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Sarath Sreedharan

25 accepted papers

2026

Explanations for Sequential Decision-Making – an Overview

AAAI 2026technical

In this paper, we highlight the field of explainable sequential decision making. We discuss how the problem of explaining sequential decisions gives rise to problems and challenges that are absent from scenarios that focus on explaining single-shot decision making. We provide a short survey of some

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Inferring Implicit Goals Across Differing Task Models

AAAI 2026technical

One of the significant challenges to generating value-aligned behavior is to not only account for the specified user objectives but also any implicit or unspecified user requirements. The existence of such implicit requirements could be particularly common in settings where the user

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Position: Make Planning Research Rigorous Again!

ICML 2026poster

In over sixty years since its inception, the field of planning has made significant contributions to both the theory and practice of building planning software that can solve a never-before-seen planning problem. This was done through established practices of rigorous design and evaluation of planni…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Explain It as Simple as Possible, but No Simpler – Explanation via Model Simplification for Addressing Inferential Gap (Abstract Reprint)

IJCAI 2025

One of the core challenges of explaining decisions made by modern AI systems is the need to address the potential gap in the inferential capabilities of the system generating the decision and the user trying to make sense of it. This inferential capability gap becomes even more critical when it come

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

A Wireframe-Based Approach for Classifying and Acquiring Proficiency in the American Sign Language (Student Abstract)

AAAI 2024technical

We describe our methodology for classifying ASL (American Sign Language) gestures. Rather than operate directly on raw images of hand gestures, we extract coor-dinates and render wireframes from individual images to construct a curated training dataset. This dataset is then used in a classifier that…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Can LLMs Fix Issues with Reasoning Models? Towards More Likely Models for AI Planning

AAAI 2024technical

This is the first work to look at the application of large language models (LLMs) for the purpose of model space edits in automated planning tasks. To set the stage for this union, we explore two different flavors of model space problems that have been studied in the AI planning literature and explo…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Expectation Alignment: Handling Reward Misspecification in the Presence of Expectation Mismatch

NeurIPS 2024poster

Detecting and handling misspecified objectives, such as reward functions, has been widely recognized as one of the central challenges within the domain of Artificial Intelligence (AI) safety research. However, even with the recognition of the importance of this problem, we are unaware of any works t…

2024

Goal Alignment: Re-analyzing Value Alignment Problems Using Human-Aware AI

AAAI 2024technical

While the question of misspecified objectives has gotten much attention in recent years, most works in this area primarily focus on the challenges related to the complexity of the objective specification mechanism (for example, the use of reward functions). However, the complexity of the objective s…

2023

Leveraging Pre-trained Large Language Models to Construct and Utilize World Models for Model-based Task Planning

NeurIPS 2023poster

There is a growing interest in applying pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to planning problems. However, methods that use LLMs directly as planners are currently impractical due to several factors, including limited correctness of plans, strong reliance on feedback from interactions with simu…

2023

On the Planning Abilities of Large Language Models - A Critical Investigation

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Intrigued by the claims of emergent reasoning capabilities in LLMs trained on general web corpora, in this paper, we set out to investigate their planning capabilities. We aim to evaluate (1) the effectiveness of LLMs in generating plans autonomously in commonsense planning tasks and (2) the potenti…

Cited by 280SourcePDFScholar
2023

Optimistic Exploration in Reinforcement Learning Using Symbolic Model Estimates

NeurIPS 2023poster

There has been an increasing interest in using symbolic models along with reinforcement learning (RL) problems, where these coarser abstract models are used as a way to provide RL agents with higher level guidance. However, most of these works are inherently limited by their assumption of having an…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2023

PlanBench: An Extensible Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Planning and Reasoning about Change

NeurIPS 2023poster

Generating plans of action, and reasoning about change have long been considered a core competence of intelligent agents. It is thus no surprise that evaluating the planning and reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) has become a hot topic of research. Most claims about LLM planning…

2022

Bridging the Gap: Providing Post-Hoc Symbolic Explanations for Sequential Decision-Making Problems with Inscrutable Representations

ICLR 2022poster

As increasingly complex AI systems are introduced into our daily lives, it becomes important for such systems to be capable of explaining the rationale for their decisions and allowing users to contest these decisions. A significant hurdle to allowing for such explanatory dialogue could be the {\em…

Cited by 42SourcePDFScholar
2022

Leveraging Approximate Symbolic Models for Reinforcement Learning via Skill Diversity

ICML 2022spotlight

Creating reinforcement learning (RL) agents that are capable of accepting and leveraging task-specific knowledge from humans has been long identified as a possible strategy for developing scalable approaches for solving long-horizon problems. While previous works have looked at the possibility of us…

2022

On the Computational Complexity of Model Reconciliations

IJCAI 2022poster

Model-reconciliation explanation is a popular framework for generating explanations for planning problems. While the framework has been extended to multiple settings since its introduction for classical planning problems, there is little agreement on the computational complexity of generating minima…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2021

A Unifying Bayesian Formulation of Measures of Interpretability in Human-AI Interaction

IJCAI 2021poster

Existing approaches for generating human-aware agent behaviors have considered different measures of interpretability in isolation. Further, these measures have been studied under differing assumptions, thus precluding the possibility of designing a single framework that captures these measures unde…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2021

Not all users are the same: Providing personalized explanations for sequential decision making problems

IROS 2021poster

There is a growing interest in designing robots that can work alongside humans. Such robots will undoubtedly be expected to explain their behavior and decisions. While generating explanations is an actively researched topic, most works tend to focus on methods that generate explanations that are one…

Cited by 10SourceScholar
2020

Designing Environments Conducive to Interpretable Robot Behavior

IROS 2020poster

Designing robots capable of generating interpretable behavior is essential for effective human-robot collaboration. This requires robots to be able to generate behavior that aligns with human expectations but exhibiting such behavior in arbitrary environments could be quite expensive for robots, and…

Cited by 29SourceScholar
2020

The Emerging Landscape of Explainable Automated Planning & Decision Making

IJCAI 2020poster

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive outline of the different threads of work in Explainable AI Planning (XAIP) that has emerged as a focus area in the last couple of years and contrast that with earlier efforts in the field in terms of techniques, target users, and delivery mechanisms. We hope…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2018

Projection-Aware Task Planning and Execution for Human-in-the-Loop Operation of Robots in a Mixed-Reality Workspace

IROS 2018poster

Recent advances in mixed-reality technologies have renewed interest in alternative modes of communication for human-robot interaction. However, most of the work in this direction has been confined to tasks such as teleoperation, simulation or explication of individual actions of a robot. In this pap…

Cited by 73SourceScholar
2017

Plan explicability and predictability for robot task planning

ICRA 2017poster

Intelligent robots and machines are becoming pervasive in human populated environments. A desirable capability of these agents is to respond to goal-oriented commands by autonomously constructing task plans. However, such autonomy can add significant cognitive load and potentially introduce safety r…

Cited by 227SourceScholar