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Integration of Structured Reasoning and Data-driven Learning for Acting and Planning by Dr. Sunandita Patra
March 10 @ 9:00 am - 10:00 am
Teams Link: MS Teams
Abstract: The talk will focus on enabling autonomous actors, such as digital agents or robots, to take deliberative actions towards achieving their long horizon goals, in the face of uncertainty and dynamic events. Today, dynamic events or failures often require human intervention, system restarts, retraining, or redesign, for example, when robots get stuck in dead ends or digital agents collapse under unanticipated events. Existing methods either rely on rule-based reasoning, where it is extremely difficult for human experts to compile and maintain a complete set of rules, or black-box machine learning models that need to be trained extensively for individual tasks. Neither approach is well suited when actors are operating in a dynamically changing environment. This work aims to overcome these limitations by creating integrated planning and learning algorithms that are practical to be executed in real-world environments (spanning finance, robotics and cybersecurity) by incorporating within a single framework: (a) deliberative acting, (b) online planning, and (c) data-driven learning from the actor’s experiences.
By integrating structured reasoning with data-driven learning, the goal of this research is to push towards the next generation of autonomous systems, general-purpose agentic AI that can plan and act deliberately across a set of diverse tasks and domains.
Bio: Sunandita Patra is a Research Lead at J. P. Morgan AI Research, Chicago, USA. Her research interests include the integration of acting, planning, and machine learning, focusing on finance, cybersecurity, and robotics domains. She completed her PhD and PostDoc in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, and holds BTech and MTech degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kharagpur. Her work received the Best Student Paper Honorable Mention Award at ICAPS 2020, and the Best Student Paper Finalist Award (Top 3) at ECMR 2025. For more details, please visit https://sunanditapatra.wixsite.com/camp