Multimedia Generative Script Learning for Task Planning

Goal-oriented generative script learning aims to generate subsequent steps based on a goal, which is an essential task to assist robots in performing stereotypical activities of daily life. We show that the performance of this task can be improved if historical states are not just captured by the linguistic instructions given to people, but are augmented with the additional information provided by accompanying images. Therefore, we propose a new task, Multimedia Generative Script Learning, to generate subsequent steps by tracking historical states in both text and vision modalities, as well as presenting the first benchmark containing 2,338 tasks and 31,496 steps with descriptive images. We aim to generate scripts that are visual-state trackable, inductive for unseen tasks, and diverse in their individual steps. We propose to encode visual state changes through a multimedia selective encoder, transferring knowledge from previously observed tasks using a retrieval-augmented decoder, and presenting the distinct information at each step by optimizing a diversity-oriented contrastive learning objective. We define metrics to evaluate both generation quality and inductive quality. Experiment results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms strong baselines.