Burcu Kılıç

I am a master's student in Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University, where I work with Assoc. Prof. Emre Ugur at ROMER. My research interests lie at the intersection of robot learning, reinforcement learning, and learned abstractions for planning.

I received my B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Bogazici University, where I was a research assistant in the Cognitive Learning and Robotics (CoLoRs) Lab. I also studied at KTH Royal Institute of Technology as an exchange student and worked as a visiting researcher at the University of Innsbruck with Justus Piater.

I am interested in how robots can acquire useful skills and compact representations from interaction data, then use those representations for decision-making and planning.

Burcu Kılıç

News

My paper, Effect-Driven Skill Abstractions for Offline Reinforcement Learning, has been accepted as a poster at NeurIPS 2026. I will present it in Sydney, Australia.

Publications

See also Google Scholar.

Effect-Driven Skill Abstractions for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Burcu Kılıç, David Drexel, Emre Ugur, Justus Piater

NeurIPS 2026NeurIPS 2026 · Poster

BibTeX
@inproceedings{kilic2026effect,
  title     = {Effect-Driven Skill Abstractions for Offline Reinforcement Learning},
  author    = {Kilic, Burcu and Drexel, David and Ugur, Emre and Piater, Justus},
  booktitle = {Fortieth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=vLeZitFeKS}
}

Bilevel Planning with Learned Symbolic Abstractions from Interaction Data

Fatih Dogangün, Burcu Kılıç, Serdar Bahar, Emre Ugur

RA-L 2026IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters · 2026

BibTeX
@article{dogangun2026bilevel,
  abbr    = {RA-L},
  title   = {Bilevel Planning with Learned Symbolic Abstractions from Interaction Data},
  author  = {Dogangün, Fatih and Kılıç, Burcu and Bahar, Serdar and Ugur, Emre},
  journal = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
  volume  = {11},
  number  = {11},
  pages   = {12599--12606},
  year    = {2026},
  month   = {nov},
  doi     = {10.1109/LRA.2026.3732904},
  html    = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11685328},
  arxiv   = {2603.08599},
  code    = {https://github.com/fatihdogangun/bilevel-planning},
  selected = {true}
}

Joint Discovery of Object and Action Symbols through Effect Prediction for Robotic Manipulation Planning

Burcu Kılıç, Berke Kartal, Fatih Dogangün, Erhan Oztop, Emre Ugur

arXiv 2026Preprint · 2026

BibTeX
@article{kilic2026joint,
  abbr    = {arXiv},
  title   = {Joint Discovery of Object and Action Symbols through Effect Prediction for Robotic Manipulation Planning},
  author  = {Kılıç, Burcu and Kartal, Berke and Dogangün, Fatih and Oztop, Erhan and Ugur, Emre},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.00031},
  year    = {2026},
  arxiv   = {2607.00031}
}

Predictability-Based Curiosity-Guided Action Symbol Discovery

Burcu Kılıç, Alper Ahmetoglu, Emre Ugur

ICDL 2025IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning · 2025

BibTeX
@inproceedings{kilic2025predictability,
  abbr      = {ICDL},
  title     = {Predictability-Based Curiosity-Guided Action Symbol Discovery},
  author    = {Kılıç, Burcu and Ahmetoglu, Alper and Ugur, Emre},
  booktitle = {2025 IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL)},
  pages     = {1--6},
  year      = {2025},
  doi       = {10.1109/ICDL63968.2025.11204386},
  html      = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11204386},
  arxiv     = {2505.18248},
  code      = {https://github.com/burcukilic/predictability-based},
  selected  = {true}
}

Learning Action Primitives in Manipulation Robots

Burcu Kılıç, Alper Ahmetoglu, Emre Ugur

SIU 2025Signal Processing and Communications Applications Conference · 2025

BibTeX
@inproceedings{kilic2025learning,
  abbr      = {SIU},
  title     = {Learning Action Primitives in Manipulation Robots},
  author    = {Kılıç, Burcu and Ahmetoglu, Alper and Ugur, Emre},
  booktitle = {2025 33rd Signal Processing and Communications Applications Conference (SIU)},
  year      = {2025},
  doi       = {10.1109/SIU66497.2025.11111831},
  html      = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11111831},
  pdf       = {https://emreugur.org/papers/Kilic-2025-SIU.pdf}
}

Education

Experience

Selected highlights. See my CV for more details.

Middle East Technical University

Sep 2026 – Present

Graduate Research Assistant · Ankara, Türkiye

  • Conducting research with Assoc. Prof. Emre Ugur at ROMER.

PragmaCraft

Apr 2026 – Jul 2026

Data Scientist · Istanbul, Türkiye

  • Developed document search and retrieval-augmented generation features for Answie.

MYTH AI

Aug 2025 – Sep 2025

Computer Vision Intern · Istanbul, Türkiye

  • Built garment-compositing pipelines using depth estimation, segmentation, and OpenCV.

University of Innsbruck

Jun 2025 – Aug 2025

Visiting Researcher · Innsbruck, Austria

  • Implemented Decision Transformer in PyTorch and studied RL methods on D4RL and OGBench.

MTU Aero Engines

Jun 2024 – Sep 2024

Machine Learning Intern · Munich, Germany

  • Developed LLM-based agentic systems with LangChain in Azure ML.
  • Built PostgreSQL-backed dashboards and applied data analysis and forecasting.

ModaMind

Jul 2023 – Jan 2024

AI Developer · Istanbul, Türkiye

  • Fine-tuned Stable Diffusion with LoRA and ControlNet for virtual-fashion applications.
  • Developed retrieval-augmented generation pipelines with Llama and GPT models.