MIT News AI

LLMs help robots understand vague instructions and focus on key details

To help robots do chores in places like homes and factories, a new approach from MIT uses one language model to clarify users’ instructions, then another to ignore irrelevant info.

arXiv AI
Aug 18

When State Becomes an Attack Surface: State-Semantic Injection in LLM-Driven Embodied Agents

arXiv:2608. 16806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated capabilities in in-context learning, task decomposition, step-by-step reasoning, and code generation, driving their gradual evolution from text generation models into the core of agents capable of perceiving environments, invoking tools, and executing tasks.

By Jiawei Liu, Jiacheng Guo, Tian Zhang, Yiwei Xu, Juan Wang, Jinlin Fan, Bowen Xiao, Chi Guo, Keyan Guo, Hongxin Hu
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Why did My Robot Just Change Personality? Prompting Guidelines for a Grounded Robot Persona in LLM-Based HRI

The paper "Why did My Robot Just Change Personality? Prompting Guidelines for a Grounded Robot Persona in LLM-Based HRI" addresses the lack of clear prompt design in human‑robot interaction using large language models. It proposes a framework and a structured prompt template with eight functional components to specify, bound, and adapt robot behavior. The authors base their guidelines on a review of prior work and on survey data from 27 HRI experts, highlighting issues such as unclear robot personality, the need for user adaptation, and ethical concerns around safety, deception, and governance.

By Ashita Ashok, Franziska Babel, Patrick Holthaus, Rucha Khot, Karla Bransky, Fethiye Irmak Dogan, Karsten Berns, Silvia Rossi, Minha Lee, Guy Laban
Towards Data Science
Aug 11

Can a Local LLM Run My AI Assistant?

I replayed the same 27 real production tasks through two local models, one hardware upgrade apart, to find out what it actually takes to replace Claude as the brain behind a 90-tool personal agent. The post Can a Local LLM Run My AI Assistant?

By Arsen Apostolov