Robots That Know What to Ask: Recovering Misaligned Rewards through Targeted Explanations

Abstract

Learning reward functions from demonstrations assumes that demonstrations provide adequate supervision over all features—or task-relevant aspects of behavior. In practice, demonstrations are often imperfect: humans may under-emphasize certain features due to cognitive load or physical difficulty, or the training regime may fail to sufficiently cover all relevant situations. In either case, important features may be underspecified, leading to ambiguity in the learned reward function and misaligned behavior at deployment. We propose a framework that detects such underspecified features and actively solicits targeted corrective demonstrations. Our key insight is that demonstrations implicitly reveal which features are well specified: features that are consistently optimized show little variation across demonstrations, while features that are underspecified vary widely. We leverage this statistical signal to infer which features may have been insufficiently demonstrated. The robot then explains which features it is uncertain about in natural language and queries for demonstrations that explicitly address the identified gaps. We evaluate our approach in a simulated tabletop manipulation domain and in a user study with a real Franka robot. Targeted, explanation-guided queries significantly improve reward recovery compared to random querying and passive data collection, reducing ambiguity that would otherwise persist in learning from imperfect demonstrations.

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{merker2026,
  author = {Merker, Helena and Walker, Nick and Bobu, Andreea},
  title = {Robots That Know What to Ask: Recovering Misaligned Rewards through Targeted Explanations},
  year = {2026},
  month = jul,
  location = {Sydney, Australia},
  booktitle = {Robotics: Science and Systems},
}