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A robot's ability to understand or ground natural language instructions is fundamentally tied to its knowledge about the surrounding world. We present an approach to grounding natural language utterances in the context of factual…
Humans can ground natural language commands to tasks at both abstract and fine-grained levels of specificity. For instance, a human forklift operator can be instructed to perform a high-level action, like "grab a pallet" or a low-level…
This paper presents a framework towards prompting multi-robot teams with high-level tasks using natural language expressions. Our objective is to use the reasoning capabilities demonstrated by recent language models in understanding and…
Reinforcement learning is a promising framework for solving control problems, but its use in practical situations is hampered by the fact that reward functions are often difficult to engineer. Specifying goals and tasks for autonomous…
Natural language understanding for robotics can require substantial domain- and platform-specific engineering. For example, for mobile robots to pick-and-place objects in an environment to satisfy human commands, we can specify the language…
This paper investigates robot manipulation based on human instruction with ambiguous requests. The intent is to compensate for imperfect natural language via visual observations. Early symbolic methods, based on manually defined symbols,…
We present a new method, PARsing And visual GrOuNding (ParaGon), for grounding natural language in object placement tasks. Natural language generally describes objects and spatial relations with compositionality and ambiguity, two major…
Recent work has shown that deep reinforcement-learning agents can learn to follow language-like instructions from infrequent environment rewards. However, this places on environment designers the onus of designing language-conditional…
Our goal is to enable a robot to learn how to sequence its actions to perform tasks specified as natural language instructions, given successful demonstrations from a human partner. The ability to plan high-level tasks can be factored as…
Understanding and following directions provided by humans can enable robots to navigate effectively in unknown situations. We present FollowNet, an end-to-end differentiable neural architecture for learning multi-modal navigation policies.…
We aim to control a robot to physically behave in the real world following any high-level language command like "cartwheel" or "kick". Although human motion datasets exist, this task remains particularly challenging since generative models…
Explainable AI techniques that describe agent reward functions can enhance human-robot collaboration in a variety of settings. One context where human understanding of agent reward functions is particularly beneficial is in the value…
Using natural language to give instructions to robots is challenging, since natural language understanding is still largely an open problem. In this paper we address this problem by restricting our attention to commands modeled as one…
While deep reinforcement learning techniques have led to agents that are successfully able to learn to perform a number of tasks that had been previously unlearnable, these techniques are still susceptible to the longstanding problem of…
Observing a human demonstrator manipulate objects provides a rich, scalable and inexpensive source of data for learning robotic policies. However, transferring skills from human videos to a robotic manipulator poses several challenges, not…
Humans are able to identify a referred visual object in a complex scene via a few rounds of natural language communications. Success communication requires both parties to engage and learn to adapt for each other. In this paper, we…
High-level human instructions often correspond to behaviors with multiple implicit steps. In order for robots to be useful in the real world, they must be able to to reason over both motions and intermediate goals implied by human…
Natural language-based robotic navigation remains a challenging problem due to the human knowledge of navigation constraints, and destination is not directly compatible with the robot knowledge base. In this paper, we aim to translate…
Humans effortlessly "program" one another by communicating goals and desires in natural language. In contrast, humans program robotic behaviours by indicating desired object locations and poses to be achieved, by providing RGB images of…
Most reinforcement learning algorithms are inefficient for learning multiple tasks in complex robotic systems, where different tasks share a set of actions. In such environments a compound policy may be learnt with shared neural network…