Robot Learning

Task Specification

Task specification is the way a desired behavior is communicated to a robot, whether as a reward function, a goal state or goal image, a natural-language instruction, a demonstration, or a formal logical specification. The choice determines what supervision the system needs and what ambiguities remain: rewards are precise but hard to author, language is flexible but underspecified, and demonstrations convey intent implicitly. Mis-specified tasks lead to reward hacking and unintended behavior.

Why it matters for physical AI

Language-conditioned robot foundation models have made natural-language instruction the dominant interface for commanding robots, which makes understanding what a specification does and does not pin down critical for safe, predictable deployment.