Environment Edits as a Corrective Signal for Reward Learning

Robot corrections allow people to adjust a robot's behavior, but a single correction changes many features. Also, preferences about object attributes and relationships between objects cannot be expressed by moving the robot. We propose environment edits as a complementary form of feedback. The robot's motion is held constant as the human edits the scene, so the only explanation for the edit is the moved object. We introduce Feature Learning from Environmental and Robot-Relational Edit Traces (FERRET), which learns preferences from both robot and environment corrections. We show that environment edits are able to disambiguate features and learn preferences that robot corrections alone cannot.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
arXiv (Cornell University)
Published
2026-10-26
DOI
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2610.35659
Primary Topic
Robot Manipulation and Learning
Type
preprint
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preprint

Environment Edits as a Corrective Signal for Reward Learning

Courtney McBeth, Nancy M. Amato, Isaac Ngui
arXiv (Cornell University)
Robot Manipulation and Learning
preprint

Environment Edits as a Corrective Signal for Reward Learning

Courtney McBeth, Nancy M. Amato, Isaac Ngui
preprint en

Abstract

Robot corrections allow people to adjust a robot's behavior, but a single correction changes many features. Also, preferences about object attributes and relationships between objects cannot be expressed by moving the robot. We propose environment edits as a complementary form of feedback. The robot's motion is held constant as the human edits the scene, so the only explanation for the edit is the moved object. We introduce Feature Learning from Environmental and Robot-Relational Edit Traces (FERRET), which learns preferences from both robot and environment corrections. We show that environment edits are able to disambiguate features and learn preferences that robot corrections alone cannot.

arXiv (Cornell University)
Robot Manipulation and Learning
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