We present a novel approach to automatically synthesize “wayfinding instructions” for an embodied robot agent. In contrast to prior approaches that are heavily reliant on human-annotated datasets designed exclusively for specific simulation platforms, our algorithm uses in-context learning to condition an LLM to generate instructions using just a few references. Using an LLM-based Visual Question Answering strategy, we gather detailed information about the environment which is used by the LLM for instruction synthesis. We implement our approach on multiple simulation platforms including Matterport3D, AI Habitat and ThreeDWorld, thereby demonstrating its platform-agnostic nature. We subjectively evaluate our approach via a user study and observe that 83.3% of users find the synthesized instructions accurately capture the details of the environment and show characteristics similar to those of human-generated instructions. Further, we conduct zero-shot navigation with multiple approaches on the REVERIE dataset using the generated instructions, and observe very close correlation with the baseline on standard success metrics (< 1% change in SR), quantifying the viability of generated instructions in replacing human-annotated data. We finally discuss the applicability of our approach in enabling a generalizable evaluation of embodied navigation policies. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first LLM-driven approach capable of generating “human-like” instructions in a platform-agnostic manner, without training.

The choice of input text prompt plays a critical role in the performance of Vision-Language Pretrained (VLP) models such as CLIP. We present APoLLo, a unified multi-modal approach that combines Adapter and Prompt learning for Vision-Language models. Our method is designed to substantially improve the generalization capabilities of VLP models when they are fine-tuned in a few-shot setting. We introduce trainable cross-attention-based adapter layers in conjunction with vision and language encoders to strengthen the alignment between the two modalities. We enforce consistency between the respective encoder branches (receiving augmented inputs) to prevent overfitting in downstream tasks. Our method is evaluated on three representative tasks: generalization to novel classes, cross-dataset evaluation, and unseen domain shifts. In practice, APoLLo achieves a relative gain up to 6.03% over MaPLe (SOTA) on novel classes for 10 diverse image recognition datasets.