Christopher Watson

My name is Chris Watson and I’m a fifth-year Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania. I work at the intersection of robot learning and formal methods, and am very fortunate to be advised by Rajeev Alur and Dinesh Jayaraman. I am also very fortunate to have worked with Corina Păsăreanu at the NASA Ames Research center as a research intern during summer 2024. Before starting my Ph.D., I completed my undergraduate studies in Computer Science at Cornell University.

It’s a really exciting time to be working with robots! Recent breakthroughs in large AI models have brought us closer than ever to creating general-purpose robots that adapt quickly to new tasks and environments. However, approaches that focus entirely on scaling data lack safety guarantees and may not fully exploit task structure to make the most of (often scarce) robot training data. My research draws from formal methods and symbolic reasoning to improve the reliability and efficiency of robot learning. Recently, I’ve been focusing on ways to combine human-provided and autonomously-discovered task structure to scaffold effective learning.

Publications and Preprints

• Let it Cook: Learning to Wait in Sequential Decision Making. Christopher Watson, Arjun Krishna, Dinesh Jayaraman, Rajeev Alur. In preparation.

• Illustrated Landmark Graphs for Long-horizon Policy Learning. Christopher Watson, Arjun Krishna, Rajeev Alur, Dinesh Jayaraman. Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) 2025.

• Scenario-based Compositional Verification of Autonomous Systems with Neural Perception. Christopher Watson, Rajeev Alur, Divya Gopinath, Ravi Mangal, Corina Păsăreanu. International Symposium on AI Verification (SAIV) 2025.

• The Transformer Cookbook. Andy Yang, Christopher Watson, Anton Xue, Satwik Bhattamishra, Jose Llarena, William Merrill, Emile Dos Santos Ferreira, Anej Svete, and David Chiang. In submission.

• Formal Verification Techniques for Vision-Based Autonomous Systems – A Survey. Sayan Mitra, Corina Păsăreanu, Pavithra Prabhakar, Sanjit A. Seshia, Ravi Mangal, Yangge Li, Christopher Watson, Divya Gopinath, Huafeng Yu. Principles of Verification: Cycling the Probabilistic Landscape - Essays Dedicated to Joost-Pieter Katoen on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday, 2024.

• Stream Types. Joseph W. Cutler, Christopher Watson, Emeka Nkurumeh, Phillip Hilliard, Harrison Goldstein, Caleb Stanford, Benjamin C. Pierce. Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) 2024.

• A Robust Theory of Series-Parallel Graphs. Rajeev Alur, Caleb Stanford, Christopher Watson. Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) 2023.

Teaching Assistantships

• CIS 6730: Computer-Aided Verification. University of Pennsylvania. Instructor: Rajeev Alur. Spring 2023

• CIS 5110: Theory of Computation. University of Pennsylvania. Instructor: Anindya De. Fall 2022

• CS 4810: Introduction to Theory of Computing. Cornell University. Instructor: John Hopcroft. Fall 2019

Activities

I’ve had the pleasure of being a student volunteer at POPL 2022 and CCC 2022, and of being a student at SSFT 2022 and OPLSS 2022.