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.
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.
arXiv:2607. 13056v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current vision-language-action (VLA) benchmarks primarily evaluate isolated manipulation skills while leaving human-robot interaction structure largely unmodeled.
arXiv:2502. 18447v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Existing approaches to reward inference typically assume that humans provide demonstrations according to specific behavior models.
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:2608. 11229v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Comparative feedback, asking people which of two behaviors they prefer, has become a standard way to align robot and agent behavior with human intent when the reward itself cannot be specified directly.
arXiv:2608. 08491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reward models are a bottleneck for reinforcement learning in embodied AI.
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.
The paper introduces Residual Reward Models (RRM) to enhance preference‑based reinforcement learning (PbRL) in robotics. RRMs decompose the true reward into a prior component—such as a heuristic, language‑generated, or IRL‑derived reward—and a learned residual that is trained with human preferences. Experiments on Meta‑World, DM‑Control, and a physical Franka Panda robot show that RRMs markedly improve sample efficiency and accelerate policy learning compared to standard PbRL methods.
The paper introduces a novel framework that combines vision‑language model (VLM) generated preferences with the Plackett‑Luce (PL) ranking model for reward learning in reinforcement learning. Unlike traditional pairwise Bradley‑Terry approaches, the PL formulation allows listwise rankings of multiple candidates, enabling the use of different ranking sizes (K = 3, 4, 5). Experiments on Meta‑World manipulation tasks show that PL‑based reward models train robotic policies as effectively as, or better than, pairwise, K‑wise, and RL‑VLM‑F baselines, achieving up to an 86% mean final success rate and matching the Oracle baseline on the Drawer Open task.
arXiv:2605. 19294v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies increasingly rely on asynchronous inference to hide large-model latency behind ongoing robot motion.
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.
arXiv:2606. 11982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) learns policies from human trajectory-level comparisons, avoiding explicit reward design and expert demonstrations.