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DonnaVakalis/README.md

Hi, I'm Donna

Postdoctoral Fellow at Mila – Quebec AI Institute, co-supervised by Yoshua Bengio and David Rolnick.

During my post-doc I developed AI systems to reduce carbon emissions from buildings—which account for ~37% of global CO₂ emissions. My research focuses on graph-structured world models and reinforcement learning, with an emphasis on systems that generalize (for example, across different building types, network layouts, and environments). Previously I studied causal inference and Bayesian methods for decision-making.


Current Research

My work sits at the intersection of model-based RL, graph neural networks, and the physical world. I'm particularly interested in how we can learn generalizable physics from simulations.

  • World Models and Intervention Operators — What does it mean for a latent world model to be good for control? Planning-time diagnostics for latent world models, and when value-equivalence is (and isn't) enough.

    • Operator-on-F Complements Value-Equivalence: A Planning-Time Diagnostic for Latent World Models — accepted, RLC 2026 Workshop on Model-Based RL in the Era of Generative World Models
    • Beyond Value Equivalence: Dimensionality in World Models — sole-authored preprint (arXiv coming soon)
  • Graph Dreamer — A world model architecture for variable-size, heterogeneous graph environments that learns the structural relationships governing thermal dynamics, enabling zero-shot transfer across buildings with different topologies. (code temporarily private)

    • Graph Dreamer: Temporal Graph World Models for Sample-Efficient and Generalisable RL — WiML @ NeurIPS 2025 [OpenReview]
    • HVAC-GRACE: Transferable Building Control via Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network Policies — ICML 2025 CO-BUILD Workshop (94–97% transfer across building configurations)
    • Graphs for Scalable Building Decarbonisation: A Transferable Approach to HVAC Control — NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Climate Change AI
  • HOT Dataset — ~150,000 simulated controllable buildings and a gym for transfer-learning research.

    • A HOT Dataset: 150,000 Buildings for HVAC Operations Transfer Research — BuildSys 2025 [HuggingFace]
  • In-Context & Bayesian RL — Bayesian fusion of context and value priors for in-context RL from suboptimal data.

    • Bayesian Decision-Time Inference for In-Context Reinforcement Learning from Suboptimal Data — accepted, RLC 2026 Workshop on Continual Reinforcement Learning [arXiv]
  • Relational Models for MBRL — Empirical-mechanistic research on when and whether relational structure in world models helps. (in progress; code temporarily private)

📚 Full publication list on Google Scholar


Community

Co-organizing the NeurIPS 2026 Smart Buildings Challenge: Learning Foundation Models for Real-World Optimization at Scale. Previously co-organized CoBuild @ ICML and UrbanAI @ NeurIPS (2023, 2024).


Technical Focus

Graph Neural Networks  •  Model-Based RL  •  EnergyPlus  •  PyTorch Geometric  •  Spatiotemporal Modeling

Most of my recent code lives in private repositories (pre-publication research), but I'm working on releasing components as papers are published.


Beyond Research

Two-time Olympian in modern pentathlon (London 2012, Rio 2016). Currently based in Nice, France. Board member at Racing to Zero, a nonprofit focused on sustainability in sport.


📫 Connect

Website LinkedIn Google Scholar ORCID

Pinned Loading

  1. stochastic-control stochastic-control Public

    Forked from adityam/stochastic-control

    Course notes for ECSE 506: Stochastic Control and Decision Theory

    Jupyter Notebook 1

  2. AC3ross AC3ross Public

    AC-3 powered crossword construction, with AI-assisted theming and clueing.

    Python