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Sheila A. McIlraith

16 accepted papers

2026

Satisficing and Optimal Generalised Planning via Goal Regression

AAAI 2026technical

Generalised planning (GP) refers to the task of synthesising programs that solve families of related planning problems. We introduce a novel, yet simple method for GP: given a set of training problems, for each problem, compute an optimal plan for each goal atom in some order, perform goal regressio

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Better Training Data Attribution via Better Inverse Hessian-Vector Products

NeurIPS 2025poster

Training data attribution (TDA) provides insights into which training data is responsible for a learned model behavior. Gradient-based TDA methods such as influence functions and unrolled differentiation both involve a computation that resembles an inverse Hessian-vector product (iHVP), which is dif…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Evaluating Generalization Capabilities of LLM-Based Agents in Mixed-Motive Scenarios Using Concordia

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities for social interaction and are increasingly being deployed in situations where they might engage with both human and artificial agents. These interactions represent a critical frontier for LLM-based agents, yet existing eval…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Ground-Compose-Reinforce: Grounding Language in Agentic Behaviours using Limited Data

NeurIPS 2025poster

Grounding language in perception and action is a key challenge when building situated agents that can interact with humans, or other agents, via language. In the past, addressing this challenge has required manually designing the language grounding or curating massive datasets that associate languag…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

PRP Rebooted: Advancing the State of the Art in FOND Planning

AAAI 2024technical

Fully Observable Non-Deterministic (FOND) planning is a variant of classical symbolic planning in which actions are nondeterministic, with an action's outcome known only upon execution. It is a popular planning paradigm with applications ranging from robot planning to dialogue-agent design and react…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Remembering to Be Fair: Non-Markovian Fairness in Sequential Decision Making

ICML 2024poster

Fair decision making has largely been studied with respect to a single decision. Here we investigate the notion of fairness in the context of sequential decision making where multiple stakeholders can be affected by the outcomes of decisions. We observe that fairness often depends on the history of…

2024

Reward Machines for Deep RL in Noisy and Uncertain Environments

NeurIPS 2024poster

Reward Machines provide an automaton-inspired structure for specifying instructions, safety constraints, and other temporally extended reward-worthy behaviour. By exposing the underlying structure of a reward function, they enable the decomposition of an RL task, leading to impressive gains in sampl…

2023

Learning Belief Representations for Partially Observable Deep RL

ICML 2023poster

Many important real-world Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems involve partial observability and require policies with memory. Unfortunately, standard deep RL algorithms for partially observable settings typically condition on the full history of interactions and are notoriously difficult to train.…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2023

STEVE-1: A Generative Model for Text-to-Behavior in Minecraft

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Constructing AI models that respond to text instructions is challenging, especially for sequential decision-making tasks. This work introduces a methodology, inspired by unCLIP, for instruction-tuning generative models of behavior without relying on a large dataset of instruction-labeled trajectorie…

Cited by 64SourcePDFScholar
2022

Learning to Follow Instructions in Text-Based Games

NeurIPS 2022accept

Text-based games present a unique class of sequential decision making problem in which agents interact with a partially observable, simulated environment via actions and observations conveyed through natural language. Such observations typically include instructions that, in a reinforcement learning…

2022

Proactive Robotic Assistance via Theory of Mind

IROS 2022poster

Advanced social cognitive skills enhance the effectiveness of human-robot interactions. Research shows that an important precursor to the development of these abilities in humans is Theory of Mind (ToM) - the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and to others. In this work, we endow robots…

Cited by 22SourceScholar
2022

You Can’t Count on Luck: Why Decision Transformers and RvS Fail in Stochastic Environments

NeurIPS 2022accept

Recently, methods such as Decision Transformer that reduce reinforcement learning to a prediction task and solve it via supervised learning (RvS) have become popular due to their simplicity, robustness to hyperparameters, and strong overall performance on offline RL tasks. However, simply conditioni…

Cited by 73SourcePDFScholar
2021

Interpretable Sequence Classification via Discrete Optimization

AAAI 2021technical

Sequence classification is the task of predicting a class label given a sequence of observations. In many applications such as healthcare monitoring or intrusion detection, early classification is crucial to prompt intervention. In this work, we learn sequence classifiers that favour early classifi…

2021

LTL2Action: Generalizing LTL Instructions for Multi-Task RL

ICML 2021spotlight

We address the problem of teaching a deep reinforcement learning (RL) agent to follow instructions in multi-task environments. Instructions are expressed in a well-known formal language {–} linear temporal logic (LTL) {–} and can specify a diversity of complex, temporally extended behaviours, includ…