Towards an LLM-Based Speech Interface for Robot-Assisted Feeding

Physically assistive robots present an opportunity to significantly increase the well-being and independence of individuals with motor impairments or other forms of disability who are unable to complete activities of daily living (ADLs). Speech interfaces, especially ones that utilize Large Language Models (LLMs), can enable individuals to effectively and naturally communicate high-level commands and nuanced preferences to robots. In this work, we demonstrate an LLM-based speech interface for a commercially available assistive feeding robot. Our system is based on an iteratively designed framework, from the paper "VoicePilot: Harnessing LLMs as Speech Interfaces for Physically Assistive Robots," that incorporates human-centric elements for integrating LLMs as interfaces for robots. It has been evaluated through a user study with 11 older adults at an independent living facility. Videos are located on our project website: https://sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.edu/voicepilot/.

Conformalized Interactive Imitation Learning: Handling Expert Shift and Intermittent Feedback

In interactive imitation learning (IL), uncertainty quantification offers a way for the learner (i.e. robot) to contend with distribution shifts encountered during deployment by actively seeking additional feedback from an expert (i.e. human) online. Prior works use mechanisms like ensemble disagreement or Monte Carlo dropout to quantify when black-box IL policies are uncertain; however, these approaches can lead to overconfident estimates when faced with deployment-time distribution shifts. Instead, we contend that we need uncertainty quantification algorithms that can leverage the expert human feedback received during deployment time to adapt the robot's uncertainty online. To tackle this, we draw upon online conformal prediction, a distribution-free method for constructing prediction intervals online given a stream of ground-truth labels. Human labels, however, are intermittent in the interactive IL setting. Thus, from the conformal prediction side, we introduce a novel uncertainty quantification algorithm called intermittent quantile tracking (IQT) that leverages a probabilistic model of intermittent labels, maintains asymptotic coverage guarantees, and empirically achieves desired coverage levels. From the interactive IL side, we develop ConformalDAgger, a new approach wherein the robot uses prediction intervals calibrated by IQT as a reliable measure of deployment-time uncertainty to actively query for more expert feedback. We compare ConformalDAgger to prior uncertainty-aware DAgger methods in scenarios where the distribution shift is (and isn't) present because of changes in the expert's policy. We find that in simulated and hardware deployments on a 7DOF robotic manipulator, ConformalDAgger detects high uncertainty when the expert shifts and increases the number of interventions compared to baselines, allowing the robot to more quickly learn the new behavior.

DegustaBot: Zero-Shot Visual Preference Estimation for Personalized Multi-Object Rearrangement

De gustibus non est disputandum ("there is no accounting for others' tastes") is a common Latin maxim describing how many solutions in life are determined by people's personal preferences. Many household tasks, in particular, can only be considered fully successful when they account for personal preferences such as the visual aesthetic of the scene. For example, setting a table could be optimized by arranging utensils according to traditional rules of Western table setting decorum, without considering the color, shape, or material of each object, but this may not be a completely satisfying solution for a given person. Toward this end, we present DegustaBot, an algorithm for visual preference learning that solves household multi-object rearrangement tasks according to personal preference. To do this, we use internet-scale pre-trained vision-and-language foundation models (VLMs) with novel zero-shot visual prompting techniques. To evaluate our method, we collect a large dataset of naturalistic personal preferences in a simulated table-setting task, and conduct a user study in order to develop two novel metrics for determining success based on personal preference. This is a challenging problem and we find that 50% of our model's predictions are likely to be found acceptable by at least 20% of people.

Conformalized Teleoperation: Confidently Mapping Human Inputs to High-Dimensional Robot Actions

Assistive robotic arms often have more degrees-of-freedom than a human teleoperator can control with a low-dimensional input, like a joystick. To overcome this challenge, existing approaches use data-driven methods to learn a mapping from low-dimensional human inputs to high-dimensional robot actions. However, determining if such a black-box mapping can confidently infer a user's intended high-dimensional action from low-dimensional inputs remains an open problem. Our key idea is to adapt the assistive map at training time to additionally estimate high-dimensional action quantiles, and then calibrate these quantiles via rigorous uncertainty quantification methods. Specifically, we leverage adaptive conformal prediction which adjusts the intervals over time, reducing the uncertainty bounds when the mapping is performant and increasing the bounds when the mapping consistently mis-predicts. Furthermore, we propose an uncertainty-interval-based mechanism for detecting high-uncertainty user inputs and robot states. We evaluate the efficacy of our proposed approach in a 2D assistive navigation task and two 7DOF Kinova Jaco tasks involving assistive cup grasping and goal reaching. Our findings demonstrate that conformalized assistive teleoperation manages to detect (but not differentiate between) high uncertainty induced by diverse preferences and induced by low-precision trajectories in the mapping's training dataset. On the whole, we see this work as a key step towards enabling robots to quantify their own uncertainty and proactively seek intervention when needed.

