Michael Watson

Rachel Luo, Michael Watson, Apoorva Sharma et al.

Rigorous evaluation of learning-based robotic systems is an essential prerequisite for deployment. However, real-world test data is expensive to gather; moreover, in a typical iterative development context, data gathered from the latest policy is necessarily limited in scale. This motivates evaluation methodologies that make use of heterogeneous data sources, including simulation, historical policy logs, and data collected from related platforms or environments. While such auxiliary data are abundant and inexpensive, they are generally not directly representative of real-world outcomes -- for example, performance in simulation may differ substantially from performance in the real world -- making their principled use for high-confidence performance estimation challenging. In this paper, we introduce X4Val, a general framework for variance-reduced real-world metric estimation in the presence of non-paired, multi-domain data. X4Val embeds samples from real and auxiliary domains into a shared representation space and learns a transferable predictor of real-world metrics; this learned predictor is then incorporated into a control-variates estimator, enabling variance reduction even when paired samples are unavailable. We provide theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations on autonomous driving and real-world robot manipulation tasks, domains across which X4Val achieves up to 38.4% variance reduction and demonstrates consistent improvements over strong baselines. These results show that non-paired, heterogeneous data can be leveraged to substantially improve the sample efficiency of rigorous robotic system validation.

Guillermo Garcia-Cobo, Maximilian Igl, Peter Karkus et al.

Autonomous driving policies are typically trained via open-loop behavior cloning of human demonstrations. However, such policies suffer from covariate shift when deployed in closed loop, leading to compounding errors. We introduce Rollouts as Demonstrations (RoaD), a simple and efficient method to mitigate covariate shift by leveraging the policy's own closed-loop rollouts as additional training data. During rollout generation, RoaD incorporates expert guidance to bias trajectories toward high-quality behavior, producing informative yet realistic demonstrations for fine-tuning. This approach enables robust closed-loop adaptation with orders of magnitude less data than reinforcement learning, and avoids restrictive assumptions of prior closed-loop supervised fine-tuning (CL-SFT) methods, allowing broader applications domains including end-to-end driving. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RoaD on WOSAC, a large-scale traffic simulation benchmark, where it performs similar or better than the prior CL-SFT method; and in AlpaSim, a high-fidelity neural reconstruction-based simulator for end-to-end driving, where it improves driving score by 41\% and reduces collisions by 54\%.

Yao Fehlis, Charles Crain, Aidan Jensen et al.

The pharmaceutical industry faces unprecedented challenges in drug discovery, with traditional approaches struggling to meet modern therapeutic development demands. This paper introduces a novel AI framework, Tippy, that transforms laboratory automation through specialized AI agents operating within the Design-Make-Test-Analyze (DMTA) cycle. Our multi-agent system employs five specialized agents - Supervisor, Molecule, Lab, Analysis, and Report, with Safety Guardrail oversight - each designed to excel in specific phases of the drug discovery pipeline. Tippy represents the first production-ready implementation of specialized AI agents for automating the DMTA cycle, providing a concrete example of how AI can transform laboratory workflows. By leveraging autonomous AI agents that reason, plan, and collaborate, we demonstrate how Tippy accelerates DMTA cycles while maintaining scientific rigor essential for pharmaceutical research. The system shows significant improvements in workflow efficiency, decision-making speed, and cross-disciplinary coordination, offering a new paradigm for AI-assisted drug discovery.

Yao Fehlis, Charles Crain, Aidan Jensen et al.

Building on the conceptual framework presented in our previous work on agentic AI for pharmaceutical research, this paper provides a comprehensive technical analysis of Tippy's multi-agent system implementation for drug discovery laboratory automation. We present a distributed microservices architecture featuring five specialized agents (Supervisor, Molecule, Lab, Analysis, and Report) that coordinate through OpenAI Agents SDK orchestration and access laboratory tools via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The system architecture encompasses agent-specific tool integration, asynchronous communication patterns, and comprehensive configuration management through Git-based tracking. Our production deployment strategy utilizes Kubernetes container orchestration with Helm charts, Docker containerization, and CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment. The implementation integrates vector databases for RAG functionality and employs an Envoy reverse proxy for secure external access. This work demonstrates how specialized AI agents can effectively coordinate complex laboratory workflows while maintaining security, scalability, reliability, and integration with existing laboratory infrastructure through standardized protocols.