# Ask4Help: Learning to Leverage an Expert for Embodied Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.09960 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09960/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [Deep Bayesian Active Learning with Image Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02910/) (2017)
- [ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01734/) (2019)
- [RLBench: The Robot Learning Benchmark & Learning Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12271/) (2019)
- [SAPIEN: A SimulAted Part-based Interactive ENvironment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08515/) (2020)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (2021)
- [On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06757/) (2018)
- [Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02857/) (2020)
- [Object Goal Navigation using Goal-Oriented Semantic Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00643/) (2020)
- [VirtualHome: Simulating Household Activities via Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07011/) (2018)
- [DD-PPO: Learning Near-Perfect PointGoal Navigators from 2.5 Billion Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00357/) (2019)
- [Speaker-Follower Models for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02724/) (2018)
- [Embodied Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11543/) (2017)
- [Learning to Explore using Active Neural SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05155/) (2020)
- [Vision-and-Dialog Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04957/) (2019)
- [ThreeDWorld: A Platform for Interactive Multi-Modal Physical Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04954/) (2020)
- [ObjectNav Revisited: On Evaluation of Embodied Agents Navigating to Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13171/) (2020)
- [Unity: A General Platform for Intelligent Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02627/) (2018)
- [Cognitive Mapping and Planning for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03920/) (2017)
- [TEACh: Task-driven Embodied Agents that Chat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00534/) (2021)
- [RoboTHOR: An Open Simulation-to-Real Embodied AI Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06799/) (2020)
- [Simple but Effective: CLIP Embeddings for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09888/) (2021)
- [BEHAVIOR: Benchmark for Everyday Household Activities in Virtual, Interactive, and Ecological Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03332/) (2021)
- [IQA: Visual Question Answering in Interactive Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.03316/) (2017)
- [Rearrangement: A Challenge for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01975/) (2020)
- [Habitat-Web: Learning Embodied Object-Search Strategies from Human Demonstrations at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03514/) (2022)
- [Learning Exploration Policies for Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01959/) (2019)
- [Occupancy Anticipation for Efficient Exploration and Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09285/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Open-Ended Instructable Embodied Agents with Memory-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15127/) (2023)
- [CLARA: Classifying and Disambiguating User Commands for Reliable Interactive Robotic Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10376/) (2023)
- [Promptable Behaviors: Personalizing Multi-Objective Rewards from Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09337/) (2023)
- [Universal Visual Decomposer: Long-Horizon Manipulation Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08581/) (2023)
- [Tools Fail: Detecting Silent Errors in Faulty Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19228/) (2024)
- [Grounding Multimodal LLMs to Embodied Agents that Ask for Help with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00907/) (2025)
- [Explore with Long-term Memory: A Benchmark and Multimodal LLM-based Reinforcement Learning Framework for Embodied Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10744/) (2026)
- [MSI-Agent: Incorporating Multi-Scale Insight into Embodied Agents for Superior Planning and Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16686/) (2024)
- [Collaborative Instance Object Navigation: Leveraging Uncertainty-Awareness to Minimize Human-Agent Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01250/) (2024)
- [ADAPT: Actively Discovering and Adapting to Preferences for any Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04040/) (2025)
- [Ask-to-Clarify: Resolving Instruction Ambiguity through Multi-turn Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15061/) (2025)
- [ELBA: Learning by Asking for Embodied Visual Navigation and Task Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04865/) (2023)
- [When Learning Is Out of Reach, Reset: Generalization in Autonomous Visuomotor Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17600/) (2023)
- [Distilling LLM Prior to Flow Model for Generalizable Agent's Imagination in Object Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09423/) (2025)
- [DialNav: Multi-turn Dialog Navigation with a Remote Guide](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12894/) (2025)
- [Interactive Semantic Map Representation for Skill-based Visual Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04107/) (2023)
- [SegmATRon: Embodied Adaptive Semantic Segmentation for Indoor Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12031/) (2023)
- [Conditional Multi-Stage Failure Recovery for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06016/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.