Welcome

I am a final-year Ph.D. candidate in the Stanford University Computer Science Department, advised by Benjamin Van Roy. My research is broadly focused on reinforcement learning. In the past, I have completed internships at Microsoft Research Cambridge, Mila, Microsoft Research Redmond, and DeepMind.

I am on the academic & industry job markets for the 2023-2024 cycle.

I completed my Bachelor's and Master's degrees in the Brown University Computer Science Department. My time at Brown centered around work in reinforcement learning, under my advisor Michael Littman. In parallel, I was a member of the Humans to Robots Laboratory where I worked with Stefanie Tellex on natural language understanding for robots. I was also a member of the Brown Laboratory for Linguistic Information Processing run by Eugene Charniak.

Research Interests

I'm primarily interested in the area of reinforcement learning with the goal of building sequential decision-making agents that learn as efficiently and as remarkably as people do. My work employs a variety of techniques for developing principled approaches to address the core challenges of sample-efficient reinforcement learning: generalization, exploration, and credit assignment. Lately, I've been studying information theory as a collection of tools that facilitate rigorous analysis while also remaining amenable to the design of practical, scalable agents.

Selected Papers & Publications

For my CV, please click here and, for a complete list of papers, please check Google Scholar, DBLP, or Semantic Scholar (depending on what you're after, one of these may be more reliable than the others).

Value Preserving State-Action Abstractions

David Abel, Nate Umbanhowar, Khimya Khetarpal, Dilip Arumugam, Doina Precup, Michael L. Littman.
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2020.
Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning & Decision Making (RLDM), 2019.
Early version: ICLR Workshop on Structures and Priors in Reinforcement Learning, 2019.

Grounding English Commands to Reward Functions

James MacGlashan, Monica Babes-Vroman, Marie desJardins, Michael L. Littman, Smaranda Muresan, Shawn Squire, Stefanie Tellex, Dilip Arumugam, Lei Yang.
Robotics: Science and Systems, 2015.