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Joey Hejna

19 accepted papers

2025

Aligning Language Models with Demonstrated Feedback

ICLR 2025poster

Language models are aligned to emulate the collective voice of many, resulting in outputs that align with no one in particular. Steering LLMs away from generic output is possible through supervised finetuning or RLHF, but requires prohibitively large datasets for new ad-hoc tasks. We argue that it i…

2025

Efficiently Generating Expressive Quadruped Behaviors via Language-Guided Preference Learning

ICRA 2025

Expressive robotic behavior is essential for the widespread acceptance of robots in social environments. Recent advancements in learned legged locomotion controllers have enabled more dynamic and versatile robot behaviors. However, determining the optimal behavior for interactions with different use

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2025

Robot Data Curation with Mutual Information Estimators

RSS 2025poster

The performance of imitation learning policies often hinges on the datasets with which they are trained. Consequently, investment in data collection for robotics has grown across both industrial and academic labs. However, despite the marked increase in the quantity of demonstrations collected, litt…

Cited by 3PDFScholar
2025

Scaffolding Dexterous Manipulation with Vision-Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Dexterous robotic hands are essential for performing complex manipulation tasks, yet remain difficult to train due to the challenges of demonstration collection and high-dimensional control. While reinforcement learning (RL) can alleviate the data bottleneck by generating experience in simulation, i…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Vision Language Models are In-Context Value Learners

ICLR 2025spotlight

Predicting temporal progress from visual trajectories is important for intelligent robots that can learn, adapt, and improve. However, learning such progress estimator, or temporal value function, across different tasks and domains requires both a large amount of diverse data and methods which can s…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Contrastive Preference Learning: Learning from Human Feedback without Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2024poster

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a popular paradigm for aligning models with human intent. Typically RLHF algorithms operate in two phases: first, use human preferences to learn a reward function and second, align the model by optimizing the learned reward via reinfor…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2024

DROID: A Large-Scale In-The-Wild Robot Manipulation Dataset

RSS 2024poster

The creation of large, diverse, high-quality robot manipulation datasets is an important stepping stone on the path toward more capable and robust robotic manipulation policies. However, creating such datasets is challenging: collecting robot manipulation data in diverse environments poses logistica…

Cited by 216SourcePDFScholar
2024

Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy

RSS 2024poster

Large policies pretrained on diverse robot datasets have the potential to transform robotic learning: instead of training new policies from scratch, such generalist robot policies may be finetuned with only a little in-domain data, yet generalize broadly. However, to be widely applicable across a ra…

Cited by 327SourcePDFScholar
2024

Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models : Open X-Embodiment Collaboration

ICRA 2024

Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for man

Cited by 910SourcecodeScholar
2024

Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models : Open X-Embodiment Collaboration0

ICRA 2024poster

Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for man…

Cited by 259SourcecodeScholar
2024

ReMix: Optimizing Data Mixtures for Large Scale Imitation Learning

CoRL 2024poster

Increasingly large robotics datasets are being collected to train larger foundation models in robotics. However, despite the fact that data selection has been of utmost importance to scaling in vision and natural language processing (NLP), little work in robotics has questioned what data such models…

Cited by 16SourcecodeScholar
2024

Scaling Laws for Reward Model Overoptimization in Direct Alignment Algorithms

NeurIPS 2024poster

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)has been crucial to the recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs), however it is often a complex and brittle process. In the classical RLHF framework, a reward model is first trained to represent human preferences, which is in turn used by an onl…

Cited by 47SourcePDFScholar
2024

So You Think You Can Scale Up Autonomous Robot Data Collection?

CoRL 2024poster

A long-standing goal in robot learning is to develop methods for robots to acquire new skills autonomously. While reinforcement learning (RL) comes with the promise of enabling autonomous data collection, it remains challenging to scale in the real-world partly due to the significant effort required…

Cited by 4SourceScholar
2023

Improving Long-Horizon Imitation through Instruction Prediction

AAAI 2023technical

Complex, long-horizon planning and its combinatorial nature pose steep challenges for learning-based agents. Difficulties in such settings are exacerbated in low data regimes where over-fitting stifles generalization and compounding errors hurt accuracy. In this work, we explore the use of an often…