Papers for

industrial manipulators

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Preference-guided steering shifts robot behavior beyond known limits

PrefPI: Preference-Guided Steering into Out-of-Distribution Behaviors

Abstract: We present PrefPI (Preference-Guided Policy Iteration), an iterative framework for steering pretrained generative robot policies using only relative preferences over self-generated trajectories. Unlike prior preference-learning methods that primarily sharpen modes already represented by the policy, we study steering beyond the initial effective support, where desired behaviors are rarely or never observed under the initial policy. Our key idea is to formulate preference learning as preference-conditioned generative modeling: preferred trajectories define a conditional distribution, whose density ratio with the broader behavior prior provides an implicit preference signal amplified by classifier-free guidance (CFG). Repeating this preference-conditioned modeling and guidance step yields a form of preference-guided policy iteration, turning incremental improvements toward previously inaccessible behaviors. Across diffusion policies and the PI0.5 flow- matching VLA in simulation and the real world, PrefPI produces substantial behavioral shifts with limited feedback. In particular, PrefPI increases object transport height from 10.7 cm to 19.8 cm on real hardware with only 150 preference-labeled trajectories.

Wed 30 SeptRoboticsArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
The gist
This work addresses the problem of changing how a robot behaves when desired actions are rarely or never seen before in its usual behavior. The authors propose a method called PrefPI, which uses relative preferences between robot actions to gradually guide the robot toward new behaviors. Instead of needing exact examples of correct actions, their method learns from comparisons of different attempts, making it possible to explore new behaviors beyond what the robot initially does. They demonstrated that PrefPI significantly improved a robot's ability to lift objects higher using only limited feedback.
Open → 2609.40165v1