arXiv AI

QuickLAP: Quick Language-Action Preference Learning for Semi-Autonomous Agents

arXiv:2511. 17855v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robots must learn from both what people do and what they say, but either modality alone is often incomplete: physical corrections are grounded but ambiguous in intent, while language expresses high-level goals but lacks physical grounding.

arXiv AI
Jul 1

Freeform Preference Learning for Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2606. 32027v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reward design remains a central bottleneck for autonomous robot policy improvement, especially in long-horizon manipulation tasks where sparse success labels provide too little signal and binary preferences collapse many competing notions of quality into one ambiguous signal.

By Marcel Torne, Anubha Mahajan, Abhijnya Bhat, Chelsea Finn
arXiv AI
Jun 2

From Demonstrations to Rewards: Test-Time Prompt Optimization for VLM Reward Models

arXiv:2606. 00083v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning relies on accurate reward functions, which are often hand-crafted or even unavailable in real-world applications, such as robotics.

By Christian Gumbsch, Leonardo Barcellona, Lennard Sch\"unemann, Platon Karageorgis, Andrii Zadaianchuk, Zehao Wang, Sergey Zakharov, Fabien Despinoy, Rahaf Aljundi, Efstratios Gavves
arXiv AI
Jul 24

TOPReward: Token Probabilities as Hidden Zero-Shot Rewards for Robotics

arXiv:2602. 19313v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: General-purpose robot learning requires dense, instruction-conditioned feedback that can distinguish meaningful task progress from stalled, failed, or partially completed behavior.

By Shirui Chen, Cole Harrison, Ying-Chun Lee, Angela Jin Yang, Zhongzheng Ren, Lillian J. Ratliff, Jiafei Duan, Dieter Fox, Ranjay Krishna
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Rethinking the Implications of Human Feedback for Preference Learning in Human-Robot Collaboration

The paper critiques the standard fixed-rule approach for deriving labels from human feedback in human-robot collaboration, showing that human-provided implication labels often differ and improve reward learning. It introduces IMPLIED, a method that starts with fixed-rule implications but learns to infer and revise accepted/rejected action labels over time, outperforming both the fixed rule and LLM baselines on recorded trajectories and a physical pizza‑making study. As a result, IMPLIED reduces preference‑estimation error and yields robot actions that better align with combined reward objectives.

By Qiping Zhang, Kate Candon, Debasmita Ghose, Marynel V\'azquez
arXiv AI
Jul 7

HALO-WA: Hybrid-Attention Latent-Guided Online Reinforcement Learning for World-Action Models

arXiv:2607. 04265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World-action (WA) models can generate long-horizon action chunks for general-purpose robotic manipulation, but they remain vulnerable to calibration, perception, and contact-dynamics errors in real-world precision tasks, often failing in the final few millimeters of alignment or insertion.

By Angen Ye, Weijie Ke, Xiaofeng Wang, Xinze Chen, Chaojun Ni, Guosheng Zhao, Boyuan Wang, Zheng Zhu, Junjie Xie, Dapeng Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 19

PlanPO: Group Planning-Aware Policy Optimization for Multi-Turn Agentic LLMs

PlanPO introduces a group planning-aware policy optimization method for multi-turn agentic large language models, addressing the issue of advantage collapse caused by treating all successful trajectories equally. By incorporating coarse-to-fine advantage signals that reflect differences in trajectory and turn lengths, PlanPO encourages agents to learn generalizable planning and generation behaviors. Experiments show a 27.2% average improvement over GRPO on benchmarks such as ALFWorld, WebShop, and SciWorld, with minimal extra training cost.

By Dayang Liang, Liyuan He, Xuan Feng, Shuxin Li, Bo An, Yunlong Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 8

Supervised Reward Inference

arXiv:2502. 18447v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Existing approaches to reward inference typically assume that humans provide demonstrations according to specific behavior models.

By Will Schwarzer, Jordan Schneider, Philip S. Thomas, Scott Niekum
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Inferring the Unspoken: Aligning Embodied Agents with Implicit Preferences

The paper "Inferring the Unspoken: Aligning Embodied Agents with Implicit Preferences" addresses the challenge of natural-language instructions that omit details needed for embodied action. It introduces the Preference-based Planning (PbP) benchmark, comprising 5,000 evaluation groups and 290 preferences across three levels, to systematically evaluate agents’ ability to infer latent user preferences from a few demonstrations. The authors propose the two-stage Inferring the Unspoken (InTU) framework, which first verbalizes inferred preferences from multimodal demonstrations and then generates action plans conditioned on that explicit representation, showing that explicit verbalization improves alignment and robustness compared to direct end-to-end planning.

By Manjie Xu, Xinyi Yang, Wei Liang, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu