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12 accepted papers

2026

AutoFocus-IL: VLM-Based Saliency Maps for Data-Efficient Visual Imitation Learning without Extra Human Annotations

ICRA 2026poster

We present AutoFocus-IL, a simple yet effective method to improve data efficiency and generalization in visual imitation learning by guiding policies to attend to task-relevant features rather than distractors and spurious correlations. Saliency regularization has emerged as a promising way to achie…

2026

HAND Me the Data: Fast Robot Adaptation Via Hand Path Retrieval

ICRA 2026poster

We present HAND, a simple and time-efficient method for teaching robots new manipulation tasks through human hand demonstrations. Instead of relying on task-specific robot demonstrations collected via teleoperation, HAND uses easy-to-provide hand demonstrations to retrieve relevant behaviors from ta…

2026

IMPACT: Intelligent Motion Planning with Acceptable Contact Trajectories Via Vision-Language Models

ICRA 2026poster

Motion planning involves determining a sequence of robot configurations to reach a desired pose, subject to movement and safety constraints. Traditional motion planning finds collision-free paths, but this is overly restrictive in clutter, where it may not be possible for a robot to accomplish a tas…

2026

PEEK: Guiding and Minimal Image Representations for Zero-Shot Generalization of Robot Manipulation Policies

ICRA 2026poster

Robotic manipulation policies often fail to generalize because they must simultaneously learn where to attend, what actions to take, and how to execute them. We argue that high-level reasoning about where and what can be offloaded to vision-language models (VLMs), leaving policies to specialize in h…

2024

A Generalized Acquisition Function for Preference-based Reward Learning

ICRA 2024poster

Preference-based reward learning is a popular technique for teaching robots and autonomous systems how a human user wants them to perform a task. Previous works have shown that actively synthesizing preference queries to maximize information gain about the reward function parameters improves data ef…

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2021

Emergent Prosociality in Multi-Agent Games Through Gifting

IJCAI 2021poster

Coordination is often critical to forming prosocial behaviors -- behaviors that increase the overall sum of rewards received by all agents in a multi-agent game. However, state of the art reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from converging to socially less desirable equilibria when multip…

Cited by 35SourcePDFScholar
2021

ROIAL: Region of Interest Active Learning for Characterizing Exoskeleton Gait Preference Landscapes

ICRA 2021poster

Characterizing what types of exoskeleton gaits are comfortable for users, and understanding the science of walking more generally, require recovering a user’s utility landscape. Learning these landscapes is challenging, as walking trajectories are defined by numerous gait parameters, data collection…

Cited by 52SourcecodeScholar
2019

Active Learning of Reward Dynamics from Hierarchical Queries

IROS 2019poster

Enabling robots to act according to human preferences across diverse environments is a crucial task, extensively studied by both roboticists and machine learning researchers. To achieve it, human preferences are often encoded by a reward function which the robot optimizes for. This reward function i…

Cited by 45SourceScholar