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Interaction with Large Language Models (LLMs) is primarily carried out via prompting. A prompt is a natural language instruction designed to elicit certain behaviour or output from a model. In theory, natural language prompts enable…
A long-term goal of reinforcement learning is to design agents that can autonomously interact and learn in the world. A critical challenge to such autonomy is the presence of irreversible states which require external assistance to recover…
Learning reward functions remains the bottleneck to equip a robot with a broad repertoire of skills. Large Language Models (LLM) contain valuable task-related knowledge that can potentially aid in the learning of reward functions. However,…
Due to their unique persuasive power, language-capable robots must be able to both act in line with human moral norms and clearly and appropriately communicate those norms. These requirements are complicated by the possibility that humans…
We argue that the direct experimental approaches to elucidate the architecture of higher brains may benefit from insights gained from exploring the possibilities and limits of artificial control architectures for robot systems. We present…
In this paper, we investigate the roles that social robots can take in physical exercise with human partners. In related work, robots or virtual intelligent agents take the role of a coach or instructor whereas in other approaches they are…
Robots operating alongside humans often encounter unfamiliar environments that make autonomous task completion challenging. Though improving models and increasing dataset size can enhance a robot's performance in unseen environments, data…
The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is a set of procedural tasks that tests an agent's ability to flexibly solve novel problems. While most ARC tasks are easy for humans, they are challenging for state-of-the-art AI. What makes…
Training generalist robot agents is an immensely difficult feat due to the requirement to perform a huge range of tasks in many different environments. We propose selectively training robots based on end-user preferences instead. Given a…
Intelligent agents such as robots are increasingly deployed in real-world, safety-critical settings. It is vital that these agents are able to explain the reasoning behind their decisions to human counterparts, however, their behavior is…
Assistive robotic arms enable users with physical disabilities to perform everyday tasks without relying on a caregiver. Unfortunately, the very dexterity that makes these arms useful also makes them challenging to teleoperate: the robot…
When a robot is asked to verbalize its plan it can do it in many ways. For example, a seemingly natural strategy is incremental, where the robot verbalizes its planned actions in plan order. However, an important aspect of this type of…
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…
With children talking to smart-speakers, smart-phones and even smart-microwaves daily, it is increasingly important to educate students on how these agents work-from underlying mechanisms to societal implications. Researchers are developing…
Purpose - Most industrial robots are still programmed using the typical teaching process, through the use of the robot teach pendant. This is a tedious and time-consuming task that requires some technical expertise, and hence new approaches…
Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) allows robots to learn skills from human users, but its effectiveness can suffer due to sub-optimal teaching, especially from untrained demonstrators. Active LfD aims to improve this by letting robots…
Robots are required to execute increasingly complex instructions in dynamic environments, which can lead to a disconnect between the user's intent and the robot's representation of the instructions. In this paper we present a natural…
Assistive robotic systems have shown growing potential to improve the quality of life of those with disabilities. As researchers explore the automation of various caregiving tasks, considerations for how the technology can still preserve…
Autonomous systems in remote locations have a high degree of autonomy and there is a need to explain what they are doing and why in order to increase transparency and maintain trust. Here, we describe a natural language chat interface that…
Language model-based instruction-following systems have lately shown increasing performance on many benchmark tasks, demonstrating the capability of adapting to a broad variety of instructions. However, such systems are often not designed…