Jake is a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and is advised by Lillian Ratliff, and collarborates closely with CTRL. His research lies at the intersection of control theory, machine learning, optimization, uncertainty quantification, and game theory, with a specific focus on decision-making in multi-agent systems. He is particularly interested in developing theoretical frameworks and principled algorithms that enable autonomous agents to interact safely and efficiently in uncertain, real-world environments.
Jake is a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2025) and an Amazon Fellow (2024-25).
Publications
Safe Probabilistic Planning for Human-Robot Interaction using Conformal Risk Control
Gonzales, J.,
Mizuta, K.,
Leung, K.*,
and Ratliff, L.*
In IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots & Systems,
2025
(accepted)
This paper presents a novel probabilistic safe control framework for human-robot interaction that combines control barrier functions (CBFs) with conformal risk control (CRC) to provide formal safety guarantees while considering complex human behavior. Our approach uses CRC to quantify and control the prediction errors in CBF safety values and establishes formal guarantees on the probability of constraint satisfaction during interaction. We further introduce an online update scheme that dynamically adjusts the safety margins produced by CRC based on the current interaction context. Through experiments in challenging human-robot navigation scenarios, we demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces collision rates and safety violations compared to baseline methods while maintaining high success rates in goal-reaching tasks and efficient control.
@inproceedings{GonzalesMizutaEtAl2025,author={Gonzales, J. and Mizuta, K. and Leung, K.* and Ratliff, L.*},booktitle={{IEEE/RSJ Int.\ Conf.\ on Intelligent Robots \& Systems}},title={{Safe Probabilistic Planning for Human-Robot Interaction using Conformal Risk Control}},year={2025},category={interaction},img={GonzalesMizutaEtAl2025.png},note={{accepted}},html={https://jakeagonzales.github.io/crc-cbf-website/},keywords={accepted},owner={karenl7}}
