Robots have the capacity to perform a broad range of useful tasks, such as factory automation, cleaning, delivery, assistive care, environmental monitoring and entertainment. Enabling a robot to perform a new task in a new environment typically requires a large amount of new software to be written, often by a team of experts. It would be valuable if future technology could empower people, who may have limited or no understanding of software coding, to train robots to perform custom tasks. Some implementations of the present invention provide methods and systems that respond to users' corrective commands to generate and refine a policy for determining appropriate actions based on sensor-data input. Upon completion of learning, the system can generate control commands by deriving them from the sensory data. Using the learned control policy, the robot can behave autonomously.