Muhammad Burhan Hafez
Researcher in Machine Learning and Robotics
I am currently a New Frontiers Fellow/Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of Machine Learning in the School of Electronics & Computer Science at the University of Southampton. My research lies at the intersection of machine learning, robotics, and motor neuroscience, with a focus on robot motor learning. I investigate the role of the biological principles of self-organization and intrinsic motivation and the neurocognitive mechanisms of meta-decision making, strategy selection, and adaptive integration of model-based and model-free control in enabling robots to efficiently and continually acquire new skills. My research interests include:
Reinforcement Learning
Continual Robot Learning
Metacognition in Robot Decision-Making
LLMs for Robot Learning and Planning
Announcements & News:
Feb 2025 - Invited as Senior Program Committee member for CoLLAs 2025
Jan 2025 - Invited as Program Committee member for ECAI 2025
Nov 2024 - Our paper "Continual Deep Reinforcement Learning with Task-Agnostic Policy Distillation" has been accepted for publications in Nature's Scientific Reports (preprint, code).
Nov 2024 - Our paper "QT-TDM: Planning with Transformer Dynamics Model and Autoregressive Q-Learning" has been accepted for publication in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (preprint, code).
Jul 2024 - New preprint out: "QT-TDM: Planning with Transformer Dynamics Model and Autoregressive Q-Learning" (link).
May 2024 - One paper on continual robot learning accepted at CoLLAs 2024 (Journal Track).
Feb 2024 - Invited as Program Committee (PC) member for ECAI 2024 and IROS 2024.
Jan 2024 - I joined the University of Southampton as a New Frontiers Fellow/Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Machine Learning.
Sep 2023 - Our paper "Continual Robot Learning using Self-Supervised Task Inference" has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (link).
Sep 2023 - I joined the Editorial Boards of Frontiers in Robotics and AI and Frontiers in Neurorobotics.
Jun 2023 - Our paper on grounding Large Language Models in multimodal sensory environments accepted at IROS 2023 (project link).
May 2023 - Our paper "Map-based Experience Replay: A Memory-Efficient Solution to Catastrophic Forgetting in Reinforcement Learning" has been accepted for publication in Frontiers in Neurorobotics (paper, code).
Apr 2023 - New preprint out: "Model Predictive Control with Self-supervised Representation Learning" (link).
Mar 2023 - New preprint out: "Chat with the Environment: Interactive Multimodal Perception using Large Language Models" (link).
Feb 2023 - I gave an invited talk titled "Efficient, Hybrid, and Continual Learning: Towards Brain-Inspired Intelligent Robots" at the Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, UK.
Feb 2023 - One paper on transformer-based multimodal learning accepted by Applied Artificial Intelligence (link).
Nov 2022 - I gave an invited talk titled "Towards Cognitive-Inspired Robot Skill Learning" at the Bernoulli Institute, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.
Jul 2022 - New paper on cross-modal self-supervised robot learning accepted at IROS 2022.
Nov 2021 - Invited talk on "Robotic Platform for Social Communication – Continual Robot Learning" at the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre on Cross-Modal Learning, Hamburg, Germany.
Jul 2021 - My paper titled "Behavior Self-Organization Supports Task Inference for Continual Robot Learning" is accepted at IROS 2021.
Apr 2021 - Our paper titled "Improving Model-Based Reinforcement Learning with Internal State Representations through Self-Supervision" is accepted at IJCNN 2021.
Nov 2020 - My article titled "Improving robot dual-system motor learning with intrinsically motivated meta-control and latent-space experience imagination" has been published in Robotics and Autonomous Systems.
May 2020 - I successfully defended my PhD thesis "Intrinsically Motivated Actor-Critic for Robot Motor Learning" with magna cum laude.
Dec 2019 - Invited talk on "Robot Motor Learning with Intrinsically Motivated Actor-Critic" at TU-Delft, The Netherlands.