Half-time seminar - Alessio Galatolo: "Large Language Models for Socially Competent and Adaptive Robotics"

External Reviewer: Prof. Oliver Lemon from Heriot-Watt University

Abstract: "Developing autonomous (social) robots has always been a challenge. The recent rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has offered a medium to address many tasks and problems that span beyond their straightforward application to dialogue and speech. In this seminar, we will discuss topics at the intersection of these two fields, researching solutions for and from robotics problems that can enable agents to behave in a socially competent, morally sensitive, and coherent manner while still addressing real-world problems.

We explore methods for coordinating natural language with gestures under computational constraints, perception modules that ground vision through language to interpret dynamic human behaviour, and lightweight techniques for adapting frozen LLMs to new domains. These technical contributions are complemented by normative analyses of LLMs in morally challenging roles and strategies for aligning them with user values through efficient preference optimisation."