Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2023

DiffVL

Scaling Up Soft Body Manipulation using Vision-Language Driven Differentiable Physics

(A) A dumpling making video; (B) The annotator interacts with our GUI tool to create DiffVL tasks; (C) A DiffVL task contains a sequence of 3D scenes along with natural language instructions to guide the solver; (D) DiffVL leverages a large language model to compile instructions into optimization programs consisting of vision elements; (E) The optimization program guides the solver to solve the task in the end.

Abstract

Combining gradient-based trajectory optimization with differentiable physics simulation is an efficient technique for solving soft-body manipulation problems. Using a well-crafted optimization objective, the solver can quickly converge onto a valid trajectory. However, writing the appropriate objective functions requires expert knowledge, making it difficult to collect a large set of naturalistic problems from non-expert users. We introduce DiffVL, a method that enables non-expert users to communicate soft-body manipulation tasks — a combination of vision and natural language, given in multiple stages — that can be readily leveraged by a differential physics solver. We have developed GUI tools that enable non-expert users to specify 100 tasks inspired by real-life soft-body manipulations from online videos, which we’ll make public. We leverage large language models to translate task descriptions into machine-interpretable optimization objectives. The optimization objectives can help differentiable physics solvers to solve these long-horizon multistage tasks that are challenging for previous baselines.

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Associated Researchers

Zhiao Huang

University of California, San Diego

Feng Chen

Tsinghua University

Chunru Lin

UMass Amherst

Hao Su

University of California, San Diego

Chuang Gan

UMass Amherst

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