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Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents deployed in real-world environments face degradation from sensor faults, actuator wear, and environmental shifts, yet lack intrinsic mechanisms to detect and diagnose these failures. We present an…

Despite recent advances in natural language understanding and generation, and decades of research on the development of conversational bots, building automated agents that can carry on rich open-ended conversations with humans "in the wild"…

Recently, collaborative robots have begun to train humans to achieve complex tasks, and the mutual information exchange between them can lead to successful robot-human collaborations. In this paper we demonstrate the application and…

Current research in dialogue systems is focused on conversational assistants working on short conversations in either task-oriented or open domain settings. In this paper, we focus on improving task-based conversational assistants online,…

The ability to learn and refine behavior after deployment has become ever more important for robots as we design them to operate in unstructured environments like households. In this work, we design a new learning system based on large…

Modern virtual personal assistants provide a convenient interface for completing daily tasks via voice commands. An important consideration for these assistants is the ability to recover from automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural…

Uncertainty is a major difficulty in endowing robots with autonomy. Robots often fail due to unexpected events. In robot contact tasks are often design to empirically look for force thresholds to define state transitions in a Markov chain…

Patients must possess the knowledge necessary to actively participate in their care. We present NoteAid-Chatbot, a conversational AI that promotes patient understanding via a novel 'learning as conversation' framework, built on a…

This paper presents a novel human-robot interaction setup for robot and human learning of symbolic language for identifying robot homeostatic needs. The robot and human learn to use and respond to the same language symbols that convey…

Acoustically expressed emotions can make communication with a robot more efficient. Detecting emotions like anger could provide a clue for the robot indicating unsafe/undesired situations. Recently, several deep neural network-based models…

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) ap proaches often struggle to learn effective policies under sparse reward conditions, necessitating the manual design of complex, task-specific reward functions. To address this limitation, rein…

Robots can learn preferences from human demonstrations, but their success depends on how informative these demonstrations are. Being informative is unfortunately very challenging, because during teaching, people typically get no…

Human-to-human conversation is not just talking and listening. It is an incremental process where participants continually establish a common understanding to rule out misunderstandings. Current language understanding methods for…

Human behavior expression and experience are inherently multi-modal, and characterized by vast individual and contextual heterogeneity. To achieve meaningful human-computer and human-robot interactions, multi-modal models of the users…

This paper proposes a method to combine reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning (IL) using a dynamic, performance-based modulation over learning signals. The proposed method combines RL and behavioral cloning (IL), or corrective…

In the field of Geriatronics, enabling effective and transparent communication between humans and robots is crucial for enhancing the acceptance and performance of assistive robots. Our early-stage research project investigates the…

Efficient use of the space in an elevator is very necessary for a service robot, due to the need for reducing the amount of time caused by waiting for the next elevator. To provide a solution for this, we propose a hybrid approach that…

Ambiguity and noise in natural language instructions create a significant barrier towards adopting autonomous systems into safety critical workflows involving humans and machines. In this paper, we propose to build on recent advances in…

Human collaborators coordinate effectively their actions through both verbal and non-verbal communication. We believe that the the same should hold for human-robot teams. We propose a formalism that enables a robot to decide optimally…

As home robotics gains traction, robots are increasingly integrated into households, offering companionship and assistance. Quadruped robots, particularly those resembling dogs, have emerged as popular alternatives for traditional pets.…