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Alex Irpan

19 accepted papers

2025

Generating Robot Constitutions & Benchmarks for Semantic Safety

CoRL 2025poster

Large vision and language models are being increasingly deployed on real robots, leading to an immediate need for ensuring robot safety under AI-control. In this paper, we develop the ASIMOV Benchmark — a collection of large-scale semantic safety datasets grounded in real-world visual scenes and hum…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

STEER: Flexible Robotic Manipulation via Dense Language Grounding

ICRA 2025

The complexity of the real world demands robotic systems that can intelligently adapt to unseen situations. We present STEER, a robot learning framework that bridges highlevel, commonsense reasoning with precise, flexible low-level control. Our approach translates complex situational awareness into

Cited by 9SourcecodeScholar
2024

Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models : Open X-Embodiment Collaboration

ICRA 2024

Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for man

Cited by 910SourcecodeScholar
2024

Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models : Open X-Embodiment Collaboration0

ICRA 2024poster

Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for man…

Cited by 259SourcecodeScholar
2024

Stop Regressing: Training Value Functions via Classification for Scalable Deep RL

ICML 2024oral

Value functions are an essential component in deep reinforcement learning (RL), that are typically trained via mean squared error regression to match bootstrapped target values. However, scaling value-based RL methods to large networks has proven challenging. This difficulty is in stark contrast to…

Cited by 60SourcePDFScholar
2023

Q-Transformer: Scalable Offline Reinforcement Learning via Autoregressive Q-Functions

CoRL 2023poster

In this work, we present a scalable reinforcement learning method for training multi-task policies from large offline datasets that can leverage both human demonstrations and autonomously collected data. Our method uses a Transformer to provide a scalable representation for Q-functions trained via o…

Cited by 106SourceScholar
2023

RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale

RSS 2023poster

By transferring knowledge from large, diverse, task-agnostic datasets, modern machine learning models can solve specific downstream tasks either zero-shot or with small task-specific datasets to a high level of performance. While this capability has been demonstrated in other fields such as computer…

2023

RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control

CoRL 2023poster

We study how vision-language models trained on Internet-scale data can be incorporated directly into end-to-end robotic control to boost generalization and enable emergent semantic reasoning. Our goal is to enable a single end-to-end trained model to both learn to map robot observations to actions a…

Cited by 1068SourceScholar
2022

Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances

CoRL 2022oral

Large language models can encode a wealth of semantic knowledge about the world. Such knowledge could be extremely useful to robots aiming to act upon high-level, temporally extended instructions expressed in natural language. However, a significant weakness of language models is that they lack real…

Cited by 1747SourcecodeScholar
2021

AW-Opt: Learning Robotic Skills with Imitation andReinforcement at Scale

CoRL 2021poster

Robotic skills can be learned via imitation learning (IL) using user-provided demonstrations, or via reinforcement learning (RL) using large amounts of autonomously collected experience. Both methods have complementary strengths and weaknesses: RL can reach a high level of performance, but requires…

Cited by 47SourceScholar
2021

Actionable Models: Unsupervised Offline Reinforcement Learning of Robotic Skills

ICML 2021spotlight

We consider the problem of learning useful robotic skills from previously collected offline data without access to manually specified rewards or additional online exploration, a setting that is becoming increasingly important for scaling robot learning by reusing past robotic data. In particular, we…

Cited by 171SourcePDFScholar
2021

BC-Z: Zero-Shot Task Generalization with Robotic Imitation Learning

CoRL 2021poster

In this paper, we study the problem of enabling a vision-based robotic manipulation system to generalize to novel tasks, a long-standing challenge in robot learning. We approach the challenge from an imitation learning perspective, aiming to study how scaling and broadening the data collected can fa…

Cited by 594SourceScholar
2020

RL-CycleGAN: Reinforcement Learning Aware Simulation-to-Real

CVPR 2020oral

Deep neural network based reinforcement learning (RL) can learn appropriate visual representations for complex tasks like vision-based robotic grasping without the need for manually engineering or prior learning a perception system. However, data for RL is collected via running an agent in the desir…

Cited by 241PDFScholar
2019

Noise Contrastive Priors for Functional Uncertainty

UAI 2019poster

Obtaining reliable uncertainty estimates of neural network predictions is a long standing challenge. Bayesian neural networks have been proposed as a solution, but it remains open how to specify their prior. In particular, the common practice of an independent normal prior in weight space imposes re…

2019

Sim-To-Real via Sim-To-Sim: Data-Efficient Robotic Grasping via Randomized-To-Canonical Adaptation Networks

CVPR 2019poster

Real world data, especially in the domain of robotics, is notoriously costly to collect. One way to circumvent this can be to leverage the power of simulation to produce large amounts of labelled data. However, training models on simulated images does not readily transfer to real-world ones. Using d…

Cited by 596PDFScholar
2018

Can Deep Reinforcement Learning Solve Erdos-Selfridge-Spencer Games?

ICML 2018oral

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved many recent successes, but our understanding of its strengths and limitations is hampered by the lack of rich environments in which we can fully characterize optimal behavior, and correspondingly diagnose individual actions against such a characterization. He…

Cited by 43SourcePDFScholar
2018

Can Deep Reinforcement Learning solve Erdos-Selfridge-Spencer Games?

ICLR 2018workshop

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved many recent successes, but our understanding of its strengths and limitations is hampered by the lack of rich environments in which we can fully characterize optimal behavior, and correspondingly diagnose individual actions against such a characterization.…

Cited by 42SourceScholar
2018

Scalable Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Robotic Manipulation

CoRL 2018

In this paper, we study the problem of learning vision-based dynamic manipulation skills using a scalable reinforcement learning approach. We study this problem in the context of grasping, a longstanding challenge in robotic manipulation. In contrast to static learning behaviors that choose a grasp

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2018

Using Simulation and Domain Adaptation to Improve Efficiency of Deep Robotic Grasping

ICRA 2018poster

Instrumenting and collecting annotated visual grasping datasets to train modern machine learning algorithms can be extremely time-consuming and expensive. An appealing alternative is to use off-the-shelf simulators to render synthetic data for which ground-truth annotations are generated automatical…

Cited by 827SourceScholar