Cathy Wu
Class of 1954 Career Development Professor
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
My group studies machine learning for optimization, with a focus on urban mobility.
I am interested in enabling faster, evidence-driven decisions for sociotechnical systems.
Previously, I completed my Ph.D. in EECS at UC Berkeley, and my B.S. and M.Eng. in EECS at MIT. I have also spent time at Microsoft Research, OpenAI, Waymo, Dropbox, Facebook, and startups.
Research Interests
My research lies at the intersection of machine learning, optimization, and urban mobility. I am particularly interested in:
Recent and Selected News
View all news →-
Jan 2026
Two papers accepted to ICLR: Learning to Segment for Vehicle Routing Problems and Towards Efficient Constraint Handling in Neural Solvers for Routing Problems!
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May 2025
MIT News features our ICLR 2024 article introducing a new benchmark! It uses a real-world traffic problem to test generalization progress in deep reinforcement learning algorithms.
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Apr 2025
Our ICLR 2024 article on using deep learning to avoid redundant calculations in large scheduling problems is featured on the MIT home page!
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Apr 2025
Cathy Wu is awarded the 2025 Ole Madsen Mentoring Award from the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE).
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Sep 2024
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Aug 2024
I had tremendous fun speaking on the Keynote Panel on Applications of Reinforcement Learning at the inaugural RLC 2024.
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Feb 2024
Our ICLR 2024 article on New AI model could streamline operations in a robotic warehouse is featured on the MIT front page! We introduce a new neural network architecture that captures complex relationships across time and space in the warehouse for hundreds of robot paths, and amortizes the computation for efficiency.
See the Group page for lab members and alumni, or visit Prospective Members to get involved.
Selected Publications
View all publications →Representative recent papers from my research.
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FeaturedLearning-Guided Prioritized Planning for Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding in Warehouse Automation
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) 2026 -
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FeaturedLearning-Guided Rolling Horizon Optimization for Long-Horizon Flexible Job Shop Scheduling
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025 MIT Home Page Feature (32% acceptance rate)Media:MIT News -
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FeaturedReproducibility in Transportation Research: A Hands-on Tutorial
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FeaturedNeural Neighborhood Search for Multi-agent Path Finding
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2024 MIT Home Page Feature (31% acceptance rate) -
FeaturedLearning to Configure Separators in Branch-and-Cut
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2023 MIT Home Page Feature (31% acceptance rate)Media:MIT News
Teaching
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Previously 6.7950/6.246.
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6.231 Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning Spring 2022
Outreach and Professional Education
These courses are intended for industry professionals and not MIT students.
Awards & Honors
- MIT CEE Ole Madsen Mentoring Award, 2025
- NSF CAREER Award, 2023 – 2028
- IEEE ITS Best Dissertation Award, First Place Award, 2019
- Microsoft Location Summit, First Place Award, Hall of Fame Inductee, 2019
- CUTC Milton Pikarsky Memorial Award, 2018
- UC Berkeley Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, CS189 Machine Learning, 2018
- ACM Future of Computing Academy, Inaugural Class, 2017
- UC Berkeley ITS Outstanding Graduate Student Award, 2017
- IEEE Best Paper Award Honorable Mention, Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC), 2016
- Rising Stars Workshop, Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), 2016
- Dwight David Eisenhower Graduate Fellowship (DDETFP), Awardee, 2015
- National Defense Science and Engineering (NDSEG) Graduate Fellowship, Awardee, 2013
- National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellowship, Fellow, 2013 – 2018
- UC Berkeley Chancellor's Fellowship for Graduate Study, 2013 – 2017
Selected Professional Service
View all service →Highlighted entries indicate leadership roles or particularly impactful service contributions.
Leadership & Professional Society Service
- Chair of Steering Committee, RERITE Working Group, 2025-2028
- Board of Governors, IEEE ITSS, 2024-2026
- Technical Program Committee, NSF CPS PI Meeting, 2025
- Organizer, Session on AI for Transportation, NAE CAFOE, 2024
- Early Career Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) Member, TR-C, 2021– . . .
Editorial & Conference Service
- Associate Editor, TR-C, 2025-2028
- Program Chair, RLC, 2025
- Associate Editor, ICRA, 2025
- Area Chair, NeurIPS, 2024
- Area Chair, ICML, 2024
- Program Committee, TRC-30, 2024
- Program Committee, L4DC, 2020
- Reviewer for TR-C, JMLR, T-ITS, Nature, Science Advances, NeurIPS, ICML, ICRA, ISTTT, ITSC, CoRL, CDC, etc.
Community Organization
- Competition Chair, League of Robot Runners (LoRR), 2022– . . .
- Organizer, AAMAS League of Robot Runners (LoRR) Competition, 2026
- Organizer, IV Workshop on Trustworthy and Open Science for Intelligent Vehicles: Datasets, Benchmarks, and Testbeds, 2026
- Organizer, IV Workshop on Safe and Trustworthy Motion Planning subject to Perception and Sensor Network Uncertainties in ITS, 2026
- Organizer, NeurIPS Workshop on Differentiable Learning of Combinatorial Algorithms: From Theory To Practice, 2025
- Organizer, ITSC Reproducibility in Transportation Research: A Hands-on Tutorial 2.0 – Reproducible Manuscripts, 2025
- Organizer, RLC Workshop on Practical Insights into RL for Real Systems (RL4RS), 2025
- Organizer, CPS-IoT Week Workshop on Going Public with Your CPS Code and Data, 2025
- Organizer, ITSC Reproducibility in Transportation Research: A Hands-on Tutorial, 2024
- Organizer, RSS Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles Across Scales (AVAS), 2024
- Organizer, ITSC Tutorial on Deep Reinforcement Learning and Transportation, 2018