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Nishanth Kumar

13 accepted papers

2026

From Pixels to Predicates: Learning Symbolic World Models via Pretrained VLMs

RA-L 2026

Our aim is to learn to solve long-horizon decision-making problems in complex robotics domains given low-level skills and a handful of demonstrations containing sequences of images. To this end, we focus on learning abstract symbolic world models that facilitate zero-shot generalization to novel goa

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

KinDER: A Physical Reasoning Benchmark for Robot Learning and Planning

RSS 2026poster

Robotic systems that interact with the physical world must reason about kinematic and dynamic constraints imposed by their own embodiment, their environment, and the task at hand. We introduce KinDER, a benchmark for Kinematic and Dynamic Embodied Reasoning that targets physical reasoning challenges…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

AHA: A Vision-Language-Model for Detecting and Reasoning Over Failures in Robotic Manipulation

ICLR 2025poster

Robotic manipulation in open-world settings requires not only task execution but also the ability to detect and learn from failures. While recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) have improved robots' spatial reasoning and problem-solving abilities, they sti…

2025

Differentiable GPU-Parallelized Task and Motion Planning

RSS 2025poster

Planning long-horizon robot manipulation requires making discrete decisions about which objects to interact with and continuous decisions about how to interact with them. A robot planner must select grasps, placements, and motions that are feasible and safe. This class of problems falls under Task a…

Cited by 0PDFScholar
2025

VisualPredicator: Learning Abstract World Models with Neuro-Symbolic Predicates for Robot Planning

ICLR 2025spotlight

Broadly intelligent agents should form task-specific abstractions that selectively expose the essential elements of a task, while abstracting away the complexity of the raw sensorimotor space. In this work, we present Neuro-Symbolic Predicates, a first-order abstraction language that combines the st…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Adaptive Language-Guided Abstraction from Contrastive Explanations

CoRL 2024poster

Many approaches to robot learning begin by inferring a reward function from a set of human demonstrations. To learn a good reward, it is necessary to determine which features of the environment are relevant before determining how these features should be used to compute reward. In particularly compl…

Cited by 4SourceScholar
2024

Practice Makes Perfect: Planning to Learning Skill Parameter Policies

RSS 2024poster

One promising approach towards effective robot decision making in complex, long-horizon tasks is to sequence together *parameterized skills*. We consider a setting where a robot is initially equipped with (1) a library of parameterized skills, (2) an AI planner for sequencing together the skills giv…

2024

Trust the PRoC3S: Solving Long-Horizon Robotics Problems with LLMs and Constraint Satisfaction

CoRL 2024poster

Recent developments in pretrained large language models (LLMs) applied to robotics have demonstrated their capacity for sequencing a set of discrete skills to achieve open-ended goals in simple robotic tasks. In this paper, we examine the topic of LLM planning for a set of *continuously parameterize…

Cited by 9SourceScholar
2023

Learning Efficient Abstract Planning Models that Choose What to Predict

CoRL 2023poster

An effective approach to solving long-horizon tasks in robotics domains with continuous state and action spaces is bilevel planning, wherein a high-level search over an abstraction of an environment is used to guide low-level decision-making. Recent work has shown how to enable such bilevel planning…

Cited by 25SourcecodeScholar
2023

Predicate Invention for Bilevel Planning

AAAI 2023technical

Efficient planning in continuous state and action spaces is fundamentally hard, even when the transition model is deterministic and known. One way to alleviate this challenge is to perform bilevel planning with abstractions, where a high-level search for abstract plans is used to guide planning in t…

2021

Just Label What You Need: Fine-Grained Active Selection for P&P through Partially Labeled Scenes

CoRL 2021poster

Self-driving vehicles must perceive and predict the future positions of nearby actors to avoid collisions and drive safely. A deep learning module is often responsible for this task, requiring large-scale, high-quality training datasets. Due to high labeling costs, active learning approaches are an…

Cited by 6SourceScholar
2020

Building Plannable Representations with Mixed Reality

IROS 2020poster

We propose Action-Oriented Semantic Maps (AOSMs), a representation that enables a robot to acquire object manipulation behaviors and semantic information about the environment from a human teacher with a Mixed Reality Head-Mounted Display (MR-HMD). AOSMs are a representation that captures both: a) h…

Cited by 7SourceScholar
2019

Multi-Object Search using Object-Oriented POMDPs

ICRA 2019poster

A core capability of robots is to reason about multiple objects under uncertainty. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) provide a means of reasoning under uncertainty for sequential decision making, but are computationally intractable in large domains. In this paper, we propose Ob…

Cited by 52SourceScholar