Welcome

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Princeton University Computer Science Department, where I work with Tom Griffiths. My research is broadly focused on reinforcement learning and, in recent years, draws heavily upon tools from information theory.

I received my Ph.D. from the Stanford University Computer Science Department, along with a M.S. from the Statistics Department, where I was advised by Benjamin Van Roy. I was affiliated with both the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford Computation & Cognition Lab. Prior to that, I completed B.S. and M.S. degrees in the Brown University Computer Science Department, advised by Michael Littman while also working closely with Stefanie Tellex.

Research Interests

My research is primarily centered around understanding principled, practical approaches for achieving data efficiency in reinforcement learning. This often takes the form of research directed towards the specific generalization, exploration, and credit assignment challenges faced by reinforcement-learning agents. In recent years, I've grown fond of information theory as a suite of tools which facilitate rigorous analysis while also remaining amenable to the design of scalable agents. I’m also interested in how insights for engineering sample efficiency into computational decision-making agents fruitfully informs our understanding and reverse engineering of sample efficiency in biological decision-making 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.