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Riashat Islam

17 accepted papers

2026

Rubric Curriculum RL: Exploiting the Generation-Verification Gap in Creative Writing

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) on foundation models has led to significant improvements in math and code generation. Extending these gains to open-ended domains remains challenging: ground-truth verification is unavailable, human annotation is expensive, and learnt reward mode…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Wavelet Predictive Representations for Non-Stationary Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2026poster

The real world is inherently non-stationary, with ever-changing factors, such as weather conditions and traffic flows, making it challenging for agents to adapt to varying environmental dynamics. Non-Stationary Reinforcement Learning (NSRL) addresses this challenge by training agents to adapt rapidl…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

When does predictive inverse dynamics outperform behavior cloning?

ICML 2026poster

Behavior cloning (BC) is a practical offline imitation learning method, but it often fails when expert demonstrations are limited. Recent works have introduced a class of architectures named predictive inverse dynamics models (PIDM) that combine a future state predictor with an inverse dynamics mode…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

h1: Bootstrapping LLMs to Reason over Longer Horizons via Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2026spotlight

Large language models excel at short-horizon reasoning tasks, but performance drops as reasoning horizon lengths increase. Existing approaches to combat this rely on inference-time scaffolding or step-level supervision, neither of which scales easily. In this work, we introduce a scalable method to …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Learning Fused State Representations for Control from Multi-View Observations

ICML 2025poster

Multi-View Reinforcement Learning (MVRL) seeks to provide agents with multi-view observations, enabling them to perceive environment with greater effectiveness and precision. Recent advancements in MVRL focus on extracting latent representations from multiview observations and leveraging them in con…

2024

EQA-MX: Embodied Question Answering using Multimodal Expression

ICLR 2024spotlight

Humans predominantly use verbal utterances and nonverbal gestures (e.g., eye gaze and pointing gestures) in their natural interactions. For instance, pointing gestures and verbal information is often required to comprehend questions such as "what object is that?" Thus, this question-answering (QA) t…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2024

Learning Latent Dynamic Robust Representations for World Models

ICML 2024poster

Visual Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) promises to encapsulate agent's knowledge about the underlying dynamics of the environment, enabling learning a world model as a useful planner. However, top MBRL agents such as Dreamer often struggle with visual pixel-based inputs in the presence of…

2024

PcLast: Discovering Plannable Continuous Latent States

ICML 2024poster

Goal-conditioned planning benefits from learned low-dimensional representations of rich observations. While compact latent representations typically learned from variational autoencoders or inverse dynamics enable goal-conditioned decision making, they ignore state reachability, hampering their perf…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Sequence-Augmented SE(3)-Flow Matching For Conditional Protein Generation

NeurIPS 2024poster

Proteins are essential for almost all biological processes and derive their diverse functions from complex $3 \rm D$ structures, which are in turn determined by their amino acid sequences. In this paper, we exploit the rich biological inductive bias of amino acid sequences and introduce FoldFlow++,…

Cited by 31SourcePDFScholar
2023

Behavior Prior Representation learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2023poster

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) struggles in environments with rich and noisy inputs, where the agent only has access to a fixed dataset without environment interactions. Past works have proposed common workarounds based on the pre-training of state representations, followed by policy training.…

2023

Ignorance is Bliss: Robust Control via Information Gating

NeurIPS 2023poster

Informational parsimony provides a useful inductive bias for learning representations that achieve better generalization by being robust to noise and spurious correlations. We propose *information gating* as a way to learn parsimonious representations that identify the minimal information required f…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2023

Principled Offline RL in the Presence of Rich Exogenous Information

ICML 2023poster

Learning to control an agent from offline data collected in a rich pixel-based visual observation space is vital for real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL). A major challenge in this setting is the presence of input information that is hard to model and irrelevant to controlling the…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2023

Representation Learning in Deep RL via Discrete Information Bottleneck

AISTATS 2023poster

Several self-supervised representation learning methods have been proposed for reinforcement learning (RL) with rich observations. For real world applications of RL, recovering underlying latent states is crucial, particularly when sensory inputs can contain irrelevant and exogenous information. In…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2023

Understanding and Addressing the Pitfalls of Bisimulation-based Representations in Offline Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

While bisimulation-based approaches hold promise for learning robust state representations for Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks, their efficacy in offline RL tasks has not been up to par. In some instances, their performance has even significantly underperformed alternative methods. We aim to unde…

2022

Discrete Compositional Representations as an Abstraction for Goal Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2022accept

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction for training agents that are capable of solving multiple tasks and reach a diverse set of objectives. How to \textit{specify} and \textit{ground} these goals in such a way that we can both reliably reach goals during training as…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2019

InfoBot: Transfer and Exploration via the Information Bottleneck

ICLR 2019poster

A central challenge in reinforcement learning is discovering effective policies for tasks where rewards are sparsely distributed. We postulate that in the absence of useful reward signals, an effective exploration strategy should seek out {\it decision states}. These states lie at critical junctions…

Cited by 189SourcePDFScholar