Related papers: Fine-Tuning Robot Policies While Maintaining User …
Robots operating in human-centered environments should have the ability to understand how objects function: what can be done with each object, where this interaction may occur, and how the object is used to achieve a goal. To this end, we…
Pouring is one of the most commonly executed tasks in humans' daily lives, whose accuracy is affected by multiple factors, including the type of material to be poured and the geometry of the source and receiving containers. In this work, we…
Robots are more capable of achieving manipulation tasks for everyday activities than before. But the safety of manipulation skills that robots employ is still an open problem. Considering all possible failures during skill learning…
AI agents powered by reasoning models require access to sensitive user data. However, their reasoning traces are difficult to control, which can result in the unintended leakage of private information to external parties. We propose…
End-user programming (EUP) tools must balance user control with the robot's ability to plan and act autonomously. Many existing task-oriented EUP tools enforce a specific level of control, e.g., by requiring that users hand-craft detailed…
This paper introduces a new method for safety-aware robot learning, focusing on repairing policies using predictive models. Our method combines behavioral cloning with neural network repair in a two-step supervised learning framework. It…
Intuitively, obedience -- following the order that a human gives -- seems like a good property for a robot to have. But, we humans are not perfect and we may give orders that are not best aligned to our preferences. We show that when a…
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…
Alignment is a key step in developing Large Language Models (LLMs) using human feedback to ensure adherence to human values and societal norms. Dependence on human feedback raises privacy concerns about how much a labeler's preferences may…
Language-capable robots hold unique persuasive power over humans, and thus can help regulate people's behavior and preserve a better moral ecosystem, by rejecting unethical commands and calling out norm violations. However, miscalibrated…
Traditional robotic approaches rely on an accurate model of the environment, a detailed description of how to perform the task, and a robust perception system to keep track of the current state. On the other hand, reinforcement learning…
A wide range of human-robot collaborative applications in diverse domains such as manufacturing, health care, the entertainment industry, and social interactions, require an autonomous robot to follow its human companion. Different working…
Acquiring multiple skills has commonly involved collecting a large number of expert demonstrations per task or engineering custom reward functions. Recently it has been shown that it is possible to acquire a diverse set of skills by…
Human emotions are expressed through multiple modalities, including verbal and non-verbal information. Moreover, the affective states of human users can be the indicator for the level of engagement and successful interaction, suitable for…
Research in social robotics is commonly focused on designing robots that imitate human behavior. While this might increase a user's satisfaction and acceptance of robots at first glance, it does not automatically aid a non-expert user in…
We explore the use of inner speech as a mechanism to enhance transparency and trust in social robots for dietary advice. In humans, inner speech structures thought processes and decision-making; in robotics, it improves explainability by…
Prediction is an appealing objective for self-supervised learning of behavioral skills, particularly for autonomous robots. However, effectively utilizing predictive models for control, especially with raw image inputs, poses a number of…
Robots can generalize manipulation skills between different scenarios by adapting to the features of the objects being manipulated. Selecting the set of relevant features for generalizing skills has usually been performed manually by a…
The dominant paradigm for end-to-end robot learning focuses on optimizing task-specific objectives that solve a single robotic problem such as picking up an object or reaching a target position. However, recent work on high-capacity models…
A popular paradigm in robotic learning is to train a policy from scratch for every new robot. This is not only inefficient but also often impractical for complex robots. In this work, we consider the problem of transferring a policy across…