Potential-based reward shaping using state-space segmentation for efficiency in reinforcement learning. - Melis Ilayda Bal; Hüseyin Aydin; Cem Iyigün; Faruk Polat (Future Gener. Comput. Syst., 2024)

Adversarial Training for Defense Against Label Poisoning Attacks. - Melis Ilayda Bal; Volkan Cevher; Michael Muehlebach (ICLR, 2025)

Optimistic Games for Combinatorial Bayesian Optimization with Application to Protein Design. - Melis Ilayda Bal; Pier Giuseppe Sessa; Mojmir Mutny; Andreas Krause 001 (ICLR, 2025)

Population-based exploration in reinforcement learning through repulsive reward shaping using eligibility traces. - Melis Ilayda Bal; Cem Iyigun; Faruk Polat; Hüseyin Aydin (Ann. Oper. Res., 2025)

ESLM: Risk-Averse Selective Language Modeling for Efficient Pretraining. - Melis Ilayda Bal; Volkan Cevher; Michael Muehlebach (CoRR, 2025)