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Kaustubh Mani

5 accepted papers

2026

SHAPO: Sharpness-Aware Policy Optimization for Safe Exploration

ICLR 2026poster

Safe exploration is a prerequisite for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents in safety-critical domains. In this paper, we approach safe exploration through the lens of epistemic uncertainty, where the actor’s sensitivity to parameter perturbations serves as a practical proxy for regions of h…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Safety Representations for Safer Policy Learning

ICLR 2025poster

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically necessitate extensive exploration of the state space to find optimal policies. However, in safety-critical applications, the risks associated with such exploration can lead to catastrophic consequences. Existing safe exploration methods attempt to mitigate…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2022

Sample Efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning via Uncertainty Estimation

ICLR 2022spotlight

In model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, using noisy value estimates to supervise policy evaluation and optimization is detrimental to the sample efficiency. As this noise is heteroscedastic, its effects can be mitigated using uncertainty-based weights in the optimization process.…

2022

f-Cal: Aleatoric uncertainty quantification for robot perception via calibrated neural regression

ICRA 2022poster

While modern deep neural networks are performant perception modules, performance (accuracy) alone is insufficient, particularly for safety-critical robotic applications such as self-driving vehicles. Robot autonomy stacks also require these otherwise blackbox models to produce reliable and calibrate…

Cited by 2SourceScholar
2020

AutoLay: Benchmarking amodal layout estimation for autonomous driving

IROS 2020poster

Given an image or a video captured from a monocular camera, amodal layout estimation is the task of predicting semantics and occupancy in bird's eye view. The term amodal implies we also reason about entities in the scene that are occluded or truncated in image space. While several recent efforts ha…

Cited by 2SourceScholar