PlaTe: Visually-Grounded Planning With Transformers in Procedural Tasks

In this work, we study the problem of how to leverage instructional videos to facilitate the understanding of human decision-making processes, focusing on training a model with the ability to plan a goal-directed procedure from real-world videos. Learning structured and plannable state and action spaces directly from unstructured videos is the key technical challenge of our task. There are two problems: first, the appearance gap between the training and validation datasets could be large for unstructured videos; second, these gaps lead to decision errors that compound over the steps. We address these limitations with
Pla
nning
T
ransform
e
r (PlaTe), which has the advantage of circumventing the compounding prediction errors that occur with single-step models during long model-based rollouts. Our method simultaneously learns the latent state and action information of assigned tasks and the representations of the decision-making process from human demonstrations. Experiments conducted on real-world instructional videos show that our method can achieve a better performance in reaching the indicated goal than previous algorithms. We also validated the possibility of applying procedural tasks on a UR-5 platform. Please see
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