Stefanos Nikolaidis
Fluor Early Career Chair in Engineering and Associate Professor of Computer Science
Leads the ICAROS lab on human-robot collaboration and quality-diversity algorithms for scenario generation.
Stefanos Nikolaidis's lab at USC works on human-robot interaction & assistive robots and human-AI collaboration & trust. 41 papers since 2023, 2 at top venues, mostly Autonomous Robots and CoRL. 2 PhD students and 1 master's student. 50 alumni, most often to Amazon and Waymo. Applications close .
At a glance
- papers, 2023–2026
- 11/ year
- at T1 venues
- 5%
- PhD students
- 2
- MS students
- 1
- alumni listed
- 50
Papers by yearfrom the lab homepage, 2023–2026
- 6 papers2026 · T1 0 · collecting
- 9 papers2025 · T1 0
- 13 papers2024 · T1 0
- 13 papers2023 · T1 2
T1 venuesOtherVenues: Autonomous Robots, CoRL, Science Robotics
Research focuspaper titles that use each topic's words
- Human-robot interaction & assistive robots18 papers
- Human-AI collaboration & trust9 papers
- human-robot4 papers
- human-robot collaboration1 paper
- collaboration1 paper
Paper list
From the lab homepage.
20266 papers
- Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), (poster)Algorithmic prompt generation for diverse human-like teaming and communication with large language models (opens in a new tab)
- International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)Autoqd: Automatic discovery of diverse behaviors with quality-diversity optimization (opens in a new tab)
- International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), , oral presentationDiscount model search for quality diversity optimization in high-dimensional measure spaces (opens in a new tab)
- International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS)Qd-mapper: A quality diversity framework to automatically evaluate multi-agent path finding algorithms in diverse maps (opens in a new tab)
- International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)Soft quality-diversity optimization (opens in a new tab)
- International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS)Theory of mind guided strategy adaptation for zero-shot coordination (opens in a new tab)
20259 papers
- Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)Adaptively Coordinating with Novel Partners via Learned Latent Strategies (opens in a new tab)
- ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)Contrastive learning from exploratory actions: Leveraging natural interactions for preference elicitation (opens in a new tab)
- International Journal of Social Robotics (IJSR), .Designing robot identity: The role of voice, clothing, and task on robot gender perception (opens in a new tab)
- IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)Integrating field of view in human-aware collaborative planning (opens in a new tab)
- Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL)ManipBench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Low-Level Robot Manipulation (opens in a new tab)
- ICORRModeling Personalized Difficulty of Rehabilitation Exercises Using Causal Trees (opens in a new tab)
- ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)Moe-hair: Toward soft and compliant contact-rich hair manipulation and care (opens in a new tab)
- Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), JulyMulti-objective covariance matrix adaptation map-annealing (opens in a new tab)
- IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and EngineeringProactive Contingency-Aware Task Allocation and Scheduling in Multi-Robot Multi-Human Cells via Hindsight Optimization (opens in a new tab)
202413 papers
- IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)BayRnTune: Adaptive Bayesian Domain Randomization via Strategic Fine-tuning (opens in a new tab)
- ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization (TELO)Covariance matrix adaptation map-annealing: Theory and experiments (opens in a new tab)
- Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), JulyDensity descent for diversity optimization (opens in a new tab)
- Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)Diva: Training adaptive agents in open-ended simulators via semi-supervised environment design
- International Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR)Gpt-fabric: Smoothing and folding fabric by leveraging pre-trained foundation models (opens in a new tab)
- The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), AugustGuidance graph optimization for lifelong multi-agent path finding (opens in a new tab)
- International Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR)Improving user experience in preference-based optimization of reward functions for assistive robots (opens in a new tab)
- International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)Multi-robot task allocation under uncertainty via hindsight optimization (opens in a new tab)
- IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE)Preference elicitation and incorporation for human-robot task scheduling (opens in a new tab)
- International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)Proximal policy gradient arborescence for quality diversity reinforcement learning (opens in a new tab)
- AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)Quality-diversity generative sampling for learning with synthetic data (opens in a new tab)
- Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)Selecting source tasks for transfer learning of human preferences (opens in a new tab)
202313 papers
- Science Robotics (T1)A Metric for Characterizing the Arm Nonuse Workspace in Poststroke Individuals Using a Robot Arm (opens in a new tab)
- Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)Arbitrarily Scalable Environment Generators via Neural Cellular Automata (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), MayContingency-aware task assignment and scheduling for human-robot teams (opens in a new tab)
- Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), JulyCovariance matrix adaptation map-annealing (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), MayInverse reinforcement learning framework for transferring task sequencing policies from humans to robots in manufacturing applications (opens in a new tab)
- The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), AugustMulti-robot coordination and layout design for automated warehousing (opens in a new tab)
- Autonomous RobotsMulti-robot geometric task-and-motion planning for collaborative manipulation tasks (opens in a new tab)
- Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), JulyPato: Policy assisted teleoperation for scalable robot data collection (opens in a new tab)
- Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), Julypyribs: A Bare-Bones Python Library for Quality Diversity Optimization (opens in a new tab)
- CoRL (T1)Surrogate Assisted Generation of Human-Robot Interaction Scenarios (opens in a new tab)
- International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER), NovemberThe RoSiD Tool: Empowering Users to Design Multimodal Signals for Human-robot Collaboration (opens in a new tab)
- Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)Training Diverse High-Dimensional Controllers by Scaling Covariance Matrix Adaptation MAP-Annealing (opens in a new tab)
Where alumni went50 listed, 42% to industry
Industry 11Academia 15
Most often to
- Amazon
- Waymo
- Adobe
Also to
- Columbia University
- MIT
- Stanford University
Apply to USCFall 2027
Computer Science PhD (Viterbi)
- Round
- Single round (Dec 15)
- Opens
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- GRE
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- English
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- Fee
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Confirmed on the program page.
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