Dhruv Sreenivas

I am a PhD student at Mila, Université de Montréal, where I am advised by Pablo Samuel Castro. I completed my BS and MS at Cornell University, where I was advised by Wen Sun.

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Research

I'm primarily interested in (deep) reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and deep generative models.

Publications
td aug photo Imagining Goals with Geometric Horizon Models for Policy Generalization
Daniel Lawson, Dhruv Sreenivas, Adriana Hugessen, Khimya Khetarpal, Glen Berseth
RL Beyond Rewards Workshop, RLC 2026
arXiv

We improve generalization in goal-conditioned behavior cloning policies via sampling goals from a geometric horizon model, allowing for experience across trajectories to be stitched together to provide useful goals for conditioning.

optimistic critics Optimistic Critics can Empower Small Actors
Olya Mastikhina*, Dhruv Sreenivas*, Pablo Samuel Castro
RLC 2025
arXiv

We find that making the critic "optimistic" in actor-critic learning (e.g. by doing Q value reduction differently) significantly improves downstream performance of much smaller actors across a variety of control domains.

ailboost Adversarial Imitation Learning via Boosting
Jonathan Chang, Dhruv Sreenivas*, Yingbing Huang*, Kianté Brantley, Wen Sun
ICLR 2024
arXiv

By viewing off-policy adversarial imitation learning through the framework of gradient boosting, we develop a novel, theoretically principled algorithm that outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

dmse Deep Multi-Modal Structural Equations For Causal Effect Estimation with Unstructured Proxies
Shachi Deshpande, Kaiwen Wang, Dhruv Sreenivas, Zheng Li, Volodymyr Kuleshov
NeurIPS 2022
arXiv

We leverage advances in deep learning to propose a universal multimodal deconfounder for causal inference, with applications in genome-wide association studies (GWAS).

milo Mitigating Covariate Shift in Imitation Learning via Offline Data Without Great Coverage
Jonathan D. Chang*, Masatoshi Uehara*, Dhruv Sreenivas, Rahul Kidambi, Wen Sun
NeurIPS 2021
code / arXiv

We leverage offline data with partial coverage over the expert state distribution to mitigate the covariate shift problem in imitation learning.

     * indicates equal contribution
Teaching
  • Spring 2023: Graduate TA for CS 6789: Foundations of Reinforcement Learning (PhD)
  • Fall 2022: Graduate TA for CS 6756: Learning for Robot Decision Making (PhD)
  • Spring 2022: Graduate TA for CS 4789: Introduction to Reinforcement Learning
  • Fall 2021: Graduate TA for CS 2110: OOP & Data Structures
Service
  • Reviewer: NeurIPS (2023, 2025), ICLR (2024, 2025), RLC (2025)

Website template is from Jon Barron's website.