Scalable Oversight Across Generative Visual AI: Toward Visual Storytelling for Everyone
Abstract: Generative visual AI has advanced by scaling data and compute, but its next bottleneck is oversight: the expert signals that evaluate, reward, and teach models what "good" looks like. Providing such oversight is increasingly difficult because foundation vision-language models now match or surpass most humans at the skills being judged. This thesis develops scalable [...]
Towards Fine-Grained Diagnosis of GUI Agents
Abstract: Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents need strong planning—what to do next—and grounding—where to click next—to solve user tasks. Yet these agents remain unreliable, and standard metrics such as task success or next-action accuracy often obscure why they fail. In this talk, I argue that reliable GUI agents require fine-grained diagnosis of core agentic capabilities, [...]
Embodied Design, Modeling, and Optimization for Bio-Inspired Aquatic Robots
Abstract: Bio-inspired aquatic robots offer a promising route to agile and efficient locomotion in fluid environments, where conventional rigid systems remain limited. In bio-inspired aquatic systems, locomotion is not determined by actuation or control alone, but instead emerges from tightly coupled interactions among body morphology, distributed compliance, actuation, onboard sensing, and the surrounding flow, making [...]
Integrating Learning and Collaboration for Human-Robot Alignment
Abstract: The alignment problem for robots considers how robots can learn to behave in accordance with human values. Today, robot learning paradigms enable humans to provide data (e.g., preference labels or demonstrations), which the robot uses to update its behavior (e.g., reward model or policy) to better align with human intentions. However, the current paradigm requires [...]
Towards Generalizable Embodied Navigation with Vision-Language Models
Abstract: Embodied navigation asks an autonomous agent to move through unknown environments and accomplish tasks such as finding objects or following instructions. Reliable performance in real-world settings, from household assistance to warehouse logistics, requires the agent to tightly integrate perception, semantic reasoning, and long-horizon planning under cluttered layouts, ambiguous appearances, and robot-specific constraints. Vision-language models [...]
From Margin to Center: Designing Inclusive & Equitable Service Robots with Disabled Adults
Abstract Service robots – autonomous systems that perform personal and professional tasks – have become a common sight in the Global North. In Human-robot interaction (HRI), researchers rarely consider the design implications of service robots for people with disabilities (PwDs) beyond controlled assistive contexts, such as private homes and assisted living facilities. Nevertheless, the purview [...]
Towards Socially Intelligent Multi-Agent Systems: Zero-Shot MARL Coordination and Theory-of-Mind Benchmarking of LLM Agents for Strategic Deception
Abstract: An agent that performs well on its own may still struggle when working with others. In multi-agent environments, success depends not only on understanding the world but also on understanding what other agents know, intend, and conceal. Cooperative partners follow hidden conventions, while adversarial opponents deceive. This work argues that robust multi-agent behavior requires [...]
Data-Driven Representation and Reasoning for Aviation Safety
Abstract: Aviation safety analysis increasingly benefits from large-scale operational trajectory data, yet raw motion traces alone are insufficient for understanding safety-critical events on the airport surface. The significance of an aircraft’s motion depends on the structured operational environment in which it occurs, including runways, taxiways, hold-short lines, and interactions among multiple agents over time. This [...]
Brain-Aligned Tactile Representations for Dexterous Robot Learning
Abstract: Touch is the essential sensory modality through which animals and robots physically negotiate the world. While much of robotic touch focuses on the capabilities of currently available tactile hardware, this thesis asks a more general question: what forms of tactile processing and representation could allow robots to approach the dexterity of animals? This thesis [...]
RI PhD Thesis Defense – Angela Chen
Date: June 26, 2026 Time: 10:00 – 11:30 AM Location: GHC – Room 4405 Zoom Link Type: Ph.D. Thesis Defense Who: Angela Chen Title: Behavioral Modeling of Interpersonal Dynamics as Controllable Agentic Systems: Empirically-grounded Adaptive Virtual Patients for Psychotherapy Training Abstract: The need for mental health care continues to outpace the supply of trained psychotherapists. Training is itself a bottleneck because supervision [...]
Spatial Reasoning and Semantic Representations for Autonomous Exploration and Object Search
Abstract: Autonomous robot exploration and object search in unknown environments are fundamental capabilities in robotics, with applications ranging from search and rescue to structural inspection. A central challenge in both tasks is that robots often must make decisions based on information they have not yet directly observed–reasoning about unexplored space, predicting future information gain, or [...]