English

LILA: Language-Informed Latent Actions

Robotics 2021-11-08 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Human-Computer Interaction Machine Learning

Abstract

We introduce Language-Informed Latent Actions (LILA), a framework for learning natural language interfaces in the context of human-robot collaboration. LILA falls under the shared autonomy paradigm: in addition to providing discrete language inputs, humans are given a low-dimensional controller - e.g., a 2 degree-of-freedom (DoF) joystick that can move left/right and up/down - for operating the robot. LILA learns to use language to modulate this controller, providing users with a language-informed control space: given an instruction like "place the cereal bowl on the tray," LILA may learn a 2-DoF space where one dimension controls the distance from the robot's end-effector to the bowl, and the other dimension controls the robot's end-effector pose relative to the grasp point on the bowl. We evaluate LILA with real-world user studies, where users can provide a language instruction while operating a 7-DoF Franka Emika Panda Arm to complete a series of complex manipulation tasks. We show that LILA models are not only more sample efficient and performant than imitation learning and end-effector control baselines, but that they are also qualitatively preferred by users.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.03205,
  title  = {LILA: Language-Informed Latent Actions},
  author = {Siddharth Karamcheti and Megha Srivastava and Percy Liang and Dorsa Sadigh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.03205},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted at the 5th Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL). Joint first authorship. 21 Pages, 11 Figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:27:03.712Z