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 [...]

Abstract: As AI systems become more capable, further progress may depend not only on scaling models and training data, but also on enabling systems to evaluate and improve their own behavior and development. This raises a dual challenge: how can we make self-improvement more effective while ensuring increasingly autonomous systems remain trustworthy? This thesis investigates [...]

Abstract: Language modeling progress is largely evidenced by steadily rising scores on benchmarks of increasing apparent difficulty. From this, the field infers increasingly general capabilities, many of which presuppose robust world modeling. Interpreting a score, however, requires understanding both the task's computational requirements and how the test-taker generalizes from them. Unlike humans, who demonstrably generalize [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]