This&That: Language-Gesture Controlled Video Generation for Robot Planning

Abstract

Clear, interpretable instructions are invaluable for complex tasks, helping to clarify goals and anticipate necessary steps. In this work, we propose a robot learning framework for communicating, planning, and executing a wide range of tasks, dubbed This&That. This&That solves general tasks by leveraging video generative models, which, through training on internet-scale data, contain rich physical and semantic context. Through this work, we tackle three fundamental challenges in video-based planning: 1) unambiguous task communication with simple human instructions, 2) controllable video gen-eration that respects user intent, and 3) translating visual plans into robot actions. This& That adds gesture conditioning alongside language to generate video predictions as a suc-cinct and unambiguous alternative to existing language-only methods, especially in complex and uncertain environments. These video predictions are then fed into a behavior cloning architecture dubbed Diffusion Video to Action (DiVA), which outperforms prior state-of-the-art behavior cloning and video-based planning methods by substantial margins. Project web-site: https://this-and-that-vid.github.io/this-and-thatl.