Tom Silver

Tom Silver.
Visiting Research Scholar
Incoming Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Email
[email protected]
Assistant
Cassandra Mendoza
Website
https://tomsilver.github.io/
Education

Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2024

 

Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (starting September 2025)
Associated Faculty in the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning

My research is motivated by the prospect of broadly-competent, helpful, and intelligent robots that can respond to very high-level commands like “make me a heart-healthy dinner”; learn new skills like “grind fresh pepper”; and learn new concepts like “wilted spinach.” Such robots will be especially transformative for people who cannot otherwise remain independent in their homes. Most of my work is at the intersection of automated planning and machine learning: learning to plan and planning to learn while making efficient use of limited data and time. I often use techniques from task and motion planning, program synthesis, and neuro-symbolic machine learning.

Selected Publications
  1. Practice Makes Perfect: Planning to Learn Skill Parameter Policies. Nishanth Kumar*, Tom Silver*, Willie McClinton, Linfeng Zhao, Stephen Proulx, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Jennifer Barry. Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2024. (*Equal contribution)
  2. Predicate Invention for Bilevel Planning. Tom Silver*, Rohan Chitnis*, Nishanth Kumar, Willie McClinton, Tomas Lozano-Perez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Joshua Tenenbaum. AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2023.
  3. Learning Neuro-Symbolic Skills for Bilevel Planning. Tom Silver, Ashay Athalye, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Tomas Lozano-Perez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling. Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2022.
  4. Planning with Learned Object Importance in Large Problem Instances using Graph Neural Networks. Tom Silver*, Rohan Chitnis*, Aidan Curtis, Joshua Tenenbaum, Tomas Lozano-Perez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling. AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2021. 
  5. Integrated Task and Motion Planning. Caelan Reed Garrett, Rohan Chitnis, Rachel Holladay, Beomjoon Kim, Tom Silver, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Tomas Lozano-Perez. Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems. Vol. 4 (2021).

Google Scholar Profile

Honors and Awards:

  • MIT EECS Hazen Teaching Award (2022)
  • NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2018-2023)
  • MIT Stata Family Presidential Fellowship (2018)