Multiclass neural network classifiers are typically trained using cross-entropy loss. Following training, the performance of this same neural network is evaluated using an application-specific metric based on the multiclass confusion matrix, such as the Macro $F_\beta$-Score. It is questionable whether the use of cross-entropy will yield a classifier that aligns with the intended application-specific performance criteria, particularly in scenarios where there is a need to emphasize one aspect of classifier performance. For example, if greater precision is preferred over recall, the $\beta$ value in the $F_\beta$ evaluation metric can be adjusted accordingly, but the cross-entropy objective remains unaware of this preference during training. We propose a method that addresses this training-evaluation gap for multiclass neural network classifiers such that users can train these models informed by the desired final $F_\beta$-Score. Following prior work in binary classification, we utilize the concepts of the soft-set confusion matrices and a piecewise-linear approximation of the Heaviside step function. Our method extends the $2 \times 2$ binary soft-set confusion matrix to a multiclass $d \times d$ confusion matrix and proposes dynamic adaptation of the threshold value $\tau$, which parameterizes the piecewise-linear Heaviside approximation during run-time. We present a theoretical analysis that shows that our method can be used to optimize for a soft-set based approximation of Macro-$F_\beta$ that is a consistent estimator of Macro-$F_\beta$, and our extensive experiments show the practical effectiveness of our approach.

Preference learning has long been studied in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in order to adapt robot behavior to specific user needs and desires. Typically, human preferences are modeled as a scalar function; however, such a formulation confounds critical considerations on how the robot should behave for a given task, with desired -- but not required -- robot behavior. In this work, we distinguish between such required and desired robot behavior by leveraging a planning framework. Specifically, we propose a novel problem formulation for preference learning in HRI where various types of human preferences are encoded as soft planning constraints. Then, we explore a data-driven method to enable a robot to infer preferences by querying users, which we instantiate in rearrangement tasks in the Habitat 2.0 simulator. We show that the proposed approach is promising at inferring three types of preferences even under varying levels of noise in simulated user choices between potential robot behaviors. Our contributions open up doors to adaptable planning-based robot behavior in the future.

Recent work in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has shown that robots can leverage implicit communicative signals from users to understand how they are being perceived during interactions. For example, these signals can be gaze patterns, facial expressions, or body motions that reflect internal human states. To facilitate future research in this direction, we contribute the REACT database, a collection of two datasets of human-robot interactions that display users' natural reactions to robots during a collaborative game and a photography scenario. Further, we analyze the datasets to show that interaction history is an important factor that can influence human reactions to robots. As a result, we believe that future models for interpreting implicit feedback in HRI should explicitly account for this history. REACT opens up doors to this possibility in the future.

Human impressions of robot performance are often measured through surveys. As a more scalable and cost-effective alternative, we study the possibility of predicting people's impressions of robot behavior using non-verbal behavioral cues and machine learning techniques. To this end, we first contribute the SEAN TOGETHER Dataset consisting of observations of an interaction between a person and a mobile robot in a Virtual Reality simulation, together with impressions of robot performance provided by users on a 5-point scale. Second, we contribute analyses of how well humans and supervised learning techniques can predict perceived robot performance based on different combinations of observation types (e.g., facial, spatial, and map features). Our results show that facial expressions alone provide useful information about human impressions of robot performance; but in the navigation scenarios we tested, spatial features are the most critical piece of information for this inference task. Also, when evaluating results as binary classification (rather than multiclass classification), the F1-Score of human predictions and machine learning models more than doubles, showing that both are better at telling the directionality of robot performance than predicting exact performance ratings. Based on our findings, we provide guidelines for implementing these predictions models in real-world navigation scenarios.

A major challenge to deploying robots widely is navigation in human-populated environments, commonly referred to as social robot navigation. While the field of social navigation has advanced tremendously in recent years, the fair evaluation of algorithms that tackle social navigation remains hard because it involves not just robotic agents moving in static environments but also dynamic human agents and their perceptions of the appropriateness of robot behavior. In contrast, clear, repeatable, and accessible benchmarks have accelerated progress in fields like computer vision, natural language processing and traditional robot navigation by enabling researchers to fairly compare algorithms, revealing limitations of existing solutions and illuminating promising new directions. We believe the same approach can benefit social navigation. In this paper, we pave the road towards common, widely accessible, and repeatable benchmarking criteria to evaluate social robot navigation. Our contributions include (a) a definition of a socially navigating robot as one that respects the principles of safety, comfort, legibility, politeness, social competency, agent understanding, proactivity, and responsiveness to context, (b) guidelines for the use of metrics, development of scenarios, benchmarks, datasets, and simulators to evaluate social navigation, and (c) a design of a social navigation metrics framework to make it easier to compare results from different simulators, robots and datasets.

Deploying interactive systems in-the-wild requires adaptability to situations not encountered in lab environments. Our work details our experience about the impact of architecture choice on behavior reusability and reactivity while deploying a public interactive system. In particular, we introduce Shutter, a robot photographer and a platform for public interaction. In designing Shutter's architecture, we focused on adaptability for in-the-wild deployment, while developing a reusable platform to facilitate future research in public human-robot interaction. We find that behavior trees allow reactivity, especially in group settings, and encourage designing reusable behaviors.

Conventional approaches to vision-and-language navigation (VLN) are trained end-to-end but struggle to perform well in freely traversable environments. Inspired by the robotics community, we propose a modular approach to VLN using topological maps. Given a natural language instruction and topological map, our approach leverages attention mechanisms to predict a navigation plan in the map. The plan is then executed with low-level actions (e.g. forward, rotate) using a robust controller. Experiments show that our method outperforms previous end-to-end approaches, generates interpretable navigation plans, and exhibits intelligent behaviors such as backtracking.

Neural network binary classifiers are often evaluated on metrics like accuracy and $F_1$-Score, which are based on confusion matrix values (True Positives, False Positives, False Negatives, and True Negatives). However, these classifiers are commonly trained with a different loss, e.g. log loss. While it is preferable to perform training on the same loss as the evaluation metric, this is difficult in the case of confusion matrix based metrics because set membership is a step function without a derivative useful for backpropagation. To address this challenge, we propose an approximation of the step function that adheres to the properties necessary for effective training of binary networks using confusion matrix based metrics. This approach allows for end-to-end training of binary deep neural classifiers via batch gradient descent. We demonstrate the flexibility of this approach in several applications with varying levels of class imbalance. We also demonstrate how the approximation allows balancing between precision and recall in the appropriate ratio for the task at hand.

We present a navigation system that combines ideas from hierarchical planning and machine learning. The system uses a traditional global planner to compute optimal paths towards a goal, and a deep local trajectory planner and velocity controller to compute motion commands. The latter components of the system adjust the behavior of the robot through attention mechanisms such that it moves towards the goal, avoids obstacles, and respects the space of nearby pedestrians. Both the structure of the proposed deep models and the use of attention mechanisms make the system's execution interpretable. Our simulation experiments suggest that the proposed architecture outperforms baselines that try to map global plan information and sensor data directly to velocity commands. In comparison to a hand-designed traditional navigation system, the proposed approach showed more consistent performance.

We propose an end-to-end deep learning model for translating free-form natural language instructions to a high-level plan for behavioral robot navigation. The proposed model uses attention mechanisms to connect information from user instructions with a topological representation of the environment. To evaluate this model, we collected a new dataset for the translation problem containing 11,051 pairs of user instructions and navigation plans. Our results show that the proposed model outperforms baseline approaches on the new dataset. Overall, our work suggests that a topological map of the environment can serve as a relevant knowledge base for translating natural language instructions into a sequence of navigation behaviors.