Nethmi Jayasinghe

PhD Candidate · Electrical & Computer Engineering · University of Illinois Chicago

Reinforcement Learning · Adaptive Decision-Making · Robust AI · Robotics

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About

I am a PhD candidate in Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago, specializing in reinforcement learning, adaptive decision-making, and robust AI systems. My research focuses on adaptive agents that make real-time decisions under distribution shifts while maintaining stable behavior - recovering from faults and unexpected dynamics without retraining, with applications across robotic platforms. Recent work was accepted to ICML 2026.

I build and evaluate these systems in PyTorch with rigorous experimentation pipelines, and I am broadly interested in representation learning, multi-modal reasoning, and sequential decision-making for real-world interactive systems. I also draw on brain-inspired principles to make learning faster, more stable, and more efficient.

Research Themes

🤖

Reinforcement Learning & Adaptive Agents

Online, inference-time adaptation that lets agents recover from faults and distribution shifts without retraining.

🦿

Robotics & Embodied Learning

Real-time control across legged, wheeled, and humanoid robots in simulation and the real world (MuJoCo, Go1, Cassie, H1, Scout).

🧠

Brain-Inspired & Robust Learning

Cerebellar mechanisms - eligibility traces, microzones, dual-timescale plasticity - for stable, fast, efficient learning.

First-Author Publications

Experience

Research & Development Engineer · Synopsys Inc.

Jun 2022 – Jul 2023

Sri Lanka

  • Designed and deployed a scalable SQL data pipeline for large-scale test-case management, reducing retrieval latency and improving throughput.
  • Built an interactive Python + SQL analytics dashboard for real-time monitoring of validation metrics.
  • Developed automated failure-detection and root-cause analysis tools in Python, accelerating debugging workflows.

Education

Ph.D., Electrical & Computer Engineering

2023 – Present

University of Illinois Chicago · Expected 2028 · GPA 3.9/4.0

B.Sc. (Hons), Electrical Engineering

2017 – 2022

University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka · GPA 3.81/4.2

Skills

Machine Learning & AI

Reinforcement Learning Adaptive Decision-Making Multi-Agent Systems Hierarchical RL Representation Learning Transformers Robust Learning Model Evaluation

Deep Learning & Experimentation

PyTorch TensorFlow scikit-learn Large-scale Training Ablation Studies Cross-validation Data Pipelines

Programming & Tools

Python SQL MATLAB Linux Git MuJoCo Gymnasium Webots Brian2