Semantic-Metric Bayesian Risk Fields: Learning Robot Safety from Human Videos with a VLM Prior

Humans interpret safety not as a binary signal but as a continuous, context- and spatially-dependent notion of risk. While risk is subjective, humans form rational mental models that guide action selection in dynamic environments. This work proposes a framework for extracting implicit human risk models by introducing a novel, semantically-conditioned and spatially-varying parametrization of risk, supervised directly from safe human demonstration videos and VLM common sense. Notably, we define risk through a Bayesian formulation. The prior is furnished by a pretrained vision-language model. In order to encourage the risk estimate to be more human aligned, a likelihood function modulates the prior to produce a relative metric of risk. Specifically, the likelihood is a learned ViT that maps pretrained features, to pixel-aligned risk values. Our pipeline ingests RGB images and a query object string, producing pixel-dense risk images. These images that can then be used as value-predictors in robot planning tasks or be projected into 3D for use in conventional trajectory optimization to produce human-like motion. This learned mapping enables generalization to novel objects and contexts, and has the potential to scale to much larger training datasets. In particular, the Bayesian framework that is introduced enables fast adaptation of our model to additional observations or common sense rules. We demonstrate that our proposed framework produces contextual risk that aligns with human preferences. Additionally, we illustrate several downstream applications of the model; as a value learner for visuomotor planners or in conjunction with a classical trajectory optimization algorithm. Our results suggest that our framework is a significant step toward enabling autonomous systems to internalize human-like risk. Code and results can be found at https://riskbayesian.github.io/bayesian_risk/.