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Shivam Vats

11 accepted papers

2026

Accelerating Residual Reinforcement Learning With Uncertainty Estimation

RA-L 2026

Residual Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular approach for adapting pretrained policies by learning a lightweight residual policy that provides corrective actions. While Residual RL is more sample-efficient than finetuning the entire base policy, existing methods struggle with sparse rewards and

Cited by 2SourcecodeScholar
2026

Accelerating Residual Reinforcement Learning with Uncertainty Estimation

ICRA 2026poster

Residual Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular approach for adapting pretrained policies by learning a lightweight residual policy that provides corrective actions. While Residual RL is more sample-efficient than finetuning the entire base policy, existing methods struggle with sparse rewards and…

2026

When Life Gives You BC, Make Q-functions: Extracting Q-values from Behavior Cloning for On-Robot Reinforcement Learning

RSS 2026poster

Behavior Cloning (BC) has emerged as a highly effective paradigm for robot learning. However, BC lacks a self-guided mechanism for online improvement after demonstrations have been collected. Existing offline-to-online learning methods often cause policies to replace previously learned good actions …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Multi-Robot Motion Planning with Diffusion Models

ICLR 2025spotlight

Diffusion models have recently been successfully applied to a wide range of robotics applications for learning complex multi-modal behaviors from data. However, prior works have mostly been confined to single-robot and small-scale environments due to the high sample complexity of learning multi-robo…

2025

Optimal Interactive Learning on the Job via Facility Location Planning

RSS 2025poster

Collaborative robots have the ability to adapt and improve their behavior by learning from their human users. By interactively learning on the job, these robots can both acquire new motor skills and customize their behavior to personal user preferences. However, for this paradigm to be viable, there…

Cited by 0PDFScholar
2025

RecoveryChaining: Learning Local Recovery Policies for Robust Manipulation

IROS 2025

Model-based planners and controllers are commonly used to solve complex manipulation problems as they can efficiently optimize diverse objectives and generalize to long horizon tasks. However, they often fail during deployment due to noisy actuation, partial observability and imperfect models. To en

Cited by 6SourceScholar
2023

SCALE: Causal Learning and Discovery of Robot Manipulation Skills using Simulation

CoRL 2023poster

We propose SCALE, an approach for discovering and learning a diverse set of interpretable robot skills from a limited dataset. Rather than learning a single skill which may fail to capture all the modes in the data, we first identify the different modes via causal reasoning and learn a separate skil…

Cited by 9SourceScholar
2022

Search-Based Task Planning with Learned Skill Effect Models for Lifelong Robotic Manipulation

ICRA 2022poster

Robots deployed in many real-world settings need to be able to acquire new skills and solve new tasks over time. Prior works on planning with skills often make assumptions on the structure of skills and tasks, such as subgoal skills, shared skill implementations, or task-specific plan skeletons, whi…

Cited by 40SourceScholar
2022

Synergistic Scheduling of Learning and Allocation of Tasks in Human-Robot Teams

ICRA 2022poster

We consider the problem of completing a set of nn tasks with a human-robot team using minimum effort. In many domains, teaching a robot to be fully autonomous can be counterproductive if there are finitely many tasks to be done. Rather, the optimal strategy is to weigh the cost of teaching a robot a…

Cited by 9SourceScholar
2020

Learning to Use Adaptive Motion Primitives in Search-Based Planning for Navigation

IROS 2020poster

Heuristic-based graph search algorithms like A* are frequently used to solve motion planning problems in many domains. For most practical applications, it is infeasible and unnecessary to pre-compute the graph representing the whole search space. Instead, these algorithms generate the graph incremen…

Cited by 5SourceScholar