Renos Zabounidis

I’m a PhD student in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Katia Sycara in the Advanced Agent Robotics Technology Lab. My research focuses on integrating foundation models, reinforcement learning, and neurosymbolic approaches to build more capable and interpretable autonomous agents.

I’m particularly interested in how LLMs can be combined with RL to enable agents that can plan, reason, and learn efficiently in complex, long-horizon tasks. My recent work, SCALAR, received an Honorable Mention for Best Paper at NeurIPS 2025 (1 of 2 out of 112 accepted papers).

Before CMU, I graduated Summa Cum Laude from UMass Amherst with a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics, where I received the Graduating Senior Award (top 8 of 426 graduates) and was a Commonwealth Honors College Scholar with Greatest Distinction.

Research Interests: Reinforcement Learning (Hierarchical, Multi-Agent, LLM Reasoning), Interpretable AI (Concept Bottleneck Models), and Foundation Models for Embodied Agents.