Events for May 06, 2025
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PhD Dissertation Defense - Sasha Volokh
Tue, May 06, 2025 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Dissertation Title: Using Program Analysis to Determine Actions for Video Game Testing
Date/Time: Tuesday, May 6th, 10:00am-12:00pm
Location: Ginsburg Hall (GCS) - 402C - 4th Floor
Committee: William G.J. Halfond (chair), Nenad Medvidovic, Chao Wang, Mukund Raghothaman, Andrew Nealen
Abstract: In the competitive video game market, the quality of games released to consumers is crucial to their success. However, modern games often release with significant bugs, causing consumer dissatisfaction and a loss of business and reputation for the companies involved. Testing is a key mechanism by which such issues can be caught and addressed during the development process. Many testing approaches require a model of the game rules, which is not available by default for games built with typical game development practices. This poses a barrier to the adoption of more advanced testing techniques, requiring either an expert to model the game or a reliance upon imprecise generic models. At a minimum, knowledge of the possible player actions is crucial for thorough manual and automated testing, but determining a precise and complete model of the game actions is challenging for games built with typical game development practices. In my dissertation, I address these challenges through novel program analysis techniques capable of determining precise and complete models of the game actions. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques, I adapted them to specify the action spaces of automated game testing agents, as well as to generate instructions for assisting human testers. The results show that the action models determined via program analysis enable effective automated testing agent performance and are also capable of improving the exploratory testing performance of human testers.Location: Ginsburg Hall (GCS) - 402C
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Sasha Volokh
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
PhD Dissertation Defense - Jesse Zhang
Tue, May 06, 2025 @ 05:00 PM - 06:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Title: Scaling Robot Adaptation with Large Model Guidance
Date: Tuesday, May 6, 2025
Time: 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm Location: RTH (Ronald Tutor Hall), room 306
Defense Committee Members: Erdem Biyik (Chair), Jesse Thomason, Joseph J. Lim, Feifei Qian, Gaurav Sukhatme
Abstract: General-purpose robots deployed in the real world must respond to dynamic environments and continuously learn new tasks. However, existing methods struggle to support such adaptation at scale—that is, without substantial human supervision. In this talk, I present an approach to scalable robot adaptation by leveraging the general knowledge encoded in Large Pre-trained Models (LPTMs). I show how integrating LPTMs with robot learning frameworks can: (1) enhance robot pre-training to better prepare for unfamiliar tasks and settings, (2) adapt to new tasks and environments with human feedback, and (3) ultimately enable autonomous adaptation with minimal human input. Together, these contributions outline a path toward generalizable algorithms that empower robots to learn novel tasks in real-world, unstructured environments.Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 306
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ellecia Williams
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
