Modeling Inter-Agent Interactions: A Spatiotemporal Attention Approach to Multi-Agent Action Anticipation
Abstract: Anticipating the near-future actions of multiple people is central to embodied systems that plan and coordinate in shared environments, yet most research targets a single agent and ignores the inter-agent dependencies that shape group behavior. This thesis presents InteractFormer, a unified model that treats inter-agent interaction as a first-class signal: operating directly on fine-grained [...]
Cutting the Skip: Training Residual-Free Transformers
Abstract: Transformers are ubiquitous. They influence nearly every aspect of modern AI. However, the mechanics of their training remain poorly understood. This poses a problem for the field due to the immense amounts of data, computational power, and energy being invested in the training of these networks. I highlight a recent intriguing empirical result from [...]
[MS Thesis Talk] Terrain-Aware Dynamics Models for High-Speed Off-Road Navigation
Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2026 Time: 1:30pm- 2:30pm Location: GHC 9115 Title: Terrain-Aware Dynamics Models for High-Speed Off-Road Navigation Abstract: High-speed autonomy in the real world requires accurate control, which often relies on dynamics models that capture the complex interaction between a robot and its environment. In off-road regimes, this terrain interaction dominates the robot's dynamics, [...]
[MS Thesis Talk] Marble: An On-Manifold Approach to Solving Mathematical Programs with Complementarity Constraints
Date: Thursday, July 30, 2026 Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM Location / ZOOM Link: (GHC 6115 / https://cmu.zoom.us/j/96096959582 ) Abstract: Many problems in robotics require reasoning over a mix of continuous dynamics and discrete events, such as making and breaking contact in manipulation and locomotion. These problems are locally well modeled by quadratic programs [...]