Shivam Vats

Postdoctoral Researcher, Brown University

profile_pic.jpeg

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Intelligent Robot Lab led by Prof. George Konidaris in the Department of Computer Science, Brown University. I earned my PhD from the Robotics Institute at CMU where I was co-advised by Prof. Maxim Likhachev and Prof. Oliver Kroemer. I work on integrating learning and planning to build intelligent robots that learn and generalize resource-rationally. I develop planning algorithms that learn from experience and active learning algorithms that strategically decide what and how to learn to improve planning. This ASME article provides a good overview of my work on collaborative robots that plan what to learn.

Previously, I studied maths and computing at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur where I worked with Prof. P.P. Chakrabarti and Prof. Bibhas Adhikari on heuristic search. I was a core developer of SymPy and an active contributor to SymEngine for many years. I also regularly participated in the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition as a member of the Autonomous Ground Vehicle Group.

I am looking for new collaborations and am always happy to chat about robotics and research. Do reach out if you are interested in working with me. Here are some of my ongoing projects:

  • learning and planning with particle-based world models
  • learning composable manipulation skills from videos
  • multi-task interactive learning from human feedback

🌟 Submit your work to our workshop on Resource-Rational Robot Learning at CoRL 2025. 🌟

Email / Google Scholar / LinkedIn

news

Aug 12, 2025 Released code for Cost-Optimal Interactive Learning (COIL).
Aug 8, 2025 We are organizing a workshop on Resource-Rational Robot Learning at CoRL 2025. See you in Seoul!
Jun 15, 2025 RecoveryChaining: Learning Local Recovery Policies for Robust Manipulation has been accepted to IROS 2025.
May 25, 2025 Our paper on Optimal Interactive Learning on the Job via Facility Location Planning has been accepted to RSS 2025.
Mar 1, 2025 Our paper on Multi-Robot Motion Planning with Diffusion Models was selected for Spotlight presentation at ICLR.

selected publications

  1. 2025_coil.gif
    Optimal Interactive Learning on the Job via Facility Location Planning
    Shivam Vats*, Michelle Zhao*, Patrick Callaghan, Mingxi Jia, Maxim Likhachev, Oliver Kroemer, and George Konidaris
    Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2025
  2. 2024_diffusion.gif
    Multi-Robot Motion Planning with Diffusion Models
    Yorai Shaoul*, Itamar Mishani*, Shivam Vats*, Jiaoyang Li, and Maxim Likhachev
    13th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
  3. 2023_corl_scale.png
    SCALE: Causal Learning and Discovery of Robot Manipulation Skills using Simulation
    Tabitha Edith* Lee*, Shivam Vats*, Siddharth Girdhar, and Oliver Kroemer
    In 7th Annual Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2023
  4. 2023_icra.jpeg
    Efficient Recovery Learning using Model Predictive Meta-Reasoning
    Shivam Vats, Maxim Likhachev, and Oliver Kroemer
    In 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023
  5. 2022_icra_adl.png
    Synergistic scheduling of learning and allocation of tasks in human-robot teams
    Shivam Vats, Oliver Kroemer, and Maxim Likhachev
    In 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022
  6. 2017_peerj.png
    SymPy: symbolic computing in Python
    Aaron Meurer, and  others
    PeerJ Computer Science, 2017