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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

VirtualHome : learning to infer programs from synthetic videos of activities in the home

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

This project models complex activities that occur in a typical household. Programs - sequences of atomic actions and interactions - are used as a high-level, unambiguous representation of complex activities executable by an agent. However, no dataset of household activity programs currently exists. This project builds such a dataset by crowdsourcing programs of typical household activities, via a game-like interface used for teaching kids how to code. The most common atomic actions are implemented in the Unity3D game engine, and videos are recorded of an agent executing the collected programs in a simulated household environment. The VirtualHome simulator allows the creation of a large activity video dataset with rich groundtruth, enabling training and testing of video understanding models. Using the collected dataset, a sequence-to-sequence neural encoder-decoder model with visual attention is built, and learns to infer programs directly from videos. It achieves 46.2% accuracy for action inference.

Degree

thesis:*
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2017

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Jain, Shantanu
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Antonio Torralba.

Subjects

dc:subject × 1

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.
Language dc:language.iso
eng

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119527
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/119527

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Jain, Shantanu. VirtualHome : learning to infer programs from synthetic videos of activities in the home. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119527