Shahabedin Sagheb

Robert Ramirez Sanchez, Heramb Nemlekar, Shahabedin Sagheb et al.

Imitation learning enables robots to learn new tasks from human examples. One fundamental limitation while learning from humans is causal confusion. Causal confusion occurs when the robot's observations include both task-relevant and extraneous information: for instance, a robot's camera might see not only the intended goal, but also clutter and changes in lighting within its environment. Because the robot does not know which aspects of its observations are important a priori, it often misinterprets the human's examples and fails to learn the desired task. To address this issue, we highlight that -- while the robot learner may not know what to focus on -- the human teacher does. In this paper we propose that the human proactively marks key parts of their task with small, lightweight beacons. Under our framework (RECON) the human attaches these beacons to task-relevant objects before providing demonstrations: as the human shows examples of the task, beacons track the position of marked objects. We then harness this offline beacon data to train a task-relevant state embedding. Specifically, we embed the robot's observations to a latent state that is correlated with the measured beacon readings: in practice, this causes the robot to autonomously filter out extraneous observations and make decisions based on features learned from the beacon data. Our simulations and a real robot experiment suggest that this framework for human-placed beacons mitigates causal confusion. Indeed, we find that using RECON significantly reduces the number of demonstrations needed to convey the task, lowering the overall time required for human teaching. See videos here: https://youtu.be/oy85xJvtLSU

Yinlong Dai, Robert Ramirez Sanchez, Ryan Jeronimus et al.

Today's robots attempt to learn new tasks by imitating human examples. These robots watch the human complete the task, and then try to match the actions taken by the human expert. However, this standard approach to visual imitation learning is fundamentally limited: the robot observes what the human does, but not why the human chooses those behaviors. Without understanding which features of the system or environment factor into the human's decisions, robot learners often misinterpret the human's examples. In practice, this results in causal confusion, inefficient learning, and robot policies that fail when the environment changes. We therefore propose a shift in perspective: instead of asking human teachers just to show what actions the robot should take, we also enable humans to intuitively indicate why they made those decisions. Under our paradigm human teachers attach markers to task-relevant objects and use natural language prompts to describe their state representation. Our proposed algorithm, CIVIL, leverages this augmented demonstration data to filter the robot's visual observations and extract a feature representation that aligns with the human teacher. CIVIL then applies these causal features to train a transformer-based policy that -- when tested on the robot -- is able to emulate human behaviors without being confused by visual distractors or irrelevant items. Our simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate that robots trained with CIVIL learn both what actions to take and why to take those actions, resulting in better performance than state-of-the-art baselines. From the human's perspective, our user study reveals that this new training paradigm actually reduces the total time required for the robot to learn the task, and also improves the robot's performance in previously unseen scenarios. See videos at our project website: https://civil2025.github.io