About Me
I am a PhD student at UT Austin advised by Amy Zhang working on deep reinforcement learning. I was supported by the NSF Ethical AI Fellowship. I am interested in all sorts of deep reinforcement learning problems but recently I’ve been thinking about unsupervised learning within decision-making contexts and applying those tools to large-scale robot learning.
Previously, I did work in the Structured Techniques for Algorithmic Robotics lab (STAR) with Professor Harish Ravichandar and the Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning lab (RAIL) with Professor Sonia Chernova. I also worked closely with Robotics PhD student Joanne Truong on sim2real for legged robotics.
Detailed C.V. (updated August 2025)
Education
- PhD in Computer Science, UT Austin, 2022 -
- M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-2021
- B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Minor in Robotics, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2016-2020
Publications
Max Rudolph*, Nathan Lichtle*, Sobhan Mohammadpour*, Alexandre Bayen, J. Zico Kolter, Amy Zhang, Gabriele Farina, Eugene Vinitsky, Samuel Sokota
RLC 2025-CoCoMARL Workshop, Oral
[paper] [code] [exploitability library] [game demo]
RL Zero: Zero-Shot Language to Behaviors without any Supervision
Harshit Sikchi*, Siddhant Agarwal*, Pranaya Jajoo*, Samyak Parajuli*, Caleb Chuck*, Max Rudolph*, Peter Stone, Amy Zhang, Scott Niekum
[paper] [project page]
Learning Action-based Representations Using Invariance
Max Rudolph*, Caleb Chuck*, Kevin Black*, Misha Lvovsky, Scott Niekum, Amy Zhang
Reinforcement Learning Conference, 2024
[paper] [code]
Robot Air Hockey: A Manipulation Testbed for Robot Learning with Reinforcement Learning
Caleb Chuck*, Carl Qi*, Michael Joseph Munje*, Shuozhe Li*, Max Rudolph*, Chang Shi*, Siddhant Agarwal*, Harshit Sikchi*, Abhinav Peri, Sarthak Dayal, Evan Kuo, Kavan Mehta, Anthony Wang, Peter Stone, Amy Zhang, Scott Niekum
[paper]
Generalization of Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Policies via Awareness and Communication of Capabilities
Max Rudolph*,Pierce Howell*,Reza Torbati, Kevin Fu, Harish Ravichandar
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2023
[paper] [code] [project page]
Rethinking Sim2Real: Lower Fidelity Simulation Leads to Higher Sim2Real Transfer in Navigation
Joanne Truong, Max Rudolph, Naoki Yokoyama, Sonia Chernova, Dhruv Batra, Akshara Rai,
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2022
CoRL, 2022– Sim-to-Real Robot Learning: Locomotion and Beyond Workshop, Spotlight
[paper] [code] [project page]
Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures: Towards Risk-Adaptive Task Allocation
Max Rudolph, Sonia Chernova, Harish Ravichandar
In Proc. of The International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2021
[paper] [code]
Range Limited Coverage Control using Air-Ground Multi-Robot Teams
Max Rudolph, Sean Wilson, Magnus Egerstedt
In Proc. of The International Conference in Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021.
[paper] [code]
Other stuff
I like to play tennis and bake. I also run the CS Graduate Student organization (GRACS) for UTCS. <!– I was part of an intern spotlight while working on Mars2020 at the Jet Propulsion Lab.
When not herding robots… –>
Joshua Tree National Park
Everglades National Park
