{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/ask4help-learning-to-leverage-an-expert-for","title":"Ask4Help: Learning to Leverage an Expert for Embodied Tasks","arxiv_id":"2211.09960","date":"2022-11-18","proceeding":null,"authors":["Kunal Pratap Singh","Luca Weihs","Alvaro Herrasti","Jonghyun Choi","Aniruddha Kemhavi","Roozbeh Mottaghi"],"abstract":"Embodied AI agents continue to become more capable every year with the advent of new models, environments, and benchmarks, but are still far away from being performant and reliable enough to be deployed in real, user-facing, applications. In this paper, we ask: can we bridge this gap by enabling agents to ask for assistance from an expert such as a human being? To this end, we propose the Ask4Help policy that augments agents with the ability to request, and then use expert assistance. Ask4Help policies can be efficiently trained without modifying the original agent's parameters and learn a desirable trade-off between task performance and the amount of requested help, thereby reducing the cost of querying the expert. We evaluate Ask4Help on two different tasks -- object goal navigation and room rearrangement and see substantial improvements in performance using minimal help. On object navigation, an agent that achieves a $52\\%$ success rate is raised to $86\\%$ with $13\\%$ help and for rearrangement, the state-of-the-art model with a $7\\%$ success rate is dramatically improved to $90.4\\%$ using $39\\%$ help. Human trials with Ask4Help demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in practical scenarios. We release the code for Ask4Help here: https://github.com/allenai/ask4help.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.09960v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.09960v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"ask4help-learning-to-leverage-an-expert-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/allenai/ask4help","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2211.09960","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2211.09960","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2211.09960"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/allenai/ask4help","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"summary":{"ran":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"939725942599a874","entry":"grad_norm","repo":"allenai/ask4help","repo_kind":"official","path":"allenact/utils/model_utils.py","file_url":"https://github.com/allenai/ask4help/blob/HEAD/allenact/utils/model_utils.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"939725942599a874"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}