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Jake Varley

11 accepted papers

2025

Learning the RoPEs: Better 2D and 3D Position Encodings with STRING

ICML 2025spotlight

We introduce $\textbf{STRING}$: Separable Translationally Invariant Position Encodings. STRING extends Rotary Position Encodings, a recently proposed and widely used algorithm in large language models, via a unifying theoretical framework. Importantly, STRING still provides $\textbf{exact}$ translat…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Embodied AI with Two Arms: Zero-shot Learning, Safety and Modularity

IROS 2024poster

We present an embodied AI system which receives open-ended natural language instructions from a human, and controls two arms to collaboratively accomplish potentially long-horizon tasks over a large workspace. Our system is modular: it deploys state of the art Large Language Models for task planning…

Cited by 15SourceScholar
2024

How to Prompt Your Robot: A PromptBook for Manipulation Skills with Code as Policies

ICRA 2024poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to perform semantic reasoning, planning and write code for robotics tasks. However, most methods rely on pre-existing primitives (i.e. pick, open drawer) or similar examples of robot code alone, which heavily limits their scalability to new…

Cited by 30SourceScholar
2024

Modeling the Real World with High-Density Visual Particle Dynamics

CoRL 2024poster

We present High-Density Visual Particle Dynamics (HD-VPD), a learned world model that can emulate the physