Muthukumar Pandaram

dblp:335/5919 · DBLP profile ↗
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1ranked-venue papers
1as first author
1since 2021 · last 2026
—ORCID · none

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021

Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.

Artificial intelligence
1 paper
Reinforcement learning · 70% Learning theory · 23% Knowledge representation and reasoning · 7%

Topics — the 5 heaviest of 5, each with the papers that count most for it

TopicWeightPapersLastEvidence papers
Machine learning › Learning theory
inductive bias
1.012026
Dynamic Sparsity: Challenging Common Sparsity Assumptions for Learning World Models in Robotic Reinforcement Learning Benchmarks · AAAI 2026
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
model-based reinforcement learning
1.012026
Dynamic Sparsity: Challenging Common Sparsity Assumptions for Learning World Models in Robotic Reinforcement Learning Benchmarks · AAAI 2026
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
sample efficiency
1.012026
Dynamic Sparsity: Challenging Common Sparsity Assumptions for Learning World Models in Robotic Reinforcement Learning Benchmarks · AAAI 2026
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › model-based reinforcement learning
world model
1.012026
Dynamic Sparsity: Challenging Common Sparsity Assumptions for Learning World Models in Robotic Reinforcement Learning Benchmarks · AAAI 2026
Knowledge, reasoning and agents › Knowledge representation and reasoning › causal reasoning
causal graph
0.312026
Dynamic Sparsity: Challenging Common Sparsity Assumptions for Learning World Models in Robotic Reinforcement Learning Benchmarks · AAAI 2026

Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics

causal graph analysis · 1.0
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 Dynamic Sparsity: Challenging Common Sparsity Assumptions for Learning World Models in Robotic Reinforcement Learning Benchmarks
abstract
The use of learned dynamics models, also known as world models, can improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning. Recent work suggests that the underlying causal graphs of such dynamics models are sparsely connected, with each of the future state variables depending only on a small subset of the current state variables, and that learning may therefore benefit from sparsity priors. Similarly, temporal sparsity, i.e. sparsely and abruptly changing local dynamics, has also been proposed as a useful inductive bias. In this work, we critically examine these assumptions by analyzing ground truth dynamics from a set of robotic reinforcement learning environments in the MuJoCo Playground benchmark suite, aiming to determine whether the proposed notions of state and temporal sparsity actually tend to hold in typical reinforcement learning tasks. We study (i) whether the causal graphs of environment dynamics are sparse, (ii) whether such sparsity is state-dependent, and (iii) whether local system dynamics change sparsely. Our results indicate that global sparsity is rare, but instead the tasks show local, state-dependent sparsity in their dynamics and this sparsity exhibits distinct structures, appearing in temporally localized clusters (e.g., during contact events) and affecting specific subsets of state dimensions. These findings challenge common sparsity prior assumptions in dynamics learning, emphasizing the need for grounded inductive biases that reflect the state-dependent sparsity structure of real-world dynamics.
Muthukumar Pandaram, Jakob J. Hollenstein, David Drexel, Samuele Tosatto, Antonio Jose Rodríguez-Sánchez, Justus H. Piater
AAAI1