From Language to Drives: A Multimodal Framework for Aligning Autonomous Robots with Human Purposes

This work explores a multimodal approach to the alignment of the behavior of open-ended learning autonomous robots with human purposes through the use of large language models as cultural enablers. While autonomous robots can generate their own skills and goals through interaction with the environment, they often lack mechanisms to ensure that these remain relevant and aligned to those of human users. The proposed approach makes use of the general and cultural knowledge contained in LLMs and VLMs to establish a multimodal interactive alignment process in which human purposes, expressed in natural language, are transformed into motivational components of a robot architecture in the form of robot missions and drives that guide the behavior of the robot. The system is structured into three layers for semantic alignment, mission generation, and drive modeling. This design enables a bidirectional interaction loop: human inputs define high-level purposes, robots expand them into executable missions making use of multimodal information relayed by LLMs and VLMs, and feedback maintains alignment with human intent. Experiments in simulation and with a physical robot demonstrate that the process produces valid missions and behaviors, supporting effective human-agent alignment in interactive scenarios with autonomous robots.