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Pratyusha Sharma

I am a PhD student in EECS at MIT advised by Prof. Antonio Torralba and Prof. Jacob Andreas. I enjoy thinking about the interplay between language (structure more than form), reasoning and sequential decision making. My research goal is to understand systems that exhibit broadly intelligent behaviors (AI systems and biological organisms) and build better AI systems!

Recently, I have worked on:
1. Developing algorithms to understand the structure of solutions artificial neural networks implement and how it affects generalization [I,II],
2. Understanding the complexity and structure of naturally arising animal communication systems in the wild 🐳 [III, IV],
3. How language and natural-language-like structures can support effective reasoning and planning in embodied agents and robots 🤖 [V,VI, VII].

Prior to this, I was at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute for a year-long research internship advised by Prof. Abhinav Gupta. Even before that, I was an undergraduate student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. During my PhD, I have also spent some fun summers at Microsoft Research NYC and NVIDIA Seattle Robotics Lab.

I am on the faculty job market this year!

Recent News

Preprints



LoRA vs Full Fine-tuning: An Illusion of Equivalence

Reece Shuttleworth, Jacob Andreas, Antonio Torralba, Pratyusha Sharma
arXiv, 2024
paper

Publications




Language-guided Skill Learning with Temporal Variational Inference

Haotian Fu, Pratyusha Sharma, Elias Stengel-Eskin, George Konidaris, Nicolas Le Roux, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Xingdi Yuan
ICML 2024
paper


Learning Adaptive Planning Representations with Natural Language Guidance

Lio Wong*, Jiayuan Mao*, Pratyusha Sharma*, Zachary S. Siegel, Jiahai Feng, Noa Korneev, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Jacob Andreas.
ICLR 2024
paper MIT News

A Vision Check-up for Language Models

Pratyusha Sharma*, Tamar Rott Shaham*, Manel Baradad, Stephanie Fu, Adrian RodriguezMunoz, Shivam Duggal, Phillip Isola, Antonio Torralba.
CVPR 2024
paper MIT News




Grokking of Hierarchical Structure in Vanilla Transformers

Shikhar Murty, Pratyusha Sharma, Jacob Andreas, Christopher Manning
ACL 2023
paper



Correcting Robot Plans with Natural Language Feedback

Pratyusha Sharma, Balakumar Sundaralingam, Valts Blukis, Chris Paxton, Tucker Hermans, Antonio Torralba, Jacob Andreas, Dieter Fox
RSS 2022
paper



Towards Understanding the Communication in Sperm Whales

Jacob Andreas, Gašper Beguš, Michael M Bronstein, Roee Diamant, Denley Delaney, Shane Gero, Shafi Goldwasser, David F Gruber, Sarah de Haas, Peter Malkin, Nikolay Pavlov, Roger Payne, Giovanni Petri, Daniela Rus, Pratyusha Sharma, Dan Tchernov, Pernille Tønnesen, Antonio Torralba, Daniel Vogt, Robert J Wood (Authors in alphabetical order)
iScience 2022
paper The New Yorker


Learning human-environment interactions using 3D conformal functional textiles

Yiyue Luo, Yunzhu Li, Pratyusha Sharma, Wan Shou, Kui Wu, Michael Foshey, Beichen Li, Tomas Palacios, Antonio Torralba, Wojciech Matusik
Nature Electronics 2021
paper