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As intelligent agents transition from controlled to uncontrolled environments, they face challenges that sometimes exceed their operational capabilities. In many scenarios, they rely on assistance from bystanders to overcome those…
Robot-to-human handovers often rely on static, open-loop strategies (or, at best, approaches that adapt only the position), which generally do not consider how the object will be grasped by the human, thus requiring the user to adapt. This…
A remote collaboration setup allows an expert to instruct a remotely located novice user to help them with a task. Advanced solutions exist in the field of remote guidance and telemanipulation, however, we lack a device that combines these…
Many programmers, when they encounter an error, would like to have the benefit of automatic fix suggestions---as long as they are, most of the time, adequate. Initial research in this direction has generally limited itself to specific…
Pick-and-place is one of the fundamental tasks in robotics research. However, the attention has been mostly focused on the ``pick'' task, leaving the ``place'' task relatively unexplored. In this paper, we address the problem of placing…
This paper presents a general-purpose formulation of a large class of discrete-time planning problems, with hybrid state and control-spaces, as factored transition systems. Factoring allows state transitions to be described as the…
Recently developed pretrained models can encode rich world knowledge expressed in multiple modalities, such as text and images. However, the outputs of these models cannot be integrated into algorithms to solve sequential decision-making…
Continuously learning to solve unseen tasks with limited experience has been extensively pursued in meta-learning and continual learning, but with restricted assumptions such as accessible task distributions, independently and identically…
When a robot learns from human examples, most approaches assume that the human partner provides examples of optimal behavior. However, there are applications in which the robot learns from non-expert humans. We argue that the robot should…
Background: The state of the art in software engineering consists of a myriad of contributions and the gaps between them; it is difficult to characterize. Questions: In order to help understanding the state of the art, can we identify gaps…
In order to ensure efficient flow of goods in an automated warehouse and to guarantee its continuous distribution to/from picking stations in an effective way, decisions about which goods will be delivered to which particular picking…
Job security can never be taken for granted, especially in times of rapid, widespread and unexpected social and economic change. These changes can force workers to transition to new jobs. This may be because new technologies emerge or…
An active approach to fault tolerance is essential for robot swarms to achieve long-term autonomy. Previous efforts have focused on responding to spontaneous electro-mechanical faults and failures. However, many faults occur gradually over…
While assistive robots have much potential to help older people with frailty-related needs, there are few in use. There is a gap between what is developed in laboratories and what would be viable in real-world contexts. Through a series of…
Detecting and adapting to catastrophic failures in robotic systems requires a robot to learn its new dynamics quickly and safely to best accomplish its goals. To address this challenging problem, we propose probabilistically-safe, online…
Consumer applications are becoming increasingly smarter and most of them have to run on device ecosystems. Potential benefits are for example enabling cross-device interaction and seamless user experiences. Essential for today's smart…
A proactive dialogue system has the ability to proactively lead the conversation. Different from the general chatbots which only react to the user, proactive dialogue systems can be used to achieve some goals, e.g., to recommend some items…
A widely used strategy to discover and understand language model mechanisms is circuit analysis. A circuit is a minimal subgraph of a model's computation graph that executes a specific task. We identify a gap in existing circuit discovery…
Cross-task generalization is a core challenge in open-world robotic manipulation, and the key lies in extracting transferable manipulation knowledge from seen tasks. Recent in-context learning approaches leverage seen task demonstrations to…
Robot skills systems are meant to reduce robot setup time for new manufacturing tasks. Yet, for dexterous, contact-rich tasks, it is often difficult to find the right skill parameters. One strategy is to learn these parameters by allowing…