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Cansu Sancaktar

6 accepted papers

2026

Hybrid Training for Vision-Language-Action Models

ICLR 2026poster

Using Large Language Models to produce intermediate thoughts, a.k.a. Chain-of-thought (CoT), before providing an answer has been a successful recipe for solving complex language tasks. In robotics, similar embodied CoT strategies, generating thoughts before actions, have also been shown to lead to i…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

SENSEI: Semantic Exploration Guided by Foundation Models to Learn Versatile World Models

ICML 2025poster

Exploration is a cornerstone of reinforcement learning (RL). Intrinsic motivation attempts to decouple exploration from external, task-based rewards. However, established approaches to intrinsic motivation that follow general principles such as information gain, often only uncover low-level interact…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Modelling Microbial Communities with Graph Neural Networks

ICML 2024poster

Understanding the interactions and interplay of microorganisms is a great challenge with many applications in medical and environmental settings. In this work, we model bacterial communities directly from their genomes using graph neural networks (GNNs). GNNs leverage the inductive bias induced by t…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

Optimistic Active Exploration of Dynamical Systems

NeurIPS 2023poster

Reinforcement learning algorithms commonly seek to optimize policies for solving one particular task. How should we explore an unknown dynamical system such that the estimated model allows us to solve multiple downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner? In this paper, we address this challenge, by deve…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2022

Curious Exploration via Structured World Models Yields Zero-Shot Object Manipulation

NeurIPS 2022accept

It has been a long-standing dream to design artificial agents that explore their environment efficiently via intrinsic motivation, similar to how children perform curious free play. Despite recent advances in intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning (RL), sample-efficient exploration in object…

Cited by 30SourcePDFScholar