Overview
PhD candidate at McGill University and Mila. My research focuses on reliable policy learning for robotic systems, drawing from robotics simulation and control, reinforcement and imitation learning, and generative policy modeling to develop intelligent systems that operate safely and reliably in the physical world.
Education
McGill University & Mila
Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering, focused on robot learning — GPA: 4/4
Sharif University of Technology
B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, focused on digital systems — GPA: 3.7/4
Minor in Computer Science, focused on machine learning — GPA: 3.8/4
Minor in Computer Science, focused on machine learning — GPA: 3.8/4
Experience
Researcher — McGill University & Mila
Developing methods that combine reinforcement and imitation learning with control-theoretic certificates to design policies with formal safety and stability guarantees.
Visiting Fellow — EPFL
Addressed out-of-sample error accumulation in imitation learning using neural ODEs combined with contraction theory for robust recovery.
MITACS Research Intern — Sycodal Electronics Inc.
Safe and robust reinforcement learning for industrial manipulation. Designed simulation environments in Isaac Sim with domain randomization to train policies that transfer to real hardware.
Researcher — Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems
Built a probabilistic simulation engine to model epidemic dynamics and assess control policies. Trained a tri-finger manipulator for object manipulation from vision using model-free RL.
Software Developer — Fanap Co.
Developed secure payment applications in C/C++ on Linux-ARM embedded systems, deployed to around half a million customers.
Student Researcher — Artificial Creatures Lab
Detection of diseased plants in vertical farming using ResNet-based vision architectures with a fuzzy control system for remediation.
Selected Publications
ICLR 2026
Contractive Diffusion Policies: Robust Action Diffusion via Contractive Score-Based Sampling
Amin Abyaneh, Charlotte Morissette, Mohamad Danesh, Anas Houssaini, David Meger, Gregory Dudek, Hsiu-Chin Lin
ICLR 2025
Contractive Dynamical Imitation Policies for Efficient Out-of-Sample Recovery
Amin Abyaneh*, Mahrokh Boroujeni*, Hsiu-Chin Lin, Giancarlo Ferrari-Trecate
ICRA 2024
Globally Stable Neural Imitation Policies
Amin Abyaneh, Mariana Sosa Guzmán, Hsiu-Chin Lin
CoRL 2023
Learning Lyapunov-Stable Polynomial Dynamical Systems Through Imitation
Amin Abyaneh, Hsiu-Chin Lin
Current Projects
Learning to Recover with Pretrained World Models
Investigating the applications of pretrained Dreamer-style world models, with massive randomized training in simulation, in learning robust recovery behavior for robot learning.
Multi-Modal Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models
Grounding pretrained tactile representations in VLA models for enhanced performance in dexterous manipulation.
Technical Skills
Languages
Python, C/C++, Java; familiar with R, Julia, Bash
ML & AI
Reinforcement & Imitation Learning, Representation Learning, Vision Transformers, LLMs, Diffusion Models, Energy-Based Models, Neural ODEs & SDEs, Statistical Learning
Robotics & Control
Robot Learning, Model-based Control, Kinematics & Dynamics, System Identification, Motion Planning, Dexterous Manipulation, Domain Randomization, Distributed Systems
Robots & Sim
ROS, PyBullet, Gazebo, Rviz, Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, Genesis Sim · Kinova (Link6, Jaco2, Gen3), Franka Panda, ANYmal C, DIGIT Tactile Sensor
Recent Awards
Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ)
4-year fellowship awarded to distinguished PhD candidates in Quebec.
NCCR Automation Fellowship
Awarded by the Swiss National Centers of Competence in Research to selected international researchers.
MITACS Accelerate Fellowship
Awarded by MITACS Canada to conduct high-caliber research with an industrial partner.
Thomas and Penelope Deirdre Szirtes Fellowship in Engineering (SFE)
Awarded by the Faculty of Engineering on the basis of academic merit to graduate students.
Teaching Assistant
McGill University: Applied Robotics (Head TA), Intelligent Robotics (Head TA), Linear Systems, Foundation Models in Robotics (Head TA)
Conference Reviewer
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
2024, 2025
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL)
2024
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
2024
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
2023, 2024, 2025