To Örebro University

In this paper, we present a novel approach to relational object affordance learning by leveraging the knowledge distillation paradigm, where large language models (LLMs) serve as generative teacher models. Distinct from traditional affordance learning approaches, which heavily depend on manual annotations, our approach leverages LLMs to automatically generate binary affordance labels and functional rationale explanations, grounded in object semantics and physical plausibility. This reduces the need for labor-intensive labeling while harnessing the rich semantic knowledge embedded in LLMs. To transfer this knowledge, we train a discriminative student model on the generated outputs, ensuring both predictive accuracy and semantic alignment with the teacher model. The student benefits from dual supervision; affordance labels guide classification, while rationales enhance functional understanding. Experimental results demonstrate that our generative-to-discriminative distillation method improves computational efficiency while maintaining a generalizable understanding of affordances across diverse object-object-action scenarios. 

Integrating human expertise with machine learning is crucial for applications demanding high accuracy and safety, such as autonomous driving. This study introduces Interactive Double Deep Q-network (iDDQN), a Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) approach that enhances Reinforcement Learning (RL) by merging human insights directly into the RL training process, improving model performance. Our proposed iDDQN method modifies the Q-value update equation to integrate human and agent actions, establishing a collaborative approach for policy development. Additionally, we present an offline evaluative framework that simulates the agent's trajectory as if no human intervention to assess the effectiveness of human interventions. Empirical results in simulated autonomous driving scenarios demonstrate that iDDQN outperforms established approaches, including Behavioral Cloning (BC), HG-DAgger, Deep Q-Learning from Demonstrations (DQfD), and vanilla DRL in leveraging human expertise for improving performance and adaptability.

Designing effective reward functions is crucial to training reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However, this design is non-trivial, even for domain experts, due to the subjective nature of certain tasks that are hard to quantify explicitly. In recent works, large language models (LLMs) have been used for reward generation from natural language task descriptions, leveraging their extensive instruction tuning and commonsense understanding of human behavior. In this work, we hypothesize that LLMs, guided by human feedback, can be used to formulate reward functions that reflect human implicit knowledge. We study this in three challenging settings - autonomous driving, humanoid locomotion, and dexterous manipulation - wherein notions of “good” behavior are tacit and hard to quantify. To this end, we introduce REvolve, a truly evolutionary framework that uses LLMs for reward design in RL. REvolve generates and refines reward functions by utilizing human feedback to guide the evolution process, effectively translating implicit human knowledge into explicit reward functions for training (deep) RL agents. Experimentally, we demonstrate that agents trained on REvolve-designed rewards outperform other state-of-the-art baselines. 

In this paper, we present a synopsis of the PlayGround project. Through neural-symbolic learning and reasoning, the PlayGround project assumes that high-level concepts and reasoning processes can be used to advance both symbol grounding and object affordance inference. However, a prerequisite for reasoning about objects and their affordances is integrated object representations that concurrently maintain symbolic values (e.g., high-level concepts), and sub-symbolic features (e.g., spatial aspects of objects). Integrated representations that, preferably, should be based upon neural-symbolic computation such that neural-symbolic models can, subsequently, be used for high-level reasoning processes. Nevertheless, reasoning processes for symbol grounding and affordance inference often require multiple inference steps. Taking inspiration from the cognitive prospects in simulation semantics, the PlayGround project further presumes that these reasoning processes can be simulated by neural rendering complementary to high-level reasoning processes.

Modeling object representations derived from perceptual observations, in a way that is also semantically meaningful for humans as well as autonomous agents, is a prerequisite for joint human-agent understanding of the world. A practical approach that aims to model such representations is perceptual anchoring, which handles the problem of mapping sub-symbolic sensor data to symbols and maintains these mappings over time. In this paper, we present ProbAnch, a modular data-driven anchoring framework, whose implementation requires a variety of well-orchestrated components, including a probabilistic reasoning system.

This paper studies whether a perceptual visual system can simulate human-like cognitive capabilities by training a computational model to predict the output of an action using language instruction. The aim is to ground action words such that an AI is able to generate an output image that outputs the effect of a certain action on an given object. The output of the model is a synthetic generated image that demonstrates the effect that the action has on the scene. This work combines an image encoder, language encoder, relational network, and image generator to ground action words, and then visualize the effect an action would have on a simulated scene. The focus in this work is to learn meaningful shared image and text representations for relational learning and object manipulation.

