Related papers: RECON: Reducing Causal Confusion with Human-Placed…
To act in the world, robots rely on a representation of salient task aspects: for example, to carry a coffee mug, a robot may consider movement efficiency or mug orientation in its behavior. However, if we want robots to act for and with…
As robots and other intelligent agents move from simple environments and problems to more complex, unstructured settings, manually programming their behavior has become increasingly challenging and expensive. Often, it is easier for a…
Programming robots to perform complex tasks is often difficult and time consuming, requiring expert knowledge and skills in robot software and sometimes hardware. Imitation learning is a method for training robots to perform tasks by…
Robot task planning decomposes human instructions into executable action sequences that enable robots to complete a series of complex tasks. Although recent large language model (LLM)-based task planners achieve amazing performance, they…
Deep learning's success in perception, natural language processing, etc. inspires hopes for advancements in autonomous robotics. However, real-world robotics face challenges like variability, high-dimensional state spaces, non-linear…
We introduce FALCON, a unified self-supervised video pretraining approach for UAV action recognition from raw RGB aerial footage, requiring no additional preprocessing at inference. UAV videos exhibit severe spatial imbalance: large,…
Imitation learning for acquiring generalizable policies often requires a large volume of demonstration data, making the process significantly costly. One promising strategy to address this challenge is to leverage the cognitive and…
Robots today often miss a key ingredient of truly intelligent behavior: the ability to reflect on their own cognitive processes and decisions. In humans, this self-monitoring or metacognition is crucial for learning, decision making and…
Imitation learning suffers from causal confusion. This phenomenon occurs when learned policies attend to features that do not causally influence the expert actions but are instead spuriously correlated. Causally confused agents produce low…
Modern machine learning models are opaque, and as a result there is a burgeoning academic subfield on methods that explain these models' behavior. However, what is the precise goal of providing such explanations, and how can we demonstrate…
Autonomous robots must communicate about their decisions to gain trust and acceptance. When doing so, robots must determine which actions are causal, i.e., which directly give rise to the desired outcome, so that these actions can be…
As robots enter human environments, they will be expected to accomplish a tremendous range of tasks. It is not feasible for robot designers to pre-program these behaviors or know them in advance, so one way to address this is through…
Performing joint interaction requires constant mutual monitoring of own actions and their effects on the other's behaviour. Such an action-effect monitoring is boosted by social cues and might result in an increasing sense of agency. Joint…
Teaching an agent to perform new tasks using natural language can easily be hindered by ambiguities in interpretation. When a teacher provides an instruction to a learner about an object by referring to its features, the learner can…
User modeling, which learns to represent users into a low-dimensional representation space based on their past behaviors, got a surge of interest from the industry for providing personalized services to users. Previous efforts in user…
Beyond representing the external world, humans also represent their own cognitive processes. In the context of perception, this metacognition helps us identify unreliable percepts, such as when we recognize that we are seeing an illusion.…
Pointing is a key mode of interaction with robots, yet most prior work has focused on recognition rather than generation. We present a motion capture dataset of human pointing gestures covering diverse styles, handedness, and spatial…
Imitation learning in robots, also called programing by demonstration, has made important advances in recent years, allowing humans to teach context dependant motor skills/tasks to robots. We propose to extend the usual contexts…
We address goal-based imitation learning, where the aim is to output the symbolic goal from a third-person video demonstration. This enables the robot to plan for execution and reproduce the same goal in a completely different environment.…
Learning from humans is challenging because people are imperfect teachers. When everyday humans show the robot a new task they want it to perform, humans inevitably make errors (e.g., inputting noisy actions) and provide suboptimal examples…