# GoalNet: Inferring Conjunctive Goal Predicates from Human Plan Demonstrations for Robot Instruction Following

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.07081 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07081/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01734/) (2019)
- [VirtualHome: Simulating Household Activities via Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07011/) (2018)
- [Advances in Pre-Training Distributed Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09405/) (2017)
- [Mapping Instructions to Actions in 3D Environments with Visual Goal Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00786/) (2018)
- [What to talk about and how? Selective Generation using LSTMs with Coarse-to-Fine Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.00838/) (2015)
- [Situated Mapping of Sequential Instructions to Actions with Single-step Reward Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10209/) (2018)
- [Adapting Everyday Manipulation Skills to Varied Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02743/) (2018)
- [TANGO: Commonsense Generalization in Predicting Tool Interactions for Mobile Manipulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04556/) (2021)
- [ToolNet: Using Commonsense Generalization for Predicting Tool Use for Robot Plan Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05478/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Our goal is to enable a robot to learn how to sequence its actions to perform tasks specified as natural language instructions, given successful demonstrations from a human partner. The ability to plan high-level tasks can be factored as (i) inferring specific goal predicates that characterize the task implied by a language instruction for a given world state and (ii) synthesizing a feasible goal-reaching action-sequence with such predicates. For the former, we leverage a neural network prediction model, while utilizing a symbolic planner for the latter. We introduce a novel neuro-symbolic model, GoalNet, for contextual and task dependent inference of goal predicates from human demonstrations and linguistic task descriptions. GoalNet combines (i) learning, where dense representations are acquired for language instruction and the world state that enables generalization to novel settings and (ii) planning, where the cause-effect modeling by the symbolic planner eschews irrelevant predicates facilitating multi-stage decision making in large domains. GoalNet demonstrates a significant improvement (51%) in the task completion rate in comparison to a state-of-the-art rule-based approach on a benchmark data set displaying linguistic variations, particularly for multi-stage instructions.