I am a third year PhD student in the NLP CDT at the University of Edinburgh. My supervisors are Professor Kartic Subr and Professor Mirella Lapata. I work with the post-doc Kevin Denamganai with funding from ELAI (The Edinburgh Laboratory for Integrated Artificial Intelligence).

Research

I work on improving language models’ understanding of physical processes by enhancing their planning and reasoning capabilities in 3D physics environments. My research interests include language models, physics simulation, explainable AI, intuitive physics, causal reasoning, and evolutionary processes.

Latest Work

CueTip: An Interactive and Explainable Physics-aware Pool Assistant

Project page

Venue: SIGGRAPH 2025

CueTip integrates a language model directly into a pool simulation. Our method allows the language model to act as a facilitator between a user and the system, allowing for the user to ask questions and receive explanations about the game and suggested shots. We train a neural surrogate of traditional pool agents in order to optimize the shot parameters so that the events given by the shot match the events requested by the language model. The events given by the simulator are in natural language, allowing the LM to generate explanations of the physics system that are grounded in real simulation events.

xInv: Explainable Optimization of Inverse Problems

xInv aims to generate grounded explanations of inverse problems. We focus on two example problems: optimization of a differentiable physics simulation, and the training of a small language model. Our method utilises natural language descriptions of Events (the output of the system during rollouts), Rewards (the optimization objective), and Updates (the changes to the parameters of the system during an optimization step). These are then used to generate explanations of the optimization process.

Highlighted Publications

Talks

CueTip: An Interactive and Explainable Physics-aware Pool Assistant

August 13, 2025, SIGGRAPH 2025 (Upcoming)

Language Model Reasoning aided by Physical Simulators

February 23, 2024, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland