Metric Learning for Generalizing Spatial Relations to New Objects

Human-centered environments are rich with a wide variety of spatial relations between everyday objects. For autonomous robots to operate effectively in such environments, they should be able to reason about these relations and generalize them to objects with different shapes and sizes. For example, having learned to place a toy inside a basket, a robot should be able to generalize this concept using a spoon and a cup. This requires a robot to have the flexibility to learn arbitrary relations in a lifelong manner, making it challenging for an expert to pre-program it with sufficient knowledge to do so beforehand. In this paper, we address the problem of learning spatial relations by introducing a novel method from the perspective of distance metric learning. Our approach enables a robot to reason about the similarity between pairwise spatial relations, thereby enabling it to use its previous knowledge when presented with a new relation to imitate. We show how this makes it possible to learn arbitrary spatial relations from non-expert users using a small number of examples and in an interactive manner. Our extensive evaluation with real-world data demonstrates the effectiveness of our method in reasoning about a continuous spectrum of spatial relations and generalizing them to new objects.Comment: Accepted at the 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. The new Freiburg Spatial Relations Dataset and a demo video of our approach running on the PR-2 robot are available at our project website: http://spatialrelations.cs.uni-freiburg.d

Answer Set Programming Modulo `Space-Time'

We present ASP Modulo `Space-Time', a declarative representational and computational framework to perform commonsense reasoning about regions with both spatial and temporal components. Supported are capabilities for mixed qualitative-quantitative reasoning, consistency checking, and inferring compositions of space-time relations; these capabilities combine and synergise for applications in a range of AI application areas where the processing and interpretation of spatio-temporal data is crucial. The framework and resulting system is the only general KR-based method for declaratively reasoning about the dynamics of `space-time' regions as first-class objects. We present an empirical evaluation (with scalability and robustness results), and include diverse application examples involving interpretation and control tasks

Leveraging Large Language Models for Scalable Vector Graphics-Driven Image Understanding

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in natural language understanding and generation. However, their potential in computer vision remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce a new, exploratory approach that enables LLMs to process images using the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format. By leveraging the XML-based textual descriptions of SVG representations instead of raster images, we aim to bridge the gap between the visual and textual modalities, allowing LLMs to directly understand and manipulate images without the need for parameterized visual components. Our method facilitates simple image classification, generation, and in-context learning using only LLM capabilities. We demonstrate the promise of our approach across discriminative and generative tasks, highlighting its (i) robustness against distribution shift, (ii) substantial improvements achieved by tapping into the in-context learning abilities of LLMs, and (iii) image understanding and generation capabilities with human guidance. Our code, data, and models can be found here https://github.com/mu-cai/svg-llm