Action-conditioned Benchmarking of Robotic Video Prediction Models: a Comparative Study

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new benchmarking method for robotic video prediction models that evaluates their effectiveness in guiding action decisions by inferring robot actions from predicted frames, highlighting discrepancies with traditional perceptual metrics.

Contribution

The study proposes an action inference-based metric for evaluating video prediction models, providing a more task-relevant assessment for robotic planning applications.

Findings

High perceptual scores do not guarantee accurate action inference.

Many models perform poorly in action inference despite good perceptual quality.

The new metric better predicts a model's usefulness in robot planning.

Abstract

A defining characteristic of intelligent systems is the ability to make action decisions based on the anticipated outcomes. Video prediction systems have been demonstrated as a solution for predicting how the future will unfold visually, and thus, many models have been proposed that are capable of predicting future frames based on a history of observed frames~(and sometimes robot actions). However, a comprehensive method for determining the fitness of different video prediction models at guiding the selection of actions is yet to be developed. Current metrics assess video prediction models based on human perception of frame quality. In contrast, we argue that if these systems are to be used to guide action, necessarily, the actions the robot performs should be encoded in the predicted frames. In this paper, we are proposing a new metric to compare different video prediction models based on this argument. More specifically, we propose an action inference system and quantitatively rank different models based on how well we can infer the robot actions from the predicted frames. Our extensive experiments show that models with high perceptual scores can perform poorly in the proposed action inference tests and thus, may not be suitable options to be used in robot planning systems.