Robotics and Machine Learning Research, hobbyist writer, ardent runner and passionate sports lover

Pulkit Katdare

I am final year phd student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. I am currently a part of the Human Centered Autonomy Lab advised by Prof. Katherine Driggs-Campbell. My research primarily focuses on developing algorithms for reliable offline validation and offline learning to enable their commercial deployment over a wide-variety of tasks. This vision also allows me to dabble with different machine learning modules involving generative models and language models.

Previously, I finished my undergraduate and masters in mechanical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. My masters thesis focuses on utlizing tenets of geometric control theory to manipulate complex systems across a manifold.

Research interests:

  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Learning-based Robotics
  • Off-Policy Evaluation
  • Language Model Pre-Training
  • Generative Models

News

  • 11/06/2023-11/09/2023: Excited to attend Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2023, which is one of the seminal conferences addressing solving complex robotics problems using machine learning techniques.
  • 10/30/2023: I passed my prelims! It was an honor to be able to present to my four committee members, Prof. Katherine Driggs-Campbell (Advisor), Prof. Lav Varshney, Prof. Alexander Schwing, Prof. Saurabh Gupta
  • 08/31/2023: Our paper Marginalized Importance Sampling for Off Environment Policy Evaluation is accepted at CoRL 2023!
  • 05/17/2023: Our paper Equivariant Few-Shot Learning from Pretrained Models is up on arxiv. A shout out to my colleagues Sourya basu, Lav Varshney and amazing folks at IBM!
  • 08/2022: Starting my tenure as a treasurer for the Computing Connection Fellowships (CCF). CCF is a pilot programme which offers fellowships to students trying to escapt unhealthy environments
  • 08/16/2022: Honored to present my work Incorporating Knowledge in Visual Question Answering to the entire alexa team!
  • 05/2022–08/2022: Completed an applied scientist internship at Alexa AI at Amazon in Sunnyvale, CA! Honored to work with Feiyang Niu, Govind Thattai, Feng Gao
  • 04/29/2022: Presented our paper Gauge Equivariant Deep Q-Learning on Discrete Manifolds at ICLR 2022 workshop on Geometrical and Topological Representation Learning
  • 01/21/2022: Our paper Off Environment Evaluation Using Convex Risk Minimization are accepted in ICRA2022!
  • 01/2022-05/2022:: Excited to be a part of the organizing commiitee for the Robotics Seminar 2022
  • 10/31/2021: Cleared my Qualifying Examination! A Special thanks to my qual committee
  • 08/2020-05/2021: Excited to start my tenure as a media chair for CSL Student Conference
  • 12/01/2021:: Humbled at being nominated for the excellence in undergraduate instruction for the ECE 110 course, introduction to electronics
  • 08/2019–05/2020: Excited to start my journey as a logistics co-ordinator at ENVISION
  • 05/16/2019: Honored to present my work on Mixture Of Experts Model For Trajectory Prediction
  • 05/2019–08/2019: Completed an applied scientist internship with Behavior Prediction Team at Motional in Boston, MA. It was an awesome learning experience with my mentors Elena Grigore, Eric Wolff, Freddie Boulton.