Alexandra Burushkina

Ph.D. Candidate
Advised by Prof. Philip S. Thomas ☺


I am a computer science Ph.D. student in the Autonomous Learning Laboratory (ALL) and the Computational Minds and Agent Well-Being Laboratory (CMAW) at the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Email: 


Research

My research is in reinforcement learning (RL). I am mainly interested in foundational RL (especially policy gradient methods), high-confidence off-policy evaluation, and confidence intervals (methods for obtaining and tightening them for use in RL algorithms and evaluation).


Publications

A. Burushkina and P. S. Thomas. Confidence Intervals for the Interquartile Mean. Reinforcement Learning Journal. To appear.

G. X. Yau, A. Burushkina, F. Ferreira da Silva, S. Maji, P. S. Thomas, and G. Vardoyan. Reinforcement Learning for Quantum Network Control with Application-Driven Objectives. arXiv:2509.10634, 2025. [pdf], [arXiv].