Mykel J. Kochenderfer
Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI
Develops decision-making under uncertainty for safety-critical autonomous systems such as aircraft collision avoidance.
Mykel J. Kochenderfer's lab at Stanford works on autonomous vehicles & drones, reinforcement learning and probabilistic & causal inference. 132 papers since 2023, 33 at top venues, mostly ICRA and ACC. 15 PhD students and 8 master's students. 173 alumni. Applications close .
At a glance
- papers, 2023–2026
- 34/ year
- at T1 venues
- 25%
- PhD students
- 15
- MS students
- 8
- alumni listed
- 173
Papers by yearfrom the lab homepage, 2023–2026
- 40 papers2026 · T1 11 · collecting
- 37 papers2025 · T1 7
- 31 papers2024 · T1 7
- 24 papers2023 · T1 8
T1 venuesOtherVenues: ICRA, ACC, ICML, AAAI, FAccT
Research focuspaper titles that use each topic's words
- Autonomous vehicles & drones15 papers
- Probabilistic & causal inference14 papers
- Reinforcement learning13 papers
- safety-critical0 papers
- aeronautics0 papers
Paper list
From the lab homepage.
202640 papers
- AAAI (T1)A new strategy for verifying reach-avoid specifications in neural feedback systems (opens in a new tab)
- AAMAS (T1)A semi-decentralized approach to multiagent control (opens in a new tab)
- ACCAdaptive strategies for pension fund management (opens in a new tab)
- aiaa_aviationAircraft localization during surface operations using segmentation masks (opens in a new tab)
- MIT PressAlgorithms for Optimization (opens in a new tab)
- MIT PressAlgorithms for Validation (opens in a new tab)
- ACCAn iterative Bayesian approach for system identification based on linear Gaussian models (opens in a new tab)
- IJCAI (T1)Approximate heuristic search for semi-decentralized systems (opens in a new tab)
- IROS (T1)AutoAresti: A benchmark and architecture for real-time aerobatic sequence interpretation (opens in a new tab)
- Journal of Artificial Intelligence ResearchBackward Monte Carlo tree search: Charting unsafe regions in the belief-space (opens in a new tab)
- Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies ConferenceChance-constrained belief-space maneuver planning for autonomous conjunction avoidance under uncertainty (opens in a new tab)
- Journal of Open Source SoftwareCrux.jl: Deep reinforcement learning in Julia (opens in a new tab)
202537 papers
- Proceedings of the IEEEA taxonomy and review of algorithms for modeling and predicting human driver behavior (opens in a new tab)
- iSpaRoAdaptive science operations in deep space missions using offline belief state planning (opens in a new tab)
- EMNLP (T1)ASTPrompter: Preference-aligned automated language model red-teaming to generate low-perplexity unsafe prompts (opens in a new tab)
- Journal of Biological RhythmsCircadian phase estimation from ambulatory wearables with particle filtering: Accuracy depends on initialization, recording duration, and light exposure (opens in a new tab)
- Journal of Open Source SoftwareCompressedBeliefMDPs.jl: A Julia package for solving large POMDPs with belief compression (opens in a new tab)
- ivDiffusion models for safety validation of autonomous driving systems (opens in a new tab)
- ERASDiffusion-based failure sampling for cyber-physical systems (opens in a new tab)
- coditDistributionally robust control with constraints on linear unidimensional projections (opens in a new tab)
- AAAI (T1)Enhanced importance sampling through latent space exploration in normalizing flows (opens in a new tab)
- CoRL (T1)Enter the mind palace: Reasoning and planning for long-term active embodied question answering (opens in a new tab)
- coditEntropy-regularized point-based value iteration (opens in a new tab)
- Journal of Open Source SoftwareExpFamilyPCA.jl: A Julia package for exponential family principal component analysis (opens in a new tab)
202431 papers
- Frontiers in PsychologyA month in review: longitudinal dynamics between daily PTSD symptom networks, affect, and drinking behaviors in female college students (opens in a new tab)
- ICAPSAddressing myopic constrained POMDP planning with recursive dual ascent (opens in a new tab)
- AI for Health Equity and FairnessAmbulance routing for optimizing stroke patient outcomes (opens in a new tab)
- IEEE Transactions on Field RoboticsAn addendum to NeBula: Toward extending team CoSTAR's solution to larger scale environments (opens in a new tab)
- Robotics and Autonomous SystemsApproximate sequential optimization for informative path planning (opens in a new tab)
- EnergiesArtificial intelligence-centric low-enthalpy geothermal field development planning (opens in a new tab)
- jaisBayesian safety validation for failure probability estimation of black-box systems (opens in a new tab)
- Reinforcement Learning JournalBetaZero: Belief-state planning for long-horizon POMDPs using learned approximations (opens in a new tab)
- NeurIPS (T1)BetterBench: Assessing AI benchmarks, uncovering issues, and establishing best practices (opens in a new tab)
- ICRA (T1)Constrained hierarchical Monte Carlo belief-state planning (opens in a new tab)
- IJCAI (T1)ConstrainedZero: Chance-constrained POMDP planning using learned probabilistic failure surrogates and adaptive safety constraints (opens in a new tab)
- RA-LDisentangled Neural Relational Inference for Interpretable Motion Prediction (opens in a new tab)
202324 papers
- IJRR (T1)Active preference-based Gaussian process regression for reward learning and optimization (opens in a new tab)
- NeurIPS (T1)AVOIDDS: Aircraft vision-based intruder detection dataset and simulator (opens in a new tab)
- IEEE Open Journal of Control SystemsBackward reachability analysis of neural feedback loops: Techniques for linear and nonlinear systems (opens in a new tab)
- aiaa_aviationBayesian safety validation for black-box systems (opens in a new tab)
- NeurIPS (T1)Conformal prediction for uncertainty-aware planning with diffusion dynamics model (opens in a new tab)
- FUSIONDeep normalizing flows for state estimation (opens in a new tab)
- dascEfficient determination of safety requirements for perception systems (opens in a new tab)
- ivExperience filter: Using past experiences on unseen tasks or environments (opens in a new tab)
- ICRA (T1)Fast and scalable signal inference for active robotic source seeking (opens in a new tab)
- Machine LearningGenerating probabilistic safety guarantees for neural network controllers (opens in a new tab)
- Machine LearningGlobal optimization of objective functions represented by ReLU networks (opens in a new tab)
- ICRA (T1)Model predictive optimized path integral strategies (opens in a new tab)
Where alumni went173 listed
Apply to StanfordFall 2027
Stanford Computer Science PhD
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