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Akanksha Saran

10 accepted papers

2024

Towards Principled Representation Learning from Videos for Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2024spotlight

We study pre-training representations for decision-making using video data, which is abundantly available for tasks such as game agents and software testing. Even though significant empirical advances have been made on this problem, a theoretical understanding remains absent. We initiate the theoret…

2023

Personalized Reward Learning with Interaction-Grounded Learning (IGL)

ICLR 2023poster

In an era of countless content offerings, recommender systems alleviate information overload by providing users with personalized content suggestions. Due to the scarcity of explicit user feedback, modern recommender systems typically optimize for the same fixed combination of implicit feedback sign…

2023

Streaming Active Learning with Deep Neural Networks

ICML 2023poster

Active learning is perhaps most naturally posed as an online learning problem. However, prior active learning approaches with deep neural networks assume offline access to the entire dataset ahead of time. This paper proposes VeSSAL, a new algorithm for batch active learning with deep neural network…

2022

Interaction-Grounded Learning with Action-Inclusive Feedback

NeurIPS 2022accept

Consider the problem setting of Interaction-Grounded Learning (IGL), in which a learner's goal is to optimally interact with the environment with no explicit reward to ground its policies. The agent observes a context vector, takes an action, and receives a feedback vector, using this information to…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2022

Understanding Acoustic Patterns of Human Teachers Demonstrating Manipulation Tasks to Robots

IROS 2022poster

Humans use audio signals in the form of spoken language or verbal reactions effectively when teaching new skills or tasks to other humans. While demonstrations allow humans to teach robots in a natural way, learning from trajectories alone does not leverage other available modalities including audio…

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2020

Human Gaze Assisted Artificial Intelligence: A Review

IJCAI 2020poster

Human gaze reveals a wealth of information about internal cognitive state. Thus, gaze-related research has significantly increased in computer vision, natural language processing, decision learning, and robotics in recent years. We provide a high-level overview of the research efforts in these field…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2018

Human Gaze Following for Human-Robot Interaction

IROS 2018poster

Gaze provides subtle informative cues to aid fluent interactions among people. Incorporating human gaze predictions can signify how engaged a person is while interacting with a robot and allow the robot to predict a human's intentions or goals. We propose a novel approach to predict human gaze fixat…

Cited by 73SourceScholar
2017

Viewpoint selection for visual failure detection

IROS 2017poster

The visual difference between outcomes in many robotics tasks is often subtle, such as the tip of a screw being near a hole versus in the hole. Furthermore, these small differences are often only observable from certain viewpoints or may even require information from multiple viewpoints to fully ver…

Cited by 13SourceScholar
2015

Hand parsing for fine-grained recognition of human grasps in monocular images

IROS 2015poster

We propose a novel method for performing fine-grained recognition of human hand grasp types using a single monocular image to allow computational systems to better understand human hand use. In particular, we focus on recognizing challenging grasp categories which differ only by subtle variations in…

Cited by 19SourceScholar