LEGO: Learning EGOcentric Action Frame Generation via Visual Instruction Tuning

Generating instructional images of human daily actions from an egocentric viewpoint serves a key step towards efficient skill transfer. In this paper, we introduce a novel problem -- egocentric action frame generation. The goal is to synthesize the action frame conditioning on the user prompt question and an input egocentric image that captures the user's environment. Notably, existing egocentric action datasets lack the detailed annotations that describe the execution of actions. Additionally, the existing diffusion-based image manipulation models are sub-optimal in controlling the state transition of an action in egocentric image pixel space because of the domain gap. To this end, we propose to Learn EGOcentric (LEGO) action frame generation via visual instruction tuning. First, we introduce a prompt enhancement scheme to generate enriched action descriptions from a visual large language model (VLLM) by visual instruction tuning. Then we propose a novel method to leverage image and text embeddings from VLLM as additional conditioning to improve the performance of a diffusion model. We validate our model on two egocentric datasets -- Ego4D and Epic-Kitchens. Our experiments show prominent improvement over prior image manipulation models in both quantitative and qualitative evaluation. We also conduct detailed ablation studies and analysis to provide insights in our method.