Princeton Robotics Seminar - Learning Representations for Interactive Robotics

There have been significant advances in the field of robot learning in the past decade. However, many challenges still remain when considering how robot learning can advance interactive agents such as robots that collaborate with humans. In this talk, I will be discussing the role of learning representations for robots that interact with humans and robots that interactively learn from humans through a few different vignettes. I will first discuss how bounded rationality of humans guided us towards developing learned latent action spaces for shared autonomy. It turns out this “bounded rationality” is not a bug and a feature — i.e. we can develop extremely efficient coordination algorithms by learning latent representations of partner strategies and operating in this low dimensional space. I will then discuss how we can go about actively learning such representations capturing human preferences including our recent work on how large language models can help design human preference reward functions. Finally, I will end the talk with a discussion of the type of representations useful for learning a robotics foundation model and some preliminary results on a new model that leverages language supervision to shape representations.

Bio: Dorsa Sadigh is an assistant professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.  Her research interests lie in the intersection of robotics, learning, and control theory. Specifically, she is interested in developing algorithms for safe and adaptive human-robot and human-AI interaction. Dorsa received her doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) from UC Berkeley in 2017, and received her bachelor’s degree in EECS from UC Berkeley in 2012.  She is awarded the Sloan Fellowship, NSF CAREER, ONR Young Investigator Award, AFOSR Young Investigator Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, Okawa Foundation Fellowship, MIT TR35, and the IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award.