Abstract: The need for mental health care continues to outpace the supply of trained psychotherapists, while psychotherapy training remains constrained by limited supervision time and scarce opportunities for repeated, feedback-rich practice in realistic scenarios. Simulation-based training can mitigate these constraints, but actor-based standardized patients are costly and difficult to scale, and many clinically challenging moments [...]

Abstract: Multi-robot manipulation is becoming an inevitability of modern robotics. As hardware costs fall, the barrier to deploying robot teams has shifted from economics to algorithmic capability. To fulfill their promise, multi-robot systems must jointly reason about geometric coordination, contact interactions, task assignments, and scene dynamics, while adapting to variable team sizes and diverse robot [...]

Abstract: Modern vision and vision–language models (VLMs) achieve remarkable perceptual performance, yet their internal representations often misalign with human-understandable concepts, clinical reasoning, or the causal structure of data. Such misalignment limits trust, generalization, and safety - particularly in high-stakes domains such as medical imaging. This thesis proposes a comprehensive framework for model alignment, developing methods [...]