The Dartmouth Autonomy Seminar Series: Dr. Na (Lina) Li, Harvard University

From Generative Models to Control: Representation-based Reinforcement Learning in Physical Systems

4/16/2026
1:15 pm - 2:15 pm
Location
Spanos Auditorium, Cummings Hall
Sponsored by
Computer Science Department, Thayer School
Audience
Public
More information
Harini Barath

The explosive growth of machine learning and data-driven methodologies has revolutionized numerous fields. Yet, translating these successes to dynamical physical systems remains a significant challenge, hindered by the complexity, uncertainty, and safety-critical nature of such environments. In this talk, Dr. Li will present a unified framework that bridges this gap by introducing novel generative representations for reinforcement learning and control. She further demonstrates how these representations help close the sim-to-real gap, improve data efficiency in imitation learning, and enable scalable computation of localized policies for large-scale nonlinear networked systems, with applications including robotics and energy systems.

Location
Spanos Auditorium, Cummings Hall
Sponsored by
Computer Science Department, Thayer School
Audience
Public
More information
Harini Barath