A significant portion of roads, particularly in densely populated developing countries, lacks explicitly defined right-of-way rules. These understructured roads pose substantial challenges for autonomous vehicle motion planning, where efficient and safe navigation relies on understanding decentralized human coordination for collision avoidance. This coordination, often termed “social driving etiquette,” remains underexplored due to limited open-source empirical data and suitable modeling frameworks. In this paper, we present a novel dataset and modeling framework designed to study motion planning in these understructured environments. The dataset includes 20 aerial videos of representative scenarios, an image dataset for training vehicle detection models, and a development kit for vehicle trajectory estimation. We demonstrate that a consensus-based modeling approach can effectively explain the emergence of priority orders observed in our dataset, and is therefore a viable framework for decentralized collision avoidance planning.

Embodied AI agents in large scenes often need to navigate to find objects. In this work, we study a naturally emerging variant of the object navigation task, hierarchical relational object navigation (HRON), where the goal is to find objects specified by logical predicates organized in a hierarchical structure-objects related to furniture and then to rooms-such as finding an apple on top of a table in the kitchen. Solving such a task requires an efficient representation to reason about object relations and correlate the relations in the environment and in the task goal. HRON in large scenes (e.g. homes) is particularly challenging due to its partial observability and long horizon, which invites solutions that can compactly store the past information while effectively exploring the scene. We demonstrate experimentally that scene graphs are the best-suited representation compared to conventional representations such as images or 2D maps. We propose a solution that uses scene graphs as part of its input and integrates graph neural networks as its backbone, with an integrated task-driven attention mechanism, and demonstrate its better scalability and learning efficiency than state-of-the-art baselines.

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms face significant challenges when dealing with long-horizon robot manipulation tasks in real-world environments due to sample inefficiency and safety issues. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel framework, SEED, which leverages two approaches: reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and primitive skill-based reinforcement learning. Both approaches are particularly effective in addressing sparse reward issues and the complexities involved in long-horizon tasks. By combining them, SEED reduces the human effort required in RLHF and increases safety in training robot manipulation with RL in real-world settings. Additionally, parameterized skills provide a clear view of the agent's high-level intentions, allowing humans to evaluate skill choices before they are executed. This feature makes the training process even safer and more efficient. To evaluate the performance of SEED, we conducted extensive experiments on five manipulation tasks with varying levels of complexity. Our results show that SEED significantly outperforms state-of-the-art RL algorithms in sample efficiency and safety. In addition, SEED also exhibits a substantial reduction of human effort compared to other RLHF methods. Further details and video results can be found at https://seediros23.github.io/.