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Niko A. Grupen

I am a research scientist at Harvey. Previously, I was a PhD student in the Computer Science department at Cornell University, advised by Bart Selman and Daniel Lee. I've also spent time at Google Research (Brain and People + AI Research) and at Apple prior to my PhD.

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Research Overview

Multi-Agent Learning

My research sits at the intersection of reinforcement learning and multi-agent systems. In particular, I study emergent coordination and communication in multi-agent RL systems and the implications of emergent behavior (e.g. safety, fairness).

Human-Aligned AI

I am also broadly interested in AI alignment, interpretability, cooperative AI, common-sense reasoning, and world-modeling.

Dissertation

Responsible Emergent Multi-Agent Behavior

Niko A. Grupen (2023)

Publications

Policy-Value Alignment and Robustness in Search-based Multi-Agent Learning

Niko A. Grupen, Michael Hanlon, Alexis Hao, Daniel D. Lee, Bart Selman; Preprint 2023

Concept-based Understanding of Emergent Multi-Agent Behavior

Niko A. Grupen, Natasha Jaques, Been Kim, Shayegan Omidshafiei; Workshop on Deep Reinforcement Learning; NeurIPS 2022

Collective Obfuscation and Crowdsourcing

Benjamin Laufer, Niko A. Grupen; Workshop on Disinformation Countermeasures and Machine Learning, ICML 2022

Cooperative Multi-Agent Fairness and Equivariant Policies

Niko A. Grupen, Bart Selman, Daniel D. Lee; AAAI 2022 (15% acceptance)

Multi-Agent Curricula and Emergent Implicit Signaling

Niko A. Grupen, Daniel D. Lee, Bart Selman; AAMAS 2022 (Oral)

Unsupervised Feature Learning for Manipulation with Contrastive Domain Randomization

Carmel Rabinovitz, Niko A. Grupen, Aviv Tamar; ICRA 2021

Low-Bandwidth Communication Emerges Naturally in Multi-Agent Learning Systems

Niko A. Grupen, Daniel D. Lee, Bart Selman; Workshop on Zero-Shot Emergent Communication, NeurIPS 2020

Visual Primitives for Abductive Reasoning

Niko A. Grupen, Ross Knepper; Workshop on Combining Learning and Reasoning, RSS 2019

An iBeacon Primer for Indoor Localization

Paul Martin, Bo-Jhang Ho, Niko A. Grupen, Samuel Munoz, Mani Srivastava; ACM BuildSys, 2014

Articles & Book Chapters

AlphaFold, GPT-3 and How to Augment Intelligence with AI

Future by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)

From Author to Editor: Our Place Alongside the New Life Cycle of Text

Future of Text by Frode A. Hegland (Foreword by Vint G. Cerf)

Patents

US10733982 | Multi-directional Dialog

N. Grupen, M. Austin, M. Ephrati, K. Leung, S. Warren, P. Williams, M. Henderson

Technical Reports

Why Embodied Intelligence Needs "Skin in the Game"

N. Grupen, Technical Report, Cornell University, December 2019

Bayesian UFO: Abductive Visual Reasoning over Intuitive Physical Concepts

N. Grupen, Technical Report, Cornell University, May 2019

YMCA: A YouTube-based Motion Controller

N. Grupen, A. Hutchinson, Technical Report, Cornell University, December 2018

Contact

niko [at] cs [dot] cornell [dot] edu