Multimodal Vision Research Laboratory

MVRL

Research Area: Reinforcement Learning

How should an agent search visual or geospatial space when observations are partial and costly? Our reinforcement learning research targets active search, exploration, and sequential decision-making in visual domains. Recent work includes diffusion-guided visual active search in partially observable environments (DiffVAS), goal modality agnostic active geo-localization (GOMAA-Geo), and partially-supervised frameworks for visual active search. We study interpretable policies, hindsight-observable POMDPs, and learning from limited supervision—often paired with geospatial embeddings and localization methods for real-world deployment.

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All Publications

  1. Sarkar A, Sastry S, Pirinen A, Jacobs N, Vorobeychik Y. 2026. DiffVAS: Diffusion-Guided Visual Active Search in Partially Observable Environments. In: International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS).
    bibtex Reinforcement Learning GeoAI GenAI
  2. Sarkar A, DiChristofano A, Das S, Fowler P, Jacobs N, Vorobeychik Y. 2025. Active Geospatial Search for Efficient Tenant Eviction Outreach. In: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
    code paper bibtex Reinforcement Learning GeoAI Urban
  3. Thumbnail for GOMAA-Geo: GOal Modality Agnostic Active Geo-localization
    Sarkar A, Sastry S, Pirinen A, Zhang C, Jacobs N, Vorobeychik Y. 2024. GOMAA-Geo: GOal Modality Agnostic Active Geo-localization. In: Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).
    code paper bibtex Reinforcement Learning Vision-Language Localization GeoAI
  4. Lanier M, Xu Y, Jacobs N, Zhang C, Vorobeychik Y. 2024. Learning Interpretable Policies in Hindsight-Observable POMDPs through Partially Supervised Reinforcement Learning. In: IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications.
    paper bibtex Reinforcement Learning
  5. Hormozabad SJ, Jacobs N, Soto MG. 2024. Reinforcement Learning for Integrated Structural Control and Health Monitoring. Practice Periodical on Structural Design and Construction 29. DOI: 10.1061/PPSCFX.SCENG-1455.
    doi bibtex Reinforcement Learning
  6. Sarkar A, DiChristofano A, Das S, Fowler P, Jacobs N, Vorobeychik Y. 2024. Geospatial Active Search for Preventing Evictions. In: International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS).
    bibtex Reinforcement Learning GeoAI Urban
  7. Sarkar A, Lanier M, Alfeld S, Feng J, Garnett R, Jacobs N, Vorobeychik Y. 2024. A Visual Active Search Framework for Geospatial Exploration. In: IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV).
    code paper bibtex Reinforcement Learning GeoAI
  8. Thumbnail for A Partially-Supervised Reinforcement Learning Framework for Visual Active Search
    Sarkar A, Jacobs N, Vorobeychik Y. 2023. A Partially-Supervised Reinforcement Learning Framework for Visual Active Search. In: Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).
    code paper bibtex Reinforcement Learning GeoAI