This week's #PaperILike is "INQUIRE: INteractive Querying for User-aware Informative REasoning" (Fitzgerald et al., CoRL 2022).
A very nice way to unify different forms of information gathering and preference learning for human-robot assistance.
PDF: proceedings.mlr.press/v205/fitzger...
This week's #PaperILike is "AssistanceZero: Scalably Solving Assistance Games" (Laidlaw et al., ICML 2025).
AlphaZero-like combo of learning & planning for assistance games, where robot & human share reward fn that robot doesn't know. + Minecraft!
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2504.07091
This week's #PaperILike is "Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning" (Hadfield-Menell et al., 2016).
Seminal work. My favorite part is the simple example showing that demonstration-by-expert is suboptimal.
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/1606.03137
This week's #PaperILike is "RoboCook: Long-Horizon Elasto-Plastic Object Manipulation with Diverse Tools" (Shi et al., CoRL 2023).
So much to like in one paper: planning, learning, deformable manipulation, GNNs, 15 3D-printed tools, and dumplings!
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2306.14447
This week's #PaperILike is "Efficient memory-based learning for robot control" (Andrew Moore's dissertation, 1990).
This and Moore's follow-up work from the 90s are worth revisiting, especially now that VLAs are starting to remember!
PDF: www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/...
This week's #PaperILike is "Learning Montezuma’s Revenge from a Single Demonstration" (Salimans & Chen, 2018).
1 demo + known world model = very natural and still under-explored problem setting.
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/1812.03381
This week's #PaperILike is "Partially Observable Task and Motion Planning with Uncertainty and Risk Awareness" (Curtis et al., RSS 2024).
State of the art for TAMP + POMDPs. I learn more every time I read this paper.
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2403.10454
This week's #PaperILike is "Empowerment: A Universal Agent-Centric Measure of Control" (Klyubin et al., 2005).
An important idea in RL, and a fun read -- mentions bacteria, chimpanzees, Newtonian mechanics, and Othello all within a few sentences.
PDF: uhra.herts.ac.uk/id/eprint/28...
This week's #PaperILike is "Integrating Planning and Learning: The PRODIGY Architecture" (Veloso et al., 1995).
A foundational project in the history of robot planning + learning, and a good place to look for old ideas that are worth resurfacing.
PDF: www.cs.cmu.edu/~jgc/publica...
This week's #PaperILike is "Continuous Deep Q-Learning with Model-based Acceleration" (Gu et al., 2016).
Got swept away by other deep RL, but I always liked the idea of parameterizing Q in a form where the optimal policy can be derived analytically.
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/1603.00748
This week's #PaperILike is "Rapid trial-and-error learning with simulation supports flexible tool use and physical reasoning" (Allen et al., PNAS 2020).
Their "Virtual Tools Game" is one I revisit often when brainstorming open challenges.
PDF & game: sites.google.com/view/virtual...
This week's #PaperILike is "Robot Task Planning Under Local Observability" (Merlin et al., 2024).
LOMDPs are a very natural middle ground between MDPs and POMDPs with enough structure for interesting planning and learning.
PDF: maxmerl.in/papers/lomdp...
This week's #PaperILike is "Bayesian Residual Policy Optimization" (Lee et al., 2020).
I like this POMDP approach because it reduces the problem to figuring out a good set of "clairvoyant experts".
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2002.03042
This week's #PaperILike is "Differentiable GPU-Parallelized Task and Motion Planning" (Shen et al., RSS 2025).
As always, meticulous work from @WillShenSaysHi and team. TAMP + GPU is long overdue!
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2411.11833
This week's #PaperILike is "Kinodynamic Task and Motion Planning using VLM-guided and Interleaved Sampling" (Kwon & Kim, 2025).
I particularly like using VLMs to guide backtracking in TAMP. Outperforms PDDLStream and LLM3.
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2510.26139
This week's #PaperILike is "Learning Exploration Strategies to Solve Real-World Marble Runs" (Allaire & Atkeson, ICRA 2023).
A very fun and creative challenge for robot physical reasoning.
Video: sites.google.com/view/learnin...
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2303.04928
This week's #PaperILike is "Elephants Don't Pack Groceries: Robot Task Planning for Low Entropy Belief States" (Adu-Bredu, RAL 2022).
Love the focus on planning with "low entropy beliefs" -- not full-fledged POMDPs, but also not full observability.
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2011.09105
This week's #PaperILike is "Sloppy Programming" (Little et al., 2010).
Vibe coding before it was cool.
PDF: dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/ha...
This week's #PaperILike is "Robot Programming" (Tomas Lozano-Perez, 1983).
A prescient paper that asks how we might generally program robots like we program computers. Much remains true 42 years later.
PDF: homes.cs.washington.edu/~ztatlock/59...
This week's #PaperILike is "Learning Proofs of Motion Planning Infeasibility" (Li & Dantam, RSS 2021).
I like using learning to "fail fast", with guarantees. Important for TAMP, where there are other MP problems to try next.
PDF: www.roboticsproceedings.org/rss17/p064.pdf
This week's #PaperILike is "Interleaving Monte Carlo Tree Search and Self-Supervised Learning for Object Retrieval in Clutter" (Huang et al., ICRA 2022).
Impressive results on a difficult and subtle problem, with a nice combo of planning + learning.
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2202.01426
This week's #PaperILike is "Goal-Oriented End-User Programming of Robots" (Porfirio et al., HRI 2024).
I like this use of planning to fill in the gaps between subgoals that are directly programmed by end users.
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2403.13988
This week's #PaperILike is "Lifelong Robot Library Learning: Bootstrapping Composable and Generalizable Skills for Embodied Control with Language Models" (Tziafas & Kasaei, ICRA 2024).
DreamCoder-like robot skill learning. Refactoring helps!
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2406.18746
This week's #PaperILike is "Monte Carlo Tree Search with Spectral Expansion for Planning with Dynamical Systems" (Riviere et al., Science Robotics 2024).
A creative synthesis of control theory and search. I like using the Gramian to branch.
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2412.11270
This week's #PaperILike is "Reality Promises: Virtual-Physical Decoupling Illusions in Mixed Reality via Invisible Mobile Robots" (Kari & Abtahi, UIST 2025).
This is some Tony Stark level stuff! XR + robots = future.
Website: mkari.de/reality-prom...
PDF: mkari.de/reality-prom...
This week's #PaperILike is "Learning to Guide Task and Motion Planning Using Score-Space Representation" (Kim et al., IJRR 2019).
This is one of those papers that I return to over the years and appreciate more every time. Chock full of ideas.
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/1807.09962
This week's #PaperILike is "On the Utility of Koopman Operator Theory in Learning Dexterous Manipulation Skills" (Han et al., CoRL 2023).
This and others have convinced me that I need to learn Koopman! Another perspective on abstraction learning.
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2303.13446
This week's #PaperILike is "Predictive Representations of State" (Littman et al., 2001).
A lesser known classic that is overdue for a revival. Fans of POMDPs will enjoy.
PDF: web.eecs.umich.edu/~baveja/Pape...
This week's #PaperILike is "Influence-Augmented Local Simulators: A Scalable Solution for Fast Deep RL in Large Networked Systems" (Suau et al., ICML 2022).
Nice work on using fast local simulators to plan & learn in large partially observed worlds.
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2202.01534
This week's #PaperILike is "Optimal Interactive Learning on the Job via Facility Location Planning" (Vats et al., RSS 2025).
I always enjoy a surprising connection between one problem (COIL) and another (UFL). And I always like work by Shivam Vats!
PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2505.00490
