Category: News
-
Ivan talks about world models at UT Austin
Ivan visited Ufuk Topcu, the Center for Autonomy, and the Oden Institute at UT Austin with a talk about physically interpretable world models. The discussions included whether anyone has mounted a camera on an inverted pendulum and whether robotics is all about “getting it to work”. The following papers were featured in the talk:
-
GAR wins 3rd place at vehicle conference in Boston
—
A team of our friends from the Gator Autonomous Racing (GAR) club went to Boston for the Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC) and took third place! That was the first in-person competition for the club. Congratulations, and wishing GAR many more such performances!
-
Ivan visits South Carolina with confidence and robustness
Ivan visited Pooyan Jamshidi at the University of South Carolina. The agenda included conversations with like-minded researchers and tours of impressive mechanical, industrial, and electrical facilities. Thanks to UF and the SEC for supporting this academic exchange! In addition, Ivan gave two talks about the recent research on confidence and robustness:
-
New preprint: differentiable discrete abstractions
Our team figured out how to optimize discrete abstractions of continuous-state systems with gradient descent. The solution lies in a smooth proxy for a simulation metric. An example state grid, resulting from our technique, is shown above. Details below:
-
New tutorial: conservative discrete abstractions
Our tutorial on building conservative, sound discretizations of continuous-state systems is finally online! To be presented by Jordan at the Embedded Systems Week in Barcelona. Citation:
-
Zhenjiang defends his PhD thesis proposal
The proposed thesis, “Chance Prediction under Distribution Shift: Diagnosis, Calibration, and Guarantees for Visual Autonomy and Language Agents”, outlines a vision for detecting, adapting, and calibrating confidence under 4 types of shifts: observation, dynamics, initial state, and controller. If you are interested in the broader perspective on Zhenjiang’s recent work, check out this article by…
-
Zhenjiang and Ani present temporal confidence at ACL’26
—
Ani (who also volunteered) and Zhenjiang traveled to the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) conference in San Diego to present our work on using temporal signatures in language model logics to calibrate their correctness confidence. It was an exciting contribution and an exciting trip!
-
Ivan receives IEEE TCCPS Early Career Award
This award recognizes a junior researcher from either academia or industry who has demonstrated outstanding contributions to the field of cyber-physical systems (CPS) in the early stage of his/her career development. Ivan was awarded ‘‘for contributions to rigorous assurance of learning-enabled cyber-physical systems, including their safety verification, trustworthy monitoring, and controller repair.’’ Big thanks to the IEEE Technical Committee on…
-
New preprint: anomaly-informed safety confidence
We developed a new safety prediction pipeline that leverages a vector of anomaly scores to predict the system’s safety confidence. Somehow, it manages to generalize to unseen anomalies in sensing and dynamics. Citation:
-
Zhenjiang presents confidences & world models at CPS Week
—
Zhenjiang Mao travelled all the way to Brittany in France to present his recent contributions at the CPS-IoT Week 2026. First, Zhenjiang showcased his proposed PhD work on “Action Confidence Trajectories for Safety Assurance in Autonomous Systems” at the CPS-IoT Week PhD Forum. He gave a short pitch and then presented a poster, which was…