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Taylor W. Killian

dblp:192/1575 · DBLP profile ↗
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7ranked-venue papers
2as first author
4since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none

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

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 7 · 2 first-author · 4 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 first-author

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
6 papers
Reinforcement learning · 66% Autonomous driving · 12% Language models and text generation · 10%
Theoretical computer science
1 paper
Mathematical optimization · 100%

Topics — the 14 heaviest of 17, each with the papers that count most for it

TopicWeightPapersLastEvidence papers
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
offline reinforcement learning
1.422025
BraVE: Offline Reinforcement Learning for Discrete Combinatorial Action Spaces · NeurIPS 2025
Medical Dead-ends and Learning to Identify High-Risk States and Treatments · NeurIPS 2021
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › large action space
combinatorial action space
0.912025
BraVE: Offline Reinforcement Learning for Discrete Combinatorial Action Spaces · NeurIPS 2025
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation
large language model reasoning
0.912025
Revisiting Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning from A Cross-Domain Perspective · NeurIPS 2025
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › reinforcement learning for NLP
reinforcement learning for language models
0.912025
Revisiting Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning from A Cross-Domain Perspective · NeurIPS 2025
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › multi-agent reinforcement learning
self-play
0.912025
Robust Autonomy Emerges from Self-Play · ICML 2025
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
value-based reinforcement learning
0.912025
BraVE: Offline Reinforcement Learning for Discrete Combinatorial Action Spaces · NeurIPS 2025
Knowledge, reasoning and agents › Planning, search and constraint satisfaction › search control
dead-end detection
0.512021
Medical Dead-ends and Learning to Identify High-Risk States and Treatments · NeurIPS 2021
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › markov decision process › Bayesian MDP
Hidden parameter MDPs
0.312017
Robust and Efficient Transfer Learning with Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Processes · AAAI 2017
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
markov decision process
0.312017
Robust and Efficient Transfer Learning with Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Processes · AAAI 2017
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
model-based reinforcement learning
0.312017
Robust and Efficient Transfer Learning with Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Processes · NIPS 2017
Machine learning › Transfer learning and domain adaptation
robust transfer learning
0.312017
Robust and Efficient Transfer Learning with Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Processes · AAAI 2017
Machine learning › Transfer learning and domain adaptation
task embedding
0.312017
Robust and Efficient Transfer Learning with Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Processes · NIPS 2017
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
transfer learning in reinforcement learning
0.312017
Robust and Efficient Transfer Learning with Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Processes · NIPS 2017
Robotics › Autonomous driving
perception and planning
0.312025
Robust Autonomy Emerges from Self-Play · ICML 2025

