Kentaro Yamada


2024

pdf
GesNavi: Gesture-guided Outdoor Vision-and-Language Navigation
Aman Jain | Teruhisa Misu | Kentaro Yamada | Hitomi Yanaka
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task involves navigating mobility using linguistic commands and has application in developing interfaces for autonomous mobility. In reality, natural human communication also encompasses non-verbal cues like hand gestures and gaze. These gesture-guided instructions have been explored in Human-Robot Interaction systems for effective interaction, particularly in object-referring expressions. However, a notable gap exists in tackling gesture-based demonstrative expressions in outdoor VLN task. To address this, we introduce a novel dataset for gesture-guided outdoor VLN instructions with demonstrative expressions, designed with a focus on complex instructions requiring multi-hop reasoning between the multiple input modalities. In addition, our work also includes a comprehensive analysis of the collected data and a comparative evaluation against the existing datasets.

pdf
Action Inference for Destination Prediction in Vision-and-Language Navigation
Anirudh Kondapally | Kentaro Yamada | Hitomi Yanaka
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) encompasses interacting with autonomous vehicles using language and visual input from the perspective of mobility.Most of the previous work in this field focuses on spatial reasoning and the semantic grounding of visual information.However, reasoning based on the actions of pedestrians in the scene is not much considered.In this study, we provide a VLN dataset for destination prediction with action inference to investigate the extent to which current VLN models perform action inference.We introduce a crowd-sourcing process to construct a dataset for this task in two steps: (1) collecting beliefs about the next action for a pedestrian and (2) annotating the destination considering the pedestrian’s next action.Our benchmarking results of the models on destination prediction lead us to believe that the models can learn to reason about the effect of the action and the next action on the destination to a certain extent.However, there is still much scope for improvement.