VirtualHome : simulating household activities via programs
Author(s)
Puig Fernandez, Xavier(Francesc Xavier)
DownloadFull printable version (5.177Mb)
Alternative title
Virtual Home : simulating household activities via programs
Simulating household activities via programs
Other Contributors
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Advisor
Antonio Torralba.
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
In order to learn to perform complex activities, autonomous agents need to know the sequences of actions needed to reach a given task. In this thesis, we propose to use programs, i.e., sequences of atomic actions and interactions, as a high level representation of complex tasks. Programs are interesting because they provide a non-ambiguous representation of a task, and allow agents to execute them. However, nowadays, there is no database providing this type of information. Towards this goal, we first crowd-source programs for a variety of activities that happen in people's homes, via a game-like interface used for teaching kids how to code. Using the collected dataset, we show how we can learn to extract programs directly from natural language descriptions or from videos. We then implement the most common atomic (inter)actions in the Unity3D game engine, and use our programs to "drive" an artificial agent to execute tasks in a simulated household environment. Our VirtualHome simulator allows us to create a large activity video dataset with rich ground-truth, enabling training and testing of video understanding models. We further showcase examples of our agent performing tasks in our VirtualHome based on language descriptions.
Description
Thesis: S.M. in Computer Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2018. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Includes bibliographical references (pages 53-55).
Date issued
2018Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer SciencePublisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Keywords
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.