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

value-based reinforcement learning · 1.7tree-structured action traversal · 1.7self-play · 0.9reinforcement learning · 0.9mixed-domain training · 0.9batched simulation · 0.9deep neural network · 0.5gaussian process latent variable model · 0.3gaussian process · 0.3bayesian neural network · 0.3
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Robust Autonomy Emerges from Self-Play
abstract
Self-play has powered breakthroughs in two-player and multi-player games. Here we show that self-play is a surprisingly effective strategy in another domain. We show that robust and naturalistic driving emerges entirely from self-play in simulation at unprecedented scale -- 1.6 billion km of driving. This is enabled by Gigaflow, a batched simulator that can synthesize and train on 42 years of subjective driving experience per hour on a single 8-GPU node. The resulting policy achieves state-of-the-art performance on three independent autonomous driving benchmarks. The policy outperforms the prior state of the art when tested on recorded real-world scenarios, amidst human drivers, without ever seeing human data during training. The policy is realistic when assessed against human references and achieves unprecedented robustness, averaging 17.5 years of continuous driving between incidents in simulation.
Marco F. Cusumano-Towner, David Hafner, Alexander Hertzberg, Brody Huval, Aleksei Petrenko, Eugene Vinitsky, Erik Wijmans, Taylor W. Killian, Stuart Bowers, Ozan Sener, Philipp Krähenbühl, Vladlen Koltun
ICML8
2025 Revisiting Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning from A Cross-Domain Perspective
abstract
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in enhancing large language model (LLM) reasoning, yet progress towards broader capabilities is limited by the availability of high-quality, multi-domain datasets. This work introduces \ours, a 92K RL-for-reasoning dataset designed to address this gap, covering six reasoning domains: Math, Code, Science, Logic, Simulation, and Tabular, each with corresponding verifiers. We build \ours via a careful data-curation pipeline, including sourcing, deduplication, reward design, and domain-specific and difficulty-based filtering, to facilitate the systematic investigation of cross-domain RL generalization. Our study using \ours suggests the efficacy of a simple mixed-domain RL training approach and reveals several key aspects affecting cross-domain transferability. We further train two models {\ours}-7B and {\ours}-32B purely with RL on our curated data and observe largely improved performance over leading open RL reasoning model baselines, with gains of 7.3\% and 7.8\% respectively on an extensive 17-task, six-domain evaluation suite. We are releasing our dataset, code, and evaluation suite to the community, aiming to support further research and development of more general RL-enhanced reasoning models.
Jorge (Zhoujun) Cheng, Shibo Hao, Tianyang Liu 0003, Yuexin Bian, Nilabjo Dey, Yonghao Zhuang 0001, Yuheng Zha, Yi Gu 0002, Kun Zhou 0002, Yuan Li 0032, Richard Fan, Jianshu She, Chengqian Gao, Abulhair Saparov, Taylor W. Killian, Haonan Li 0002, Mikhail Yurochkin, Eric P. Xing, Zhengzhong Liu 0001, Zhiting Hu
NeurIPS19
2025 BraVE: Offline Reinforcement Learning for Discrete Combinatorial Action Spaces
abstract
Offline reinforcement learning in high-dimensional, discrete action spaces is challenging due to the exponential scaling of the joint action space with the number of sub-actions and the complexity of modeling sub-action dependencies. Existing methods either exhaustively evaluate the action space, making them computationally infeasible, or factorize Q-values, failing to represent joint sub-action effects. We propose \textbf{Bra}nch \textbf{V}alue \textbf{E}stimation (BraVE), a value-based method that uses tree-structured action traversal to evaluate a linear number of joint actions while preserving dependency structure. BraVE outperforms prior offline RL methods by up to $20\times$ in environments with over four million actions.
Matthew Landers, Taylor W. Killian, Hugo Barnes, Thomas Hartvigsen, Afsaneh Doryab
NeurIPS2
2021 Medical Dead-ends and Learning to Identify High-Risk States and Treatments
abstract
Machine learning has successfully framed many sequential decision making problems as either supervised prediction, or optimal decision-making policy identification via reinforcement learning. In data-constrained offline settings, both approaches may fail as they assume fully optimal behavior or rely on exploring alternatives that may not exist. We introduce an inherently different approach that identifies "dead-ends" of a state space. We focus on patient condition in the intensive care unit, where a "medical dead-end" indicates that a patient will expire, regardless of all potential future treatment sequences. We postulate "treatment security" as avoiding treatments with probability proportional to their chance of leading to dead-ends, present a formal proof, and frame discovery as an RL problem. We then train three independent deep neural models for automated state construction, dead-end discovery and confirmation. Our empirical results discover that dead-ends exist in real clinical data among septic patients, and further reveal gaps between secure treatments and those administered.
Mehdi Fatemi, Taylor W. Killian, Jayakumar Subramanian, Marzyeh Ghassemi
NeurIPS2
2020 Optimization Methods for Interpretable Differentiable Decision Trees Applied to Reinforcement Learning
abstract
Decision trees are ubiquitous in machine learning for their ease of use and interpretability. Yet, these models are not typically employed in reinforcement learning as they cannot be updated online via stochastic gradient descent. We overcome this limitation by allowing for a gradient update over the entire tree that improves sample complexity affords interpretable policy extraction. First, we include theoretical motivation on the need for policy-gradient learning by examining the properties of gradient descent over differentiable decision trees. Second, we demonstrate that our approach equals or outperforms a neural network on all domains and can learn discrete decision trees online with average rewards up to 7x higher than a batch-trained decision tree. Third, we conduct a user study to quantify the interpretability of a decision tree, rule list, and a neural network with statistically significant results (p < 0.001).
Andrew Silva, Matthew C. Gombolay, Taylor W. Killian, Ivan Dario Jimenez Jimenez, Sung-Hyun Son
AISTATS3
2017 Robust and Efficient Transfer Learning with Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Processes
abstract
An intriguing application of transfer learning emerges when tasks arise with similar, but not identical, dynamics. Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Processes (HiP-MDP) embed these tasks into a low-dimensional space; given the embedding parameters one can identify the MDP for a particular task. However, the original formulation of HiP-MDP had a critical flaw: the embedding uncertainty was modeled independently of the agent's state uncertainty, requiring an arduous training procedure. In this work, we apply a Gaussian Process latent variable model to jointly model the dynamics and the embedding, leading to a more elegant formulation, one that allows for better uncertainty quantification and thus more robust transfer.
Taylor W. Killian, George Dimitri Konidaris, Finale Doshi-Velez
AAAI1
2017 Robust and Efficient Transfer Learning with Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Processes
abstract
We introduce a new formulation of the Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Process (HiP-MDP), a framework for modeling families of related tasks using low-dimensional latent embeddings. Our new framework correctly models the joint uncertainty in the latent parameters and the state space. We also replace the original Gaussian Process-based model with a Bayesian Neural Network, enabling more scalable inference. Thus, we expand the scope of the HiP-MDP to applications with higher dimensions and more complex dynamics.
Taylor W. Killian, Samuel Daulton, Finale Doshi-Velez, George Dimitri Konidaris
NIPS1