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ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Robust and Adaptive Decision-making for Multi-agent Systems”

October 5 at 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM
Hybrid Event
Details
Date: October 5, 2026
Time: 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM
Event Tags:
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  • Organizer
    Electrical and Systems Engineering
    215-898-6823
    eseevents@seas.upenn.edu
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    Venue
    Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street
    Philadelphia
    PA 19104
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    Autonomous agents must accomplish complex tasks while interacting with uncertain opponents and coordinating with teammates. This dissertation develops methods for robust and adaptive decision-making through opponent modeling, adversarial policy synthesis, and learning guided by temporal logic task specifications. It also introduces a method that attributes shared safety costs to individual agents to support safe cooperation. Experiments in autonomous racing, robotic control, cooperative transport, and networked systems demonstrate progress toward capable agents that adapt to others and coordinate under shared safety requirements.

    Speaker

    Hongrui Zheng

    Hongrui Zheng

    ESE Ph.D. Candidate

    Hongrui Zheng is a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on enabling effective coordination and cooperation among autonomous agents operating in dynamic, uncertain environments, and synthesizing robust systems capable of functioning reliably in adversarial or competitive scenarios.