Research & publications

Peer-reviewed publications, student abstracts, and manuscripts under review.

2027HRI[under review]

Sweepless Dreams: Envisioning Social Robots to Support the Unhoused

Sean Collins, N. C. Morris, M. Diamond, M. Wills, Jevon Lipsey, Tom Williams

Homelessness is a complex, prevalent, and socially entangled issue that affects a multitude of aspects within an individual's life. While numerous organizations work together to provide necessary services and support to unhoused people, many of the needs of unhoused people remain unmet. For roboticists seeking to work with this population, this raises two key research questions: what needs remain unmet in this community, and which of those needs might be addressable through robotic solutions? To answer these research questions, we conducted a five phase research process. First, we conducted interviews...

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BibTeX citation

Sweepless Dreams: Envisioning Social Robots to Support the Unhoused

@inproceedings{collins2027sweepless,
  title={Sweepless Dreams: Envisioning Social Robots to Support the Unhoused},
  author={Collins, S. and Morris, N. C. and Diamond, M. and Wills, M. and Lipsey, Jevon and Williams, Tom},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 2027 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '27)},
  year={2027},
  note={Under Review}
}
2025AAAI

An Evaluation of Approaches to Train Embeddings for Logical Inference

Y. White, Jevon Lipsey, J. Heflin

Knowledge bases traditionally require manual optimization to ensure reasonable performance when answering queries. We build on previous neurosymbolic approaches by improving the training of an embedding model for logical statements that maximizes similarity between unifying atoms and minimizes similarity of non-unifying atoms. In particular, we evaluate different approaches to training this model.

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BibTeX citation

An Evaluation of Approaches to Train Embeddings for Logical Inference

@inproceedings{white2025evaluation,
  title={An Evaluation of Approaches to Train Embeddings for Logical Inference},
  author={White, Y. and Lipsey, Jevon and Heflin, J.},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  volume={39},
  number={28},
  pages={29527--29528},
  year={2025},
  doi={10.1609/aaai.v39i28.35313}
}
2025PMLR

High Quality Embeddings for Horn Logic Reasoning

Y. Zhang, Y. White, D. Clark, J. Sanchez, Jevon Lipsey, A. Hirst, J. Heflin

Neural networks can be trained to rank the choices made by logical reasoners, resulting in more efficient searches for answers. A key step in this process is creating useful embeddings, i.e., numeric representations of logical statements. This paper introduces and evaluates several approaches to creating embeddings that result in better downstream results. We train embeddings using triplet loss, which requires examples consisting of an anchor, a positive example, and a negative example. We introduce three ideas: generating anchors that are more likely to have repeated terms, generating positive and negative...

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BibTeX citation

High Quality Embeddings for Horn Logic Reasoning

@inproceedings{zhang2025highquality,
  title={High Quality Embeddings for Horn Logic Reasoning},
  author={Zhang, Y. and White, Y. and Clark, D. and Sanchez, J. and Lipsey, Jevon and Hirst, A. and Heflin, J.},
  booktitle={Proceedings of The 19th International Conference on Neurosymbolic Learning and Reasoning},
  series={Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  volume={284},
  pages={116--129},
  year={2025},
  publisher={PMLR},
  url={https://proceedings.mlr.press/v284/zhang25a.html}
}