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Specifying reward functions for robots that operate in environments without a natural reward signal can be challenging, and incorrectly specified rewards can incentivise degenerate or dangerous behavior. A promising alternative to manually…
Collaborative robotics requires effective communication between a robot and a human partner. This work proposes a set of interpretive principles for how a robotic arm can use pointing actions to communicate task information to people by…
Recent work in visual representation learning for robotics demonstrates the viability of learning from large video datasets of humans performing everyday tasks. Leveraging methods such as masked autoencoding and contrastive learning, these…
As machine learning models and autonomous agents are increasingly deployed in high-stakes, real-world domains such as healthcare, security, finance, and robotics, the need for transparent and trustworthy explanations has become critical. To…
Endowing robots with the human ability to learn a growing set of skills over the course of a lifetime as opposed to mastering single tasks is an open problem in robot learning. While multi-task learning approaches have been proposed to…
Modern paradigms for robot imitation train expressive policy architectures on large amounts of human demonstration data. Yet performance on contact-rich, deformable-object, and long-horizon tasks plateau far below perfect execution, even…
What makes generalization hard for imitation learning in visual robotic manipulation? This question is difficult to approach at face value, but the environment from the perspective of a robot can often be decomposed into enumerable factors…
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 have internal models of robots (like their physical capabilities), the world (like what will happen next), and their tasks (like a preferred goal). However, human internal models are not always perfect: for example, it is easy to…
To have a robot actively supporting a human during a collaborative task, it is crucial that robots are able to identify the current action in order to predict the next one. Common approaches make use of high-level knowledge, such as object…
Learning task models of bimanual manipulation from human demonstration and their execution on a robot should take temporal constraints between actions into account. This includes constraints on (i) the symbolic level such as precedence…
This work aims to interpret human behavior to anticipate potential user confusion when a robot provides explanations for failure, allowing the robot to adapt its explanations for more natural and efficient collaboration. Using a dataset…
For many real-world robotics applications, robots need to continually adapt and learn new concepts. Further, robots need to learn through limited data because of scarcity of labeled data in the real-world environments. To this end, my…
"Monkey see monkey do" is an age-old adage, referring to na\"ive imitation without a deep understanding of a system's underlying mechanics. Indeed, if a demonstrator has access to information unavailable to the imitator (monkey), such as a…
A major challenge in research involving artificial intelligence (AI) is the development of algorithms that can find solutions to problems that can generalize to different environments and tasks. Unlike AI, humans are adept at finding…
Context plays an important role in visual recognition. Recent studies have shown that visual recognition networks can be fooled by placing objects in inconsistent contexts (e.g., a cow in the ocean). To model the role of contextual…
Deep neural networks have achieved success across a wide range of applications, including as models of human behavior and neural representations in vision tasks. However, neural network training and human learning differ in fundamental…
As mobile robots are increasingly deployed in human environments, enabling them to predict how people perceive them is critical for socially adaptable navigation. Predicting perceptions is challenging for two main reasons: (1) HRI…
Recent studies on transformer-based language models show that they can answer questions by reasoning over knowledge provided as part of the context (i.e., in-context reasoning). However, since the available knowledge is often not filtered…
Robot manipulation is an important part of human-robot interaction technology. However, traditional pre-programmed methods can only accomplish simple and repetitive tasks. To enable effective communication between robots and humans, and to…