Humans are intuitive by nature. We can sense meaning beyond the literal words that we encounter. Now, a new artificial intelligence–assisted learning platform developed by MIT engineers is enabling robots to read larger meaning into a human’s natural language commands.

In a study to be presented at the annual Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2026), held in Austin, Texas, Nov. 9–12, researchers from MIT and New York University introduce FLEX, a flexible feature-editing pipeline for robot motion planning.

With FLEX, humans can interact with a robot by giving it instructions in natural, conversational language. The robot can not only follow the instructions literally but also read into the words to draw larger generalizations that help to improve its motion-planning task.