arXiv AI

RobotValues: Evaluating Household Robots When Human Values Conflict

arXiv:2606. 03312v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While household robots are often evaluated based on task completion, everyday domestic environments involve value-conflicting situations in which robots are expected to choose actions that prioritize other values than task success, such as human autonomy, efficiency, or social appropriateness.

arXiv AI
Sep 17

HINT-Plan: Human Intention-Aware Robot Task Planning in Context-Rich Environments using Vision Language Models

HINT-Plan is a new method that integrates human intention prediction into robot task planning by using Vision Language Models to infer high‑level human intentions from third‑person images. These intentions are converted into goal states and combined with hierarchical Scene Graphs to formulate joint task‑planning problems in context‑rich environments. In a photorealistic simulation, HINT-Plan achieved a 69.71% success rate, outperforming baselines by up to 35.29% and reducing functional conflicts.

By Yuchen Liu, Luigi Palmieri, Lujun Li, Radu State, Ilche Georgievski, Marco Aiello
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Robots That Take Initiative: A Framework for Building and Evaluating Proactive Robots

The paper presents a unified formalism for proactive robot assistance, organized into three levels, and introduces a framework for unprompted proactive assistance. It demonstrates that offline evaluation overestimates performance and proposes a closed-loop evaluation using an adaptive human model. The authors also present GAP, a method that learns from passive observation to anticipate user goals and act, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods in closed-loop tests.

By Maithili Patel, Sonia Chernova
arXiv AI
Sep 16

Bridging Learned Visual Perception and Symbolic Belief-Space Planning

The paper introduces a new paradigm called VLM-as-probabilistic-grounder, which models the uncertainty of Vision‑Language Model (VLM) predicate groundings as a probability distribution over symbolic states. This probabilistic grounding allows belief‑space planning, producing more robust plans in partially observable settings. Experiments in simulated household robot environments demonstrate that this approach improves robustness and task success compared to deterministic grounding methods.

By Guy Azran, Michael Navat, Sarah Keren
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
Sep 21

Value-Sensitive Delegation in Everyday AI Agent Use: Evidence from OpenClaw

The paper examines how users delegate tasks to the AI agent OpenClaw by analyzing 73,093 Reddit posts. It identifies 21 human values grouped into six categories—such as Autonomous Operation, Dependable Operation, Affordable Operation, Bounded Reach, Reviewability, and Equitable Access—and finds that values are largely satisfied when users describe the agent’s outputs but often unmet when users discuss supervising the agent. The authors term this pattern "value‑sensitive delegation," emphasizing that supporting human values requires attention to both what an agent does and the conditions users set around its use.

By Renkai Ma, Ruyuan Wan, Xuan Lu, Fan Yang, Chen Chen, Lingyao Li