Learning reward functions from human preferences is a widely used approach for aligning robot behavior with user expectations in human-robot interaction. Most existing approaches assume that humans evaluate uncertain outcomes using expected utility (EU), aggregating outcome utilities linearly with their probabilities. However, behavioral evidence shows that humans are systematically risk-sensitive, overweighting rare negative events and exhibiting loss aversion. We study the consequences of this mismatch in social robot navigation, where safety-critical outcomes (e.g., collisions) are rare but highly consequential. We compare EU with Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT), a nonlinear model of human decision-making, within a Bradley-Terry preference learning framework. Our preliminary experiments show that when preferences are generated by risk-sensitive users, CPT-based learners recover reward functions with substantially lower regret compared to EU-based learners. Our results highlight the importance of modeling human risk sensitivity when learning rewards from preferences over stochastic robot outcomes.
Contact-rich robot manipulation requires physical interaction cues that are often invisible to cameras, making tactile sensing essential for robust control. However, scaling visuo-tactile robot learning remains difficult because real tactile interaction data are expensive to coll…
Geometry Foundation Models (GFMs) have substantially advanced monocular 3D reconstruction, yet extending this capability to 4D dynamic understanding remains a fundamental challenge. Most existing motion perception methods (e.g., sparse tracking, dense point-wise flow) treat motio…
In production processes for consumer products, assembly instructions are essential not only for planning but also for executing the production process. Likewise in robotics, it is crucial for an assembly robot to understand how components fit together and can be assembled. To fac…
Accurate yet low-latency depth is essential for radar-camera perception in autonomous systems. Cameras provide rich appearance but lack metric scale, whereas automotive radar offers metric range but is sparse and noisy. Many pipelines are multi-stage or depend on auxiliary annota…
Action-conditioned video world models predict future observations from an initial observation and an action signal. In robotics, actions influence future observations through two distinct processes: they are first realized into robot motion by the robot body and controller, and t…
The paper proposes a robot-agnostic compliant-control framework that extends the ROS control ecosystem with standardized joint and Cartesian command interfaces. It addresses a key limitation of existing control software: no reusable infrastructure for implementing compliant-contr…