Yell At Your Robot: Improving On-the-Fly from Language Corrections
Lucy Xiaoyang Shi Zheyuan Hu Tony Z. Zhao Archit Sharma Karl Pertsch Jianlan Luo Sergey Levine Chelsea Finn
Hierarchical policies that combine language and low-level control have been
shown to perform impressively long-horizon robotic tasks, by leveraging either
zero-shot high-level planners like pretrained language and vision-language
models (LLMs/VLMs) or models trained on annotated robotic demonstrations.
However, for complex and dexterous skills, attaining high success rates on
long-horizon tasks still represents a major challenge -- the longer the task
is, the more likely it is that some stage will fail. Can humans help the robot
to continuously improve its long-horizon task performance through intuitive and
natural feedback? In this paper, we make the following observation: high-level
policies that index into sufficiently rich and expressive low-level
language-conditioned skills can be readily supervised with human feedback in
the form of language corrections. We show that even fine-grained corrections,
such as small movements ("move a bit to the left"), can be effectively
incorporated into high-level policies, and that such corrections can be readily
obtained from humans observing the robot and making occasional suggestions.
This framework enables robots not only to rapidly adapt to real-time language
feedback, but also incorporate this feedback into an iterative training scheme
that improves the high-level policy's ability to correct errors in both
low-level execution and high-level decision-making purely from verbal feedback.
Our evaluation on real hardware shows that this leads to significant
performance improvement in long-horizon, dexterous manipulation tasks without
the need for any additional teleoperation. Videos and code are available at
https://yay-robot.github.io/.