Understanding Robot Minds: Leveraging Machine Teaching for Transparent Human-Robot Collaboration Across Diverse Groups

In this work, we aim to improve transparency and efficacy in human-robot collaboration by developing machine teaching algorithms suitable for groups with varied learning capabilities. While previous approaches focused on tailored approaches for teaching individuals, our method teaches teams with various compositions of diverse learners using team belief representations to address personalization challenges within groups. We investigate various group teaching strategies, such as focusing on individual beliefs or the group's collective beliefs, and assess their impact on learning robot policies for different team compositions. Our findings reveal that team belief strategies yield less variation in learning duration and better accommodate diverse teams compared to individual belief strategies, suggesting their suitability in mixed-proficiency settings with limited resources. Conversely, individual belief strategies provide a more uniform knowledge level, particularly effective for homogeneously inexperienced groups. Our study indicates that the teaching strategy's efficacy is significantly influenced by team composition and learner proficiency, highlighting the importance of real-time assessment of learner proficiency and adapting teaching approaches based on learner proficiency for optimal teaching outcomes.

Bootstrapping Linear Models for Fast Online Adaptation in Human-Agent Collaboration

Agents that assist people need to have well-initialized policies that can adapt quickly to align with their partners' reward functions. Initializing policies to maximize performance with unknown partners can be achieved by bootstrapping nonlinear models using imitation learning over large, offline datasets. Such policies can require prohibitive computation to fine-tune in-situ and therefore may miss critical run-time information about a partner's reward function as expressed through their immediate behavior. In contrast, online logistic regression using low-capacity models performs rapid inference and fine-tuning updates and thus can make effective use of immediate in-task behavior for reward function alignment. However, these low-capacity models cannot be bootstrapped as effectively by offline datasets and thus have poor initializations. We propose BLR-HAC, Bootstrapped Logistic Regression for Human Agent Collaboration, which bootstraps large nonlinear models to learn the parameters of a low-capacity model which then uses online logistic regression for updates during collaboration. We test BLR-HAC in a simulated surface rearrangement task and demonstrate that it achieves higher zero-shot accuracy than shallow methods and takes far less computation to adapt online while still achieving similar performance to fine-tuned, large nonlinear models. For code, please see our project page https://sites.google.com/view/blr-hac.

VoicePilot: Harnessing LLMs as Speech Interfaces for Physically Assistive Robots

Physically assistive robots present an opportunity to significantly increase the well-being and independence of individuals with motor impairments or other forms of disability who are unable to complete activities of daily living. Speech interfaces, especially ones that utilize Large Language Models (LLMs), can enable individuals to effectively and naturally communicate high-level commands and nuanced preferences to robots. Frameworks for integrating LLMs as interfaces to robots for high level task planning and code generation have been proposed, but fail to incorporate human-centric considerations which are essential while developing assistive interfaces. In this work, we present a framework for incorporating LLMs as speech interfaces for physically assistive robots, constructed iteratively with 3 stages of testing involving a feeding robot, culminating in an evaluation with 11 older adults at an independent living facility. We use both quantitative and qualitative data from the final study to validate our framework and additionally provide design guidelines for using LLMs as speech interfaces for assistive robots. Videos and supporting files are located on our project website: https://sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.edu/voicepilot/

Paper index: Designing an introductory HRI course (workshop at HRI 2024)

Human-robot interaction is now an established discipline. Dozens of HRI courses exist at universities worldwide, and some institutions even offer degrees in HRI. However, although many students are being taught HRI, there is no agreed-upon curriculum for an introductory HRI course. In this workshop, we aimed to reach community consensus on what should be covered in such a course. Through interactive activities like panels, breakout discussions, and syllabus design, workshop participants explored the many topics and pedagogical approaches for teaching HRI. This collection of articles submitted to the workshop provides examples of HRI courses being offered worldwide.

Object Importance Estimation using Counterfactual Reasoning for Intelligent Driving

The ability to identify important objects in a complex and dynamic driving environment is essential for autonomous driving agents to make safe and efficient driving decisions. It also helps assistive driving systems decide when to alert drivers. We tackle object importance estimation in a data-driven fashion and introduce HOIST - Human-annotated Object Importance in Simulated Traffic. HOIST contains driving scenarios with human-annotated importance labels for vehicles and pedestrians. We additionally propose a novel approach that relies on counterfactual reasoning to estimate an object's importance. We generate counterfactual scenarios by modifying the motion of objects and ascribe importance based on how the modifications affect the ego vehicle's driving. Our approach outperforms strong baselines for the task of object importance estimation on HOIST. We also perform ablation studies to justify our design choices and show the significance of the different components of our proposed approach.

Multi-Agent Strategy Explanations for Human-Robot Collaboration

As robots are deployed in human spaces, it's important that they are able to coordinate their actions with the people around them. Part of such coordination involves ensuring that people have a good understanding of how a robot will act in the environment. This can be achieved through explanations of the robot's policy. Much prior work in explainable AI and RL focuses on generating explanations for single-agent policies, but little has been explored in generating explanations for collaborative policies. In this work, we investigate how to generate multi-agent strategy explanations for human-robot collaboration. We formulate the problem using a generic multi-agent planner, show how to generate visual explanations through strategy-conditioned landmark states and generate textual explanations by giving the landmarks to an LLM. Through a user study, we find that when presented with explanations from our proposed framework, users are able to better explore the full space of strategies and collaborate more efficiently with new robot partners.