Mark Edmonds

Staff AI/ML Applied Scientist at General Motors · PhD, Computer Science, UCLA

I'm a Staff AI/ML Applied Scientist at General Motors, where I build end-to-end driving models trained with imitation and self-play reinforcement learning. I joined GM through its acquisition of Cruise, where I contributed to DriveGPT, an autoregressive behavior model that showed scaling laws for autonomous driving (ICML 2025), and distilled large models for deployment.

My research focuses on learning-based decision-making for embodied agents: models that improve with scale, generalize to new situations, and can explain their behavior. I received my PhD in Computer Science from UCLA under Dr. Song-Chun Zhu, studying causal learning, imitation learning, and explainable AI, with work published in Science Robotics, ICML, CVPR, and AAAI. I'm most motivated by applications with direct societal benefit, starting with safer roads.

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Mark Edmonds
(my friends call me marcus)

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Selected publications

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ICML

DriveGPT: Scaling Autoregressive Behavior Models for Driving

X. Huang, E. M. Wolff, P. Vernaza, T. Phan-Minh, H. Chen, D. S. Hayden, M. Edmonds, B. Pierce, X. Chen, P. E. Jacob, X. Chen, C. Tairbekov, P. Agarwal, T. Gao, Y. Chai, and S. S. Srinivasa

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025

PDFarXiv
BibTeX
@inproceedings{huang2025drivegpt,
  title = {DriveGPT: Scaling Autoregressive Behavior Models for Driving},
  author = {Huang, X. and Wolff, E. M. and Vernaza, P. and Phan-Minh, T. and Chen, H. and Hayden, D. S. and Edmonds, M. and Pierce, B. and Chen, X. and Jacob, P. E. and Chen, X. and Tairbekov, C. and Agarwal, P. and Gao, T. and Chai, Y. and Srinivasa, S. S.},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
  year = {2025}
}
Sci. Robot.

In situ bidirectional human-robot value alignment

L. Yuan*, X. Gao*, Z. Zheng*, M. Edmonds, Y. N. Wu, F. Rossano, H. Lu, Y. Zhu, and S.-C. Zhu

Science Robotics, 2022

SupplementArticleProject pageVideo
BibTeX
@article{yuan2022situ,
  title = {In situ bidirectional human-robot value alignment},
  author = {Yuan, L. and Gao, X. and Zheng, Z. and Edmonds, M. and Wu, Y. N. and Rossano, F. and Lu, H. and Zhu, Y. and Zhu, S.-C.},
  journal = {Science Robotics},
  volume = {7},
  number = {68},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.1126/scirobotics.abm4183}
}
Engineering

Dark, Beyond Deep: A Paradigm Shift to Cognitive AI with Humanlike Common Sense

Y. Zhu, T. Gao, L. Fan, S. Huang, M. Edmonds, H. Liu, F. Gao, C. Zhang, S. Qi, Y. N. Wu, J. B. Tenenbaum, and S.-C. Zhu

Engineering, 2020

PDFProject page
BibTeX
@article{zhu2020dark,
  title = {Dark, Beyond Deep: A Paradigm Shift to Cognitive AI with Humanlike Common Sense},
  author = {Zhu, Y. and Gao, T. and Fan, L. and Huang, S. and Edmonds, M. and Liu, H. and Gao, F. and Zhang, C. and Qi, S. and Wu, Y. N. and Tenenbaum, J. B. and Zhu, S.-C.},
  journal = {Engineering},
  year = {2020}
}
AAAI

Theory-based Causal Transfer: Integrating Instance-level Induction and Abstract-level Structure Learning

M. Edmonds, X. Ma, S. Qi, Y. Zhu, H. Lu, and S.-C. Zhu

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2020Oral

PDFSupplementProject pageCode
BibTeX
@inproceedings{edmonds2020theory,
  title = {Theory-based Causal Transfer: Integrating Instance-level Induction and Abstract-level Structure Learning},
  author = {Edmonds, M. and Ma, X. and Qi, S. and Zhu, Y. and Lu, H. and Zhu, S.-C.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)},
  year = {2020}
}
Sci. Robot.

A tale of two explanations: Enhancing human trust by explaining robot behavior

M. Edmonds*, F. Gao*, H. Liu*, X. Xie*, S. Qi, B. Rothrock, Y. Zhu, Y. N. Wu, H. Lu, and S.-C. Zhu

Science Robotics, 2019

SupplementArticleProject pageVideo
BibTeX
@article{edmonds2019tale,
  title = {A tale of two explanations: Enhancing human trust by explaining robot behavior},
  author = {Edmonds, M. and Gao, F. and Liu, H. and Xie, X. and Qi, S. and Rothrock, B. and Zhu, Y. and Wu, Y. N. and Lu, H. and Zhu, S.-C.},
  journal = {Science Robotics},
  volume = {4},
  number = {37},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.1126/scirobotics.aay4663}
}