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Shayegan Omidshafiei

20 accepted papers

2026

Simulation Distillation: Pretraining World Models in Simulation for Rapid Real-World Adaptation

RSS 2026poster

Simulation-to-real transfer remains a central challenge in robotics, as mismatches between simulated and real-world dynamics often lead to failures. While reinforcement learning offers a principled mechanism for adaptation, existing sim-to-real finetuning methods struggle with exploration and long-h…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Ventura: Adapting Image Diffusion Models for Unified Task Conditioned Navigation

ICRA 2026poster

Robots must adapt to diverse human instructions and operate safely in unstructured, open-world environments. Recent Vision–Language models (VLMs) offer strong priors for grounding language and perception, but remain difficult to steer for navigation due to differences in action spaces and pretrainin…

2026

World Model Failure Classification and Anomaly Detection for Autonomous Inspection

ICRA 2026poster

Autonomous inspection robots for monitoring industrial sites can reduce costs and risks associated with human-led inspection. However, accurate readings can be challenging due to occlusions, limited viewpoints, or unexpected environmental conditions. We propose a hybrid framework that combines super…

2025

Enter the Mind Palace: Reasoning and Planning for Long-term Active Embodied Question Answering

CoRL 2025poster

As robots become increasingly capable of operating over extended periods—spanning days, weeks, and even months—they are expected to accumulate knowledge of their environments and leverage this experience to assist humans more effectively. This paper studies the problem of Long-term Active Embodied Q…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

SayComply: Grounding Field Robotic Tasks in Operational Compliance Through Retrieval-Based Language Models

ICRA 2025

This paper addresses the problem of task planning for robots that must comply with operational manuals in real-world settings. Task planning under these constraints is essential for enabling autonomous robot operation in domains that require adherence to domain-specific knowledge. Current methods fo

Cited by 6SourcecodeScholar
2024

Adaptive Accompaniment with ReaLchords

ICML 2024poster

Jamming requires coordination, anticipation, and collaborative creativity between musicians. Current generative models of music produce expressive output but are not able to generate in an online manner, meaning simultaneously with other musicians (human or otherwise). We propose ReaLchords, an onli…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2022

Beyond Rewards: a Hierarchical Perspective on Offline Multiagent Behavioral Analysis

NeurIPS 2022accept

Each year, expert-level performance is attained in increasingly-complex multiagent domains, where notable examples include Go, Poker, and StarCraft II. This rapid progression is accompanied by a commensurate need to better understand how such agents attain this performance, to enable their safe depl…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2021

From Poincaré Recurrence to Convergence in Imperfect Information Games: Finding Equilibrium via Regularization

ICML 2021spotlight

In this paper we investigate the Follow the Regularized Leader dynamics in sequential imperfect information games (IIG). We generalize existing results of Poincar{é} recurrence from normal-form games to zero-sum two-player imperfect information games and other sequential game settings. We then inves…

Cited by 105SourcePDFScholar
2020

A Generalized Training Approach for Multiagent Learning

ICLR 2020talk

This paper investigates a population-based training regime based on game-theoretic principles called Policy-Spaced Response Oracles (PSRO). PSRO is general in the sense that it (1) encompasses well-known algorithms such as fictitious play and double oracle as special cases, and (2) in principle appl…

Cited by 127SourcecodeScholar
2020

Fast computation of Nash Equilibria in Imperfect Information Games

ICML 2020poster

We introduce and analyze a class of algorithms, called Mirror Ascent against an Improved Opponent (MAIO), for computing Nash equilibria in two-player zero-sum games, both in normal form and in sequential form with imperfect information. These algorithms update the policy of each player with a mirror…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2020

Real World Games Look Like Spinning Tops

NeurIPS 2020poster

This paper investigates the geometrical properties of real world games (e.g. Tic-Tac-Toe, Go, StarCraft II). We hypothesise that their geometrical structure resembles a spinning top, with the upright axis representing transitive strength, and the radial axis representing the non-transitive dimension…

Cited by 130SourcePDFScholar
2019

Multiagent Evaluation under Incomplete Information

NeurIPS 2019spotlight

This paper investigates the evaluation of learned multiagent strategies in the incomplete information setting, which plays a critical role in ranking and training of agents. Traditionally, researchers have relied on Elo ratings for this purpose, with recent works also using methods based on Nash equ…

Cited by 46SourcePDFScholar
2019

Policy Distillation and Value Matching in Multiagent Reinforcement Learning

IROS 2019poster

Multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms have been demonstrated on complex tasks that require the coordination of a team of multiple agents to complete. Existing works have focused on sharing information between agents via centralized critics to stabilize learning or through communication…

Cited by 39SourceScholar
2017

Deep Decentralized Multi-task Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning under Partial Observability

ICML 2017poster

Many real-world tasks involve multiple agents with partial observability and limited communication. Learning is challenging in these settings due to local viewpoints of agents, which perceive the world as non-stationary due to concurrently-exploring teammates. Approaches that learn specialized polic…

Cited by 706SourcePDFScholar
2017

Learning for multi-robot cooperation in partially observable stochastic environments with macro-actions

IROS 2017poster

This paper presents a data-driven approach for multi-robot coordination in partially-observable domains based on Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (Dec-POMDPs) and macro-actions (MAs). Dec-POMDPs provide a general framework for cooperative sequential decision making under…

Cited by 42SourceScholar
2017

Scalable accelerated decentralized multi-robot policy search in continuous observation spaces

ICRA 2017poster

This paper presents the first ever approach for solving continuous-observation Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (Dec-POMDPs) and their semi-Markovian counterparts, Dec-POSMDPs. This contribution is especially important in robotics, where a vast number of sensors provide c…

Cited by 9SourceScholar
2017

Semantic-level decentralized multi-robot decision-making using probabilistic macro-observations

ICRA 2017poster

Robust environment perception is essential for decision-making on robots operating in complex domains. Intelligent task execution requires principled treatment of uncertainty sources in a robot's observation model. This is important not only for low-level observations (e.g., accelerom-eter data), bu…

Cited by 10SourceScholar
2016

Graph-based Cross Entropy method for solving multi-robot decentralized POMDPs

ICRA 2016

This paper introduces a probabilistic algorithm for multi-robot decision-making under uncertainty, which can be posed as a Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (Dec-POMDP). Dec-POMDPs are inherently synchronous decision-making frameworks which require significant computational

Cited by 23SourceScholar
2015

Decentralized control of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes using belief space macro-actions

ICRA 2015poster

The focus of this paper is on solving multi-robot planning problems in continuous spaces with partial observability. Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (Dec-POMDPs) are general models for multi-robot coordination problems, but representing and solving Dec-POMDPs is often in…

Cited by 85SourceScholar
2015

Online heterogeneous multiagent learning under limited communication with applications to forest fire management

IROS 2015poster

Many robotic missions require online estimation of the unknown state transition models associated with uncertainty that stems from mission dynamics. The learning problem is usually distributed among agents in multiagent scenarios, either due to the absence of a centralized processing unit or because…

Cited by 16SourceScholar