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 [...]

  Abstract: The United States Green Industry faces a persistent labor shortage that motivates the adoption of agricultural automation.  However, existing systems are not designed for the unstructured, densely planted environment of a tree nursery. This thesis presents a robotic system intended to alleviate this shortage while remaining usable by non-technical farmers, built around a [...]

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 [...]