Shivam Vats

I am a postdoc at Brown University working on robot learning at deployment with George Konidaris. I develop deployment-time learning algorithms for manufacturing and household applications, as well as test-time search algorithms to ensure safety in high-stakes tasks, such as multi-robot coordination. This ASME article provides a good overview of my work on collaborative factory robots that plan what to learn.

I earned my PhD from the Robotics Institute at CMU where I was co-advised by Maxim Likhachev and Oliver Kroemer. I studied Maths and Computing at IIT Kharagpur where I worked with P.P. Chakrabarti and Bibhas Adhikari on heuristic search and algebraic topology. I was a core developer of SymPy and closely involved in SymEngine for many years. I also regularly competed in the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition with the Autonomous Ground Vehicle Group at IIT.

🌟 I am on the job market for research roles in robotics.🌟

Email / Google Scholar / LinkedIn

news

May 18, 2026	Two new papers on reinforcement learning for robot manipulation with RAI Institute at RSS and RAL.
Dec 12, 2025	I gave a talk at the Mila Robot Learning Seminar on “Resource-Rational Robot Intelligence” (YouTube link).
Oct 14, 2025	Honored to be selected as a Rising Star by the 2025 Northeast Robotics Colloquium (NERC).
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!

selected publications

RecoveryChaining: Learning Local Recovery Policies for Robust Manipulation

Shivam Vats, Devesh K Jha, Maxim Likhachev, Oliver Kroemer, and Diego Romeres

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2025

Bib PDF Code

@article{vats2025recoverychaining,
  title = {RecoveryChaining: Learning Local Recovery Policies for Robust Manipulation},
  author = {Vats, Shivam and Jha, Devesh K and Likhachev, Maxim and Kroemer, Oliver and Romeres, Diego},
  journal = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  year = {2025},
}

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

Bib PDF Code Website

@article{vats2025coil,
  title = {Optimal Interactive Learning on the Job via Facility Location
           Planning},
  author = {Vats*, Shivam and Zhao*, Michelle and Callaghan, Patrick and Jia, Mingxi and Likhachev, Maxim and Kroemer, Oliver and Konidaris, George},
  journal = {Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS)},
  year = {2025},
}

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

Bib PDF Code Website 🏆 Spotlight presentation

@article{shaoul2024multi,
  title = {Multi-Robot Motion Planning with Diffusion Models},
  author = {Shaoul*, Yorai and Mishani*, Itamar and Vats*, Shivam and Li, Jiaoyang and Likhachev, Maxim},
  journal = {13th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
  year = {2025},
}

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

Bib PDF Code Website

@inproceedings{vats2023efficient,
  title = {Efficient Recovery Learning using Model Predictive Meta-Reasoning},
  author = {Vats, Shivam and Likhachev, Maxim and Kroemer, Oliver},
  booktitle = {2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  pages = {7258--7264},
  year = {2023},
  organization = {IEEE},
}

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

Bib PDF 🏆 Outstanding Interaction Paper Finalist

@inproceedings{vats2022synergistic,
  title = {Synergistic scheduling of learning and allocation of tasks in human-robot teams},
  author = {Vats, Shivam and Kroemer, Oliver and Likhachev, Maxim},
  booktitle = {2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  pages = {2789--2795},
  year = {2022},
  organization = {IEEE},
}

SymPy: symbolic computing in Python

Aaron Meurer, and others

PeerJ Computer Science, 2017

Bib PDF

@article{meurer2017sympy,
  title = {SymPy: symbolic computing in Python},
  author = {Meurer, Aaron and others},
  journal = {PeerJ Computer Science},
  volume = {3},
  pages = {e103},
  year = {2017},
  publisher = {PeerJ Inc.},
}