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 March 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
[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
[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]
In the Media
I was part of an intern spotlight while working on Mars2020 at the Jet Propulsion Lab.
When not herding robots…
I like to play tennis and bake.
Joshua Tree National Park
Everglades National Park
