What Makes Learning to Control Easy or Hard?

1403 Tepper School Building

Abstract: Designing autonomous systems that are simultaneously high-performing, adaptive, and provably safe remains an open problem. In this talk, we will argue that in order to meet this goal, new theoretical and algorithmic tools are needed that blend the stability, robustness, and safety guarantees of robust control with the flexibility, adaptability, and performance of machine [...]

Towards a Robot Generalist through In-Context Learning and Abstractions

NSH 1305

Abstract: The goal of this thesis is to discover AI processes that enhance cross-domain and cross-task generalization in intelligent robot agents. Unlike the dominant approach in contemporary robot learning, which pursues generalization primarily through scaling laws (increasing data and model size), we focus on identifying the best abstractions and representations in both perception and policy [...]