Bidipta Sarkar

I am a first-year DPhil student in Engineering Science at the University of Oxford in the FLAIR and WhiRL labs, co-supervised by Professor Jakob Foerster and Professor Shimon Whiteson. I am funded by the Clarendon Fund Scholarship in partnership with a Department of Engineering Science Studentship.

I received my BS in Computer Science with Honors and Distinction at Stanford University (2020-2024), where I was also a member of Professor Dorsa Sadigh's ILIAD lab since my sophomore year.

I am interested in creating AI agents that can interact with their environment and safely work alongside humans and other autonomous agents, with a growing focus on integrating natural language into AI coordination. My research broadly spans three subfields of computer science:

• Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Enabling independently trained agents to cooperate on a common task and form conventions.

• Vision: Capturing meaningful information about an agent's environment from sensors.

• Graphics: Simulating environments while balancing speed and realism.

Posts

(November 2023, Video) My talk on Diverse Conventions for Human-AI Collaboration

(August 2023, Blog Post) Overcooked in Thousands of Kitchens: Training Top Performing Agents in Under a Minute

(Living Document) Emacs Setup for macOS and GNU/Linux

Publications

Physically Grounded Vision-Language Models for Robotic Manipulation

Jensen Gao, Bidipta Sarkar, Fei Xia, Ted Xiao, Jiajun Wu, Brian Ichter, Anirudha Majumdar, Dorsa Sadigh

International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2024

Paper / Website / Video

Diverse Conventions for Human-AI Collaboration

Bidipta Sarkar, Andy Shih, Dorsa Sadigh

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), December 2023

Paper / Website / Code / Video

An Extensible, Data-Oriented Architecture for High-Performance, Many-World Simulation

Brennan Shacklett, Luc Guy Rosenzweig, Zhiqiang Xie, Bidipta Sarkar, Andrew Szot, Erik Wijmans, Vladlen Koltun, Dhruv Batra, Kayvon Fatahalian

Transactions on Graphics 2023

Paper / Website / RL Environments / Blog / Colab

PantheonRL: A MARL Library for Dynamic Training Interactions

Bidipta Sarkar*, Aditi Talati*, Andy Shih*, Dorsa Sadigh

Proceedings of the 36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Demo Track), February 2022

Paper / Code / Video / DOI

Bachelor's Honors Thesis

Training Language Models for Social Deduction with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Bidipta Sarkar, Warren Xia, C. Karen Liu, Dorsa Sadigh

Stanford Digital Repository, May 2024

Paper / Website / Code / DOI

Preprints

An Interactive Agent Foundation Model

Zane Durante*, Bidipta Sarkar*, Ran Gong*, Rohan Taori, Yusuke Noda, Paul Tang, Ehsan Adeli, Shrinidhi Kowshika Lakshmikanth, Kevin Schulman, Arnold Milstein, Demetri Terzopoulos, Ade Famoti, Noboru Kuno, Ashley Llorens, Hoi Vo, Katsu Ikeuchi, Li Fei-Fei, Jianfeng Gao, Naoki Wake*, Qiuyuan Huang*

arXiv, February 2024

Paper / Website