Programming-by-Demonstration for Long-Horizon Robot Tasks

Abstract

The goal of programmatic Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is to learn a policy in a programming language that can be used to control a robot’s behavior from a set of user demonstrations. This paper presents a new programmatic LfD algorithm that targets long-horizon robot tasks which require synthesizing programs with complex control flow structures, including nested loops with multiple conditionals. Our proposed method first learns a program sketch that captures the target program’s control flow and then completes this sketch using an LLM-guided search procedure that incorporates a novel technique for proving unrealizability of programming-by-demonstration problems. We have implemented our approach in a new tool called PROLEX and present the results of a comprehensive experimental evaluation on 120 benchmarks involving complex tasks and environments. We show that, given a 120 second time limit, PROLEX can find a program consistent with the demonstrations in 80% of the cases. Furthermore, for 81% of the tasks for which a solution is returned, PROLEX is able to find the ground truth program with just one demonstration. In comparison, CVC5, a syntax-guided synthesis tool, is only able to solve 25% of the cases even when given the ground truth program sketch, and an LLM-based approach, GPT-Synth, is unable to solve any of the tasks due to the environment complexity.