A coding agent solving a software-engineering task spends dozens of steps reasoning, editing code, and running tests, yet little is known about what the underlying language model internally represents...

Reinforcement learning is a powerful paradigm for learning optimal policies from experimental data. However, to find optimal policies, most reinforcement learning algorithms explore all possible actio...

We consider the problem of autonomously learning robot skills under a limited practice budget for sequential tasks. We propose an active skill learning algorithm, \emph{Deliberate Practice (DP)}, that...

Scaling test-time compute has emerged as a key ingredient for enabling large language models (LLMs) to solve difficult problems, but comes with high latency and inference cost. We introduce sleep-time...

One of the most striking features of human cognition is the capacity to plan. Two aspects of human planning stand out: its efficiency and flexibility. Efficiency is especially impressive because plans...

Perhaps surprisingly, it is possible to predict how long an algorithm will take to run on a previously unseen input, using machine learning techniques to build a model of the algorithm's runtime as a ...

A Lie group is an old mathematical abstract object dating back to the XIX century, when mathematician Sophus Lie laid the foundations of the theory of continuous transformation groups. As it often hap...

Are world models a necessary ingredient for flexible, goal-directed behaviour, or is model-free learning sufficient? We provide a formal answer to this question, showing that any agent capable of gene...

Multi-step forceful manipulation tasks, such as opening a push-and-twist childproof bottle, require a robot to make various planning choices that are substantially impacted by the requirement to exert...

YouTube video by Mrinal Verghese

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on reasoning benchmarks like math and logic. While many works have largely assumed well-defined tasks, real-world queries are often under...

Current domain-independent, classical planners require symbolic models of the problem domain and instance as input, resulting in a knowledge acquisition bottleneck. Meanwhile, although deep learning h...

Neural networks often learn task-specific latent representations that fail to generalize to novel settings or tasks. Conversely, humans learn discrete representations (i.e., concepts or words) at a va...

Imitation learning has proven to be useful for many real-world problems, but approaches such as behavioral cloning suffer from data mismatch and compounding error issues. One attempt to address these ...

Research on Interactive Robot Learning has yielded several modalities for querying a human for training data, including demonstrations, preferences, and corrections. While prior work in this space ...

Assistance games are a promising alternative to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for training AI assistants. Assistance games resolve key drawbacks of RLHF, such as incentives for dec...

For an autonomous system to be helpful to humans and to pose no unwarranted risks, it needs to align its values with those of the humans in its environment in such a way that its actions contribute to...

Humans excel in complex long-horizon soft body manipulation tasks via flexible tool use: bread baking requires a knife to slice the dough and a rolling pin to flatten it. Often regarded as a hallmark ...

We propose a new method for learning from a single demonstration to solve hard exploration tasks like the Atari game Montezuma's Revenge. Instead of imitating human demonstrations, as proposed in othe...

Integrated task and motion planning (TAMP) has proven to be a valuable approach to generalizable long-horizon robotic manipulation and navigation problems. However, the typical TAMP problem formulatio...

Model-free reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to a range of challenging problems, and has recently been extended to handle large neural network policies and value functions. However,...

Many animals, and an increasing number of artificial agents, display sophisticated capabilities to perceive and manipulate objects. But human beings remain distinctive in their capacity for flexible, ...

Informed and robust decision making in the face of uncertainty is critical for robots that perform physical tasks alongside people. We formulate this as Bayesian Reinforcement Learning over latent Mar...

Planning long-horizon robot manipulation requires making discrete decisions about which objects to interact with and continuous decisions about how to interact with them. A robot planner must select g...

Tom Silver's academic website.

Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) integrates high-level task planning with low-level motion feasibility, but existing methods are costly in long-horizon problems due to excessive motion sampling. While ...

Learning Exploration Strategies to Solve Real-World Marble Runs

Recent advances in computational perception have significantly improved the ability of autonomous robots to perform state estimation with low entropy. Such advances motivate a reconsideration of robot...

In this study, working with the task of object retrieval in clutter, we have developed a robot learning framework in which Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is first applied to enable a Deep Neural Netwo...

End-user programming (EUP) tools must balance user control with the robot's ability to plan and act autonomously. Many existing task-oriented EUP tools enforce a specific level of control, e.g., by re...

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a new paradigm for embodied reasoning and control, most recently by generating robot policy code that utilizes a custom library of vision and control primi...

The ability of a robot to plan complex behaviors with real-time computation, rather than adhering to predesigned or offline-learned routines, alleviates the need for specialized algorithms or training...