Related papers: Using Vision-Language Models as Proxies for Social…
Effective communication is vital in healthcare, especially across language barriers, where non-verbal cues and gestures are critical. This paper presents a privacy-preserving vision-language framework for medical interpreter robots that…
Robot learning holds tremendous promise to unlock the full potential of flexible, general, and dexterous robot systems, as well as to address some of the deepest questions in artificial intelligence. However, bringing robot learning to the…
Natural language instructions for robotic manipulation tasks often exhibit ambiguity and vagueness. For instance, the instruction "Hang a mug on the mug tree" may involve multiple valid actions if there are several mugs and branches to…
A robot in a human-centric environment needs to account for the human's intent and future motion in its task and motion planning to ensure safe and effective operation. This requires symbolic reasoning about probable future actions and the…
This research investigates both explicit and implicit social biases exhibited by Vision-Language Models (VLMs). The key distinction between these bias types lies in the level of awareness: explicit bias refers to conscious, intentional…
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) refers to the task of enabling autonomous robots to navigate unfamiliar environments by following natural language instructions. While recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown promise in…
Scaling LLM-based embodied agents from text-only environments to complex multimodal settings remains a major challenge. Recent work identifies a perception-reasoning-decision gap in standalone Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which often…
Autonomous driving systems often infer pedestrian yielding behavior from geometric and kinematic cues alone, limiting their ability to reason about visual scene context and age-dependent behavioral variability. This limitation can produce…
This abstract explores classroom Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenarios with an emphasis on the adaptation of human-inspired social gaze models in robot cognitive architecture to facilitate a more seamless social interaction. First, we…
Vision-language-action (VLA) models can enable broad open world generalization, but require large and diverse datasets. It is appealing to consider whether some of this data can come from human videos, which cover diverse real-world…
Our interest is in the design of software systems involving a human-expert interacting -- using natural language -- with a large language model (LLM) on data analysis tasks. For complex problems, it is possible that LLMs can harness human…
Understanding emotions is a fundamental ability for intelligent systems to be able to interact with humans. Vision-language models (VLMs) have made tremendous progress in the last few years for many visual tasks, potentially offering a…
Understanding user instructions and object spatial relations in surrounding environments is crucial for intelligent robot systems to assist humans in various tasks. The natural language and spatial reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language…
In human-robot collaborative interaction scenarios, nonverbal communication plays an important role. Both, signals sent by a human collaborator need to be identified and interpreted by the robotic system, and the signals sent by the robot…
Incremental decision making in real-world environments is one of the most challenging tasks in embodied artificial intelligence. One particularly demanding scenario is Vision and Language Navigation~(VLN) which requires visual and natural…
Vision Language Models (VLMs) have recently been leveraged to generate robotic actions, forming Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, directly adapting a pretrained VLM for robotic control remains challenging, particularly when…
We are approaching a future where social robots will progressively become widespread in many aspects of our daily lives, including education, healthcare, work, and personal use. All of such practical applications require that humans and…
Robots operating in human-centric or hazardous environments must proactively anticipate and mitigate dangers beyond basic obstacle detection. Traditional navigation systems often depend on static maps, which struggle to account for dynamic…
Conversational systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, show exceptional proficiency in context understanding and response generation. However, despite their impressive capabilities, they still possess limitations,…
Humans can quickly learn new behaviors by leveraging background world knowledge. In contrast, agents trained with reinforcement learning (RL) typically learn behaviors from scratch. We thus propose a novel approach that uses the vast…