Siddharth Srikanth

Siddharth Srikanth, Freddie Liang, Sophie Hsu et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have significant potential to enable general-purpose robotic systems for a range of vision-language tasks. However, the performance of VLA-based robots is highly sensitive to the precise wording of language instructions, and it remains difficult to predict when such robots will fail. To improve the robustness of VLAs to different wordings, we present Q-DIG (Quality Diversity for Diverse Instruction Generation), which performs red-teaming by scalably identifying diverse natural language task descriptions that induce failures while remaining task-relevant. Q-DIG integrates Quality Diversity (QD) techniques with Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to generate a broad spectrum of adversarial instructions that expose meaningful vulnerabilities in VLA behavior. Our results across multiple simulation benchmarks show that Q-DIG finds more diverse and meaningful failure modes compared to baseline methods, and that fine-tuning VLAs on the generated instructions improves task success rates. Furthermore, results from a user study highlight that Q-DIG generates prompts judged to be more natural and human-like than those from baselines. Finally, real-world evaluations of Q-DIG prompts show results consistent with simulation, and fine-tuning VLAs on the generated prompts further success rates on unseen instructions. Together, these findings suggest that Q-DIG is a promising approach for identifying vulnerabilities and improving the robustness of VLA-based robots. Our anonymous project website is at qdigvla.github.io.

Siddharth Srikanth, John Krumm, Jonathan Qin

Road traffic congestion is a persistent problem. Focusing resources on the causes of congestion is a potentially efficient strategy for reducing slowdowns. We present NEXICA, an algorithm to discover which parts of the highway system tend to cause slowdowns on other parts of the highway. We use time series of road speeds as inputs to our causal discovery algorithm. Finding other algorithms inadequate, we develop a new approach that is novel in three ways. First, it concentrates on just the presence or absence of events in the time series, where an event indicates the temporal beginning of a traffic slowdown. Second, we develop a probabilistic model using maximum likelihood estimation to compute the probabilities of spontaneous and caused slowdowns between two locations on the highway. Third, we train a binary classifier to identify pairs of cause/effect locations trained on pairs of road locations where we are reasonably certain a priori of their causal connections, both positive and negative. We test our approach on six months of road speed data from 195 different highway speed sensors in the Los Angeles area, showing that our approach is superior to state-of-the-art baselines in both accuracy and computation speed.

Siddharth Srikanth, Varun Bhatt, Boshen Zhang et al.

Understanding how humans collaborate and communicate in teams is essential for improving human-agent teaming and AI-assisted decision-making. However, relying solely on data from large-scale user studies is impractical due to logistical, ethical, and practical constraints, necessitating synthetic models of multiple diverse human behaviors. Recently, agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to emulate human-like behavior in social settings. But, obtaining a large set of diverse behaviors requires manual effort in the form of designing prompts. On the other hand, Quality Diversity (QD) optimization has been shown to be capable of generating diverse Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent behavior. In this work, we combine QD optimization with LLM-powered agents to iteratively search for prompts that generate diverse team behavior in a long-horizon, multi-step collaborative environment. We first show, through a human-subjects experiment (n=54 participants), that humans exhibit diverse coordination and communication behavior in this domain. We then show that our approach can effectively replicate trends from human teaming data and also capture behaviors that are not easily observed without collecting large amounts of data. Our findings highlight the combination of QD and LLM-powered agents as an effective tool for studying teaming and communication strategies in multi-agent collaboration.