DTG), which features 4391 cluttered scenes with over 2 million 6-DoF grasp poses. Each grasp is annotated with a specific task, involving 6 tasks and 198 objects in total. Moreover, we propose One-Stage TaskGrasp (OSTG), a strong baseline to address the TO6DGC problem. Our OSTG adopts a task-oriented point selection strategy to detect where to grasp, and a task-oriented grasp generation module to decide how to grasp given a specific task. To evaluate the effectiveness of OSTG, extensive experiments are conducted on 6DTG. The results show that our method outperforms various baselines on multiple metrics. Real robot experiments also verify that our OSTG has a better perception of the task-oriented grasp points and 6-DoF grasp poses.

Vision and Language Navigation (VLN) is a challenging task that requires agents to understand instructions and navigate to the destination in a visual environment. One of the key challenges in outdoor VLN is keeping track of which part of the instruction was completed. To alleviate this problem, previous works mainly focus on grounding the natural language to the visual input, but neglecting the crucial role of the agent's spatial position information in the grounding process. In this work, we first explore the substantial effect of spatial position locating on the grounding of outdoor VLN, drawing inspiration from human navigation. In real-world navigation scenarios, before planning a path to the destination, humans typically need to figure out their current location. This observation underscores the pivotal role of spatial localization in the navigation process. In this work, we introduce a novel framework, Locating before Planning (Loc4Plan), designed to incorporate spatial perception for action planning in outdoor VLN tasks. The main idea behind Loc4Plan is to perform the spatial localization before planning a decision action based on corresponding guidance, which comprises a block-aware spatial locating (BAL) module and a spatial-aware action planning (SAP) module. Specifically, to help the agent perceive its spatial location in the environment, we propose to learn a position predictor that measures how far the agent is from the next intersection for reflecting its position, which is achieved by the BAL module. After this locating process, we propose the PSA module to associate visual observations After the locating process, we propose the SAP module to incorporate spatial information to ground the corresponding guidance and enhance the precision of action planning. Extensive experiments on the Touchdown and map2seq datasets show that the proposed Loc4Plan outperforms the SOTA methods.

Action Quality Assessment (AQA) is a task that tries to answer how well an action is carried out. While remarkable progress has been achieved, existing works on AQA assume that all the training data are visible for training at one time, but do not enable continual learning on assessing new technical actions. In this work, we address such a Continual Learning problem in AQA (Continual-AQA), which urges a unified model to learn AQA tasks sequentially without forgetting. Our idea for modeling Continual-AQA is to sequentially learn a task-consistent score-discriminative feature distribution, in which the latent features express a strong correlation with the score labels regardless of the task or action types. From this perspective, we aim to mitigate the forgetting in Continual-AQA from two aspects. Firstly, to fuse the features of new and previous data into a score-discriminative distribution, a novel Feature-Score Correlation-Aware Rehearsal is proposed to store and reuse data from previous tasks with limited memory size. Secondly, an Action General-Specific Graph is developed to learn and decouple the action-general and action-specific knowledge so that the task-consistent score-discriminative features can be better extracted across various tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the contributions of proposed components. The comparisons with the existing continual learning methods additionally verify the effectiveness and versatility of our approach. Data and code are available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/Continual-AQA.