Here are some of my recent research projects. For potential students: Please contact me if you are interested in doing a PhD, Master thesis, Bachelor thesis, or any other kind of projects with me. 

• Learning to communicate in MARL: 
  • There is one ongoing PhD project conducted by C. Zhu where I am the co-promoter and daily supervisor.  See our recent survey paper on JAAMAS.
  • Thomas Wessels recently starts his PhD project under this topic, where I am the co-promoter and daily supervisor. This project will focus on learning the causal effects of communication in MARL. It is funded by the Hybrid Intelligence, and will involve collaboration with dr. Sara Magliacane. 
• Inductive biases in (MA)RL: 
  • There is an ongoing PhD project conducted by S. Han, where I am the co-promoter and daily supervisor.  The project focuses on the structured (MA)RL with sparse reward and neuro-symbolic knowledge. See our recent paper on ECAI. 
  • Check our recent workshop on ‘Inductive Biases in Reinforcement Learning’ in Reinforcement Learning Conference 2025. Stay tuned for the next edition.
• Use RL for natural language processing (NLP) tasks:
  • Use deep RL for dialogue systems policy optimization: A completed PhD project and ongoing collaborative project with dr. Yangyang Zhao.  See our recent papers on TACL and EMNLP. 
  • Specialize NLP models through Reinforcement Learning: This is an ongoing PhD project conducted by Leon Eshuijs at VU, where I co-supervise (with Prof. Antske Fokkens). It is funded by the Hybrid Intelligence project. See our recent CoNLL paper. 
• Use RL to support real-time human (healthcare) behaviors:
  • Following the success of our project 'Wie zorgt?', the Wie Zorgt 2 project (i.e. Intelligent Home Care for Dementia) has recently been funded by ClickNL. In this project, we aim to develop an intelligent RL-based conversational system to decrease the pressure on healthcare professionals and improve the quality of care for the elderly with dementia. See our recent paper on the topic.  
  • This research is a collaborative work with TNO under the HI project. We aim to develop a knowledge-based dialogue system for clinical support of patients with Type 2 diabetes and optimize the interaction using RL. See our recent viewpoint paper. 
• Understand public sentiment and communication from social media data during the COVID-19 outbreak period: This research started with NLP analysis in the PuReGoMe project and now we extend it to analyze the dynamics of communication networks (e.g. see our recent preprint paper on RL for information maximization). We have a great number of Dutch social media data and are open to collaborations. 

Graduated PhD projects:

• dr. Yangyang Zhao: Task-Oriented Dialogue Policies Based on the Deep Reinforcement Learning. Now lecturer in Changsha University of Science and Technology
• dr. Selene Baez Santamaria:  Knowledge-centered conversational agents with a drive to learn. Now postdoc at University of Zurich