With the recent rise of large language models, vision-language models, and other general foundation models, there is growing potential for multimodal, multi-task robotics that can operate in diverse environments given natural language input. One such application is indoor navigation using natural language instructions. However, despite recent progress, this problem remains challenging due to the 3D spatial reasoning and semantic understanding required. Additionally, the language used may be imperfect or misaligned with the scene, further complicating the task. To address this challenge, we curate a benchmark dataset, IRef-VLA, for Interactive Referential Vision and Language-guided Action in 3D Scenes with imperfect references. IRef-VLA is the largest real-world dataset for the referential grounding task, consisting of over 11.5 K scanned 3D rooms from existing datasets, 7.6 M heuristically generated semantic relations, and 4.7 M referential statements. Our dataset also contains semantic object and room annotations, scene graphs, navigable free space annotations, and is augmented with statements where the language has imperfections or ambiguities. We verify the generalizability of our dataset by evaluating with state-of-the-art models to obtain a performance baseline and also develop a graphsearch baseline to demonstrate the performance bound and generation of alternatives using scene-graph knowledge. With this benchmark, we aim to provide a resource for 3D scene understanding that aids the development of robust, interactive navigation systems. The dataset and all source code is publicly released11https://github.com/HaochenZ11/IRef-VLA.

Interpreting object-referential language and grounding objects in 3D with spatial relations and attributes is essential for robots operating alongside humans. However, this task is often challenging due to the diversity of scenes, large number of fine-grained objects, and complex free-form nature of language references. Furthermore, in the 3D domain, obtaining large amounts of natural language training data is difficult. Thus, it is important for methods to learn from little data and zero-shot generalize to new environments. To address these challenges, we propose SORT3D, an approach that utilizes rich object attributes from 2D data and merges a heuristics-based spatial reasoning toolbox with the ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform sequential reasoning. Importantly, our method does not require text-to-3D data for training and can be applied zero-shot to unseen environments. We show that SORT3D achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on complex view-dependent grounding tasks on two benchmarks. We also implement the pipeline to run real-time on two autonomous vehicles and demonstrate that our approach can be used for object-goal navigation on previously unseen real-world environments. All source code for the system pipeline is publicly released.1

The rise of interactive recommendation assistants has led to a novel domain of natural language (NL) recommendation that would benefit from improved multi-aspect reasoning to retrieve relevant items based on NL statements of preference. Such preference statements often involve multiple aspects, e.g., "I would like meat lasagna but I'm watching my weight". Unfortunately, progress in this domain is slowed by the lack of annotated data. To address this gap, we curate a novel dataset which captures logical reasoning over multi-aspect, NL preference-based queries and a set of multiple-choice, multi-aspect item descriptions. We focus on the recipe domain in which multi-aspect preferences are often encountered due to the complexity of the human diet. The goal of publishing our dataset is to provide a benchmark for joint progress in three key areas: 1) structured, multi-aspect NL reasoning with a variety of properties (e.g., level of specificity, presence of negation, and the need for commonsense, analogical, and/or temporal inference), 2) the ability of recommender systems to respond to NL preference utterances, and 3) explainable NL recommendation facilitated by aspect extraction and reasoning. We perform experiments using a variety of methods (sparse and dense retrieval, zero- and few-shot reasoning with large language models) in two settings: a monolithic setting which uses the full query and an aspect-based setting which isolates individual query aspects and aggregates the results. GPT-3 results in much stronger performance than other methods with 73% zero-shot accuracy and 83% few-shot accuracy in the monolithic setting. Aspect-based GPT-3, which facilitates structured explanations, also shows promise with 68% zero-shot accuracy. These results establish baselines for future research into explainable recommendations via multi-aspect preference-based NL reasoning.