Related papers: Fine-Tuning Robot Policies While Maintaining User …

Large language models enable unscripted conversations while maintaining a consistent personality. One desirable personality trait in cooperative partners, known to improve task performance, is agreeableness. To explore the impact of large…

The daily activities performed by a disabled or elderly person can be monitored by a smart environment, and the acquired data can be used to learn a predictive model of user behavior. To speed up the learning, several researchers designed…

Group processes refer to the dynamics that occur within a group and are critical for understanding how groups function. With robots being increasingly placed within small groups, improving these processes has emerged as an important…

Home robots performing personalized tasks must adeptly balance user preferences with environmental affordances. We focus on organization tasks within constrained spaces, such as arranging items into a refrigerator, where preferences for…

Robotics and automation are poised to change the landscape of home and work in the near future. Robots are adept at deliberately moving, sensing, and interacting with their environments. The pervasive use of this technology promises…

Robot caregiving should be personalized to meet the diverse needs of care recipients -- assisting with tasks as needed, while taking user agency in action into account. In physical tasks such as handover, bathing, dressing, and…

As service robots become more and more capable of performing useful tasks for us, there is a growing need to teach robots how we expect them to carry out these tasks. However, different users typically have their own preferences, for…

In imitation and reinforcement learning, the cost of human supervision limits the amount of data that robots can be trained on. An aspirational goal is to construct self-improving robots: robots that can learn and improve on their own, from…

Although learning-based methods have great potential for robotics, one concern is that a robot that updates its parameters might cause large amounts of damage before it learns the optimal policy. We formalize the idea of safe learning in a…

Predictive human models often need to adapt their parameters online from human data. This raises previously ignored safety-related questions for robots relying on these models such as what the model could learn online and how quickly could…

Programming robots for general purpose applications is extremely challenging due to the great diversity of end-user tasks ranging from manufacturing environments to personal homes. Recent work has focused on enabling end-users to program…

The main novelty of the proposed approach is that it allows a robot to learn an end-to-end policy which can adapt to changes in the environment during execution. While goal conditioning of policies has been studied in the RL literature,…

Firms increasingly delegate decisions to learning algorithms in platform markets. Standard algorithms perform well when platform policies are stationary, but firms often face ambiguity about whether policies are stationary or adapt…

It is intractable for assistive robots to have all functionalities pre-programmed prior to deployment. Rather, it is more realistic for robots to perform supplemental, on-site learning about user's needs and preferences, and particularities…

Pre-trained generalist policies are rapidly gaining relevance in robot learning due to their promise of fast adaptation to novel, in-domain tasks. This adaptation often relies on collecting new demonstrations for a specific task of interest…

Simulations are attractive environments for training agents as they provide an abundant source of data and alleviate certain safety concerns during the training process. But the behaviours developed by agents in simulation are often…

Autonomous learning of robotic skills can allow general-purpose robots to learn wide behavioral repertoires without requiring extensive manual engineering. However, robotic skill learning methods typically make one of several trade-offs to…

Robotic foundation models, or generalist robot policies, hold immense potential to enable flexible, general-purpose and dexterous robotic systems. Despite their advancements, our empirical experiments reveal that existing robot policies are…

Robots are increasingly being deployed in public spaces. However, the general population rarely has the opportunity to nominate what they would prefer or expect a robot to do in these contexts. Since most people have little or no experience…

Socially Assistive Robots navigate highly sensible environments, which place high demands on safety and communication with users. The reasoning behind an SAR's actions must be transparent at any time to earn users' trust and acceptance.…