Bharat Prakash

I am a PhD candidate in CSEE at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where I am co advised by Tinoosh Mohsenin and Tim Oates. I am also a visiting researcher at Johns Hopkins University.

Before this, I spent time at eBay/PayPal as a software enginner where I worked on PayPal Credit and PayPal Working Capital. I did my MS also at UMBC and BE at University of Pune.

Email  /  Resume  /  Google Scholar  /  LinkedIn  /  GitHub


Research

The goal of my research is to build language guided hierarchical agents capable of solving complex long horizon tasks using RL and human feedback. More recently, I am interested in exploiting large language models to augment these agents..


LLM Augmented Hierarchical Agents
Bharat Prakash, Tim Oates, Tinoosh Mohsenin
LangRob @ CoRL 2023
FMDM @ NeurIPS 2023
FLAIRS 2024

Using large pretrained language models (LLMs) to inject common sense priors into hierarchical agents

Hierarchical Agents by Combining Language Generation and Semantic Goal Directed RL
Bharat Prakash, Nicholas Waytowich, Tim Oates, Tinoosh Mohsenin
LaReL Workshop, NeurIPS 2022

An interpretable hierarchical agent framework by combining sub-goal generation using language and semantic goal directed reinforcement learning

Combining Learning from Human Feedback and Knowledge Engineering to Solve Hierarchical Tasks in Minecraft
Vinicius Goecks, David Watkins, Nicholas Waytowich, Bharat Prakash
AAAI Make 2022, BASALT Competetion NeurIPS 2022

NeurIPS MineRL BASALT Challenge Winners

Interactive Hierarchical Guidance using Language
Bharat Prakash, Nicholas Waytowich, Tim Oates, Tinoosh Mohsenin
AAAI AI-HRI Fall Symposium, 2021

A hierarchical agent framework where low-level sub-goals are specified using language

Automatic Goal Generation using Dynamical Distance Learning
Bharat Prakash, Nicholas Waytowich, Tim Oates, Tinoosh Mohsenin
arXiv, 2021

A method for goal generation using dynamical distance functions thus automatically producing a curriculum.

Guiding Safe Reinforcement Learning Policies Using Structured Language Constraints
Bharat Prakash, Nicholas Waytowich, Tim Oates, Tinoosh Mohsenin
SafeAI Workshop, AAAI, 2020

A framework to train RL agents conditioned on constraints that are in the form of structured language

Improving Safety in Reinforcement Learning using Model-Based Architectures and Human Intervention
Bharat Prakash, Mohit Khatwani, Nicholas Waytowich, Tinoosh Mohsenin
AAAI FLAIRS, 2019

A hybrid architecture for reducing the human intervention time and improving safety by combining model-based and model-free methods.

Representation learning by solving auxiliary tasks on Xray images
Bharat Prakash

Learning image representations on unannotated Chest Xray images using the method described in Noroozi and Favaro to gain improvements in classification tasks. Here we they use the pretext task of solving jigsaw puzzles to pre-train the convolutional neural network. Chest x-ray images from the x-ray14 database were used.

Academic Services

Program Committee, Reviewer
Conferences: IJCAI 2023, NeurIPS 2023, AAAI 2024.
Symposiums and Workshops: AI-HRI 2021, AI-HRI 2022, LangRob @ CoRL 2023, FMDM @ NeurIPS 2023, RobotLearning @ NeurIPS 2023


(wesbite code from this guy)