This paper addresses the topic of semantic world modeling by conjoining probabilistic reasoning and object anchoring. The proposed approach uses a so-called bottom-up object anchoring method that relies on rich continuous attribute values measured from perceptual sensor data. A novel anchoring matching function learns to maintain object entities in space and time and is validated using a large set of trained humanly annotated ground truth data of real-world objects. For more complex scenarios, a high-level probabilistic object tracker has been integrated with the anchoring framework and handles the tracking of occluded objects via reasoning about the state of unobserved objects. We demonstrate the performance of our integrated approach through scenarios such as the shell game scenario, where we illustrate how anchored objects are retained by preserving relations through probabilistic reasoning.

Robotic agents should be able to learn from sub-symbolic sensor data and, at the same time, be able to reason about objects and communicate with humans on a symbolic level. This raises the question of how to overcome the gap between symbolic and sub-symbolic artificial intelligence. We propose a semantic world modeling approach based on bottom-up object anchoring using an object-centered representation of the world. Perceptual anchoring processes continuous perceptual sensor data and maintains a correspondence to a symbolic representation. We extend the definitions of anchoring to handle multi-modal probability distributions and we couple the resulting symbol anchoring system to a probabilistic logic reasoner for performing inference. Furthermore, we use statistical relational learning to enable the anchoring framework to learn symbolic knowledge in the form of a set of probabilistic logic rules of the world from noisy and sub-symbolic sensor input. The resulting framework, which combines perceptual anchoring and statistical relational learning, is able to maintain a semantic world model of all the objects that have been perceived over time, while still exploiting the expressiveness of logical rules to reason about the state of objects which are not directly observed through sensory input data. To validate our approach we demonstrate, on the one hand, the ability of our system to perform probabilistic reasoning over multi-modal probability distributions, and on the other hand, the learning of probabilistic logical rules from anchored objects produced by perceptual observations. The learned logical rules are, subsequently, used to assess our proposed probabilistic anchoring procedure. We demonstrate our system in a setting involving object interactions where object occlusions arise and where probabilistic inference is needed to correctly anchor objects.

Human-robot interaction often occurs in the form of instructions given from a human to a robot. For a robot to successfully follow instructions, a common representation of the world and objects in it should be shared between humans and the robot so that the instructions can be grounded. Achieving this representation can be done via learning, where both the world representation and the language grounding are learned simultaneously. However, in robotics this can be a difficult task due to the cost and scarcity of data. In this paper, we tackle the problem by separately learning the world representation of the robot and the language grounding. While this approach can address the challenges in getting sufficient data, it may give rise to inconsistencies between both learned components. Therefore, we further propose Bayesian learning to resolve such inconsistencies between the natural language grounding and a robot’s world representation by exploiting spatio-relational information that is implicitly present in instructions given by a human. Moreover, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on a scenario involving a robotic arm in the physical world.

Autonomous agents, situated in real-world scenarios, need to maintain consonance between the perceived world (through sensory capabilities) and their internal representation of the world in the form of symbolic knowledge. An approach for modeling such representations of objects is through the concept of perceptual anchoring, which, by definition, handles the problem of creating and maintaining, in time and space, the correspondence between symbols and sensor data that refer to the same physical object in the external world.

The work presented in this thesis leverages notations found within perceptual anchoring to address the problem of real-world semantic world modeling, emphasizing, in particular, sensor-driven bottom-up acquisition of perceptual data. The proposed method for handling the attribute values that constitute the perceptual signature of an object is to first integrate and explore available resources of information, such as a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to classify objects on the perceptual level. In addition, a novel anchoring matching function is proposed. This function introduces both the theoretical procedure for comparing attribute values, as well as establishes the use of a learned model that approximates the anchoring matching problem. To verify the proposed method, an evaluation using human judgment to collect annotated ground truth data of real-world objects is further presented. The collected data is subsequently used to train and validate different classification algorithms, in order to learn how to correctly anchor objects, and thereby learn to invoke correct anchoring functionality.

There are, however, situations that are difficult to handle purely from the perspective of perceptual anchoring, e.g., situations where an object is moved during occlusion. In the absence of perceptual observations, it is necessary to couple the anchoring procedure with probabilistic object tracking to speculate about occluded objects, and hence, maintain a consistent world model. Motivated by the limitation in the original anchoring definition, which prohibited the modeling of the history of an object, an extension to the anchoring definition is also presented. This extension permits the historical trace of an anchored object to be maintained and used for the purpose of learning additional properties of an object, e.g., learning of the action applied to an object.