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Robots often need to be reconfigurable$-$to customize, calibrate, or optimize robots operating in varying environments with different hardware). A particular challenge in robotics is the automated and dynamic reconfiguration to load and…
Despite significant advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL), model performance remains highly sensitive to algorithm and hyperparameter configurations, while generalization gaps across environments complicate real-world deployment. Although…
The design of physical compliance -- its location, degree, and structure -- affects robot performance and robustness in contact-rich tasks. While compliance is often used in the robot's joints, flange, or end-effector, this paper proposes…
Human-robot interaction requires a common understanding of the operational environment, which can be provided by a representation that blends geometric and symbolic knowledge: a semantic map. Through a semantic map the robot can interpret…
Software systems with large parameter spaces, nondeterminism and high computational cost are challenging to test. Recently, software testing techniques based on causal inference have been successfully applied to systems that exhibit such…
Exploiting robots for activities in human-shared environments, whether warehouses, shopping centres or hospitals, calls for such robots to understand the underlying physical interactions between nearby agents and objects. In particular,…
The explainability of a robot's actions is crucial to its acceptance in social spaces. Explaining why a robot fails to complete a given task is particularly important for non-expert users to be aware of the robot's capabilities and…
Automated feature engineering (AFE) enables AI systems to autonomously construct high-utility representations from raw tabular data. However, existing AFE methods rely on statistical heuristics, yielding brittle features that fail under…
Modern applications are built as large, distributed systems spanning numerous modules, teams, and data centers. Despite robust engineering and recovery strategies, failures and performance issues remain inevitable, risking significant…
As robots are deployed in complex situations, engineers and end users must develop a holistic understanding of their behaviors, capabilities, and limitations. Some behaviors are directly optimized by the objective function. They often…
Causal understanding is important in many disciplines of science and engineering, where we seek to understand how different factors in the system causally affect an experiment or situation and pave a pathway towards creating effective or…
Many tasks, particularly those involving interaction with the environment, are characterized by high variability, making robotic autonomy difficult. One flexible solution is to introduce the input of a human with superior experience and…
Robots are increasingly operating in open-world environments where safe behavior depends on context: the same hallway may require different navigation strategies when crowded versus empty, or during an emergency versus normal operations.…
High-dimensional compositional data are prevalent in many applications. The simplex constraint poses intrinsic challenges to inferring the conditional dependence relationships among the components forming a composition, as encoded by a…
Understanding the root cause of a defect is critical to isolating and repairing buggy behavior. We present Causal Testing, a new method of root-cause analysis that relies on the theory of counterfactual causality to identify a set of…
Medical vision-language models can automate the generation of radiology reports but struggle with accurate visual grounding and factual consistency. Existing models often misalign textual findings with visual evidence, leading to unreliable…
Training general robotic policies from heterogeneous data for different tasks is a significant challenge. Existing robotic datasets vary in different modalities such as color, depth, tactile, and proprioceptive information, and collected in…
Robot planning in partially observable domains is difficult, because a robot needs to estimate the current state and plan actions at the same time. When the domain includes many objects, reasoning about the objects and their relationships…
Why does a phenomenon occur? Addressing this question is central to most scientific inquiries and often relies on simulations of scientific models. As models become more intricate, deciphering the causes behind phenomena in high-dimensional…
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate advanced reasoning abilities, enabling robots to understand natural language instructions and generate high-level plans with appropriate grounding. However, LLM hallucinations present a significant…