Stanford AA289/ENGR319 - Robotics and Autonomous Systems Seminar - Stanford Seminar - Interactive Imitation Learning: Planning Alongside Humans

Sanjiban Choudhury Cornell University (currently at Aurora) January 21, 2022 Advances in machine learning have fueled progress towards deploying real-world robots from assembly lines to self-driving. However, if robots are to truly work alongside humans in the wild, they need to solve fundamental challenges that go beyond collecting large-scale datasets. Robots must continually improve and learn online to adapt to individual human preferences. How do we design robots that both understand and learn from natural human interactions? In this talk, I will dive into two core challenges. First, I will discuss learning from natural human interactions where we look at the recurring problem of feedback-driven covariate shift. We will tackle this problem from a unified framework of distribution matching. Second, I will discuss learning to predict human intent where we look at the chicken-or-egg problem of planning with learned forecasts. I will present a graph neural network approach that tractably reasons over latent intents of multiple actors in the scene. Finally, we will demonstrate how these methods come together to result in a self-driving product deployed at scale. View the full playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rMeercb-kvGLUrOq4HR6BZD #robots