Multi-Target Embodied Question Answering

Licheng Yu, Xinlei Chen, Georgia Gkioxari, Mohit Bansal, Tamara L. Berg, Dhruv Batra; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019, pp. 6309-6318

Embodied Question Answering (EQA) is a relatively new task where an agent is asked to answer questions about its environment from egocentric perception. EQA as introduced in [8] makes the fundamental assumption that every question, e.g., "what color is the car?", has exactly one target ("car") being inquired about. This assumption puts a direct limitation on the abilities of the agent. We present a generalization of EQA -- Multi-Target EQA (MT-EQA). Specifically, we study questions that have multiple targets in them, such as "Is the dresser in the bedroom bigger than the oven in the kitchen?", where the agent has to navigate to multiple locations ("dresser in bedroom", "oven in kitchen") and perform comparative reasoning ("dresser" bigger than "oven") before it can answer a question. Such questions require the development of entirely new modules or components in the agent. To address this, we propose a modular architecture composed of a program generator, a controller, a navigator, and a VQA module. The program generator converts the given question into sequential executable sub-programs; the navigator guides the agent to multiple locations pertinent to the navigation-related sub-programs; and the controller learns to select relevant observations along its path. These observations are then fed to the VQA module to predict the answer. We perform detailed analysis for each of the model components and show that our joint model can outperform previous methods and strong baselines by a significant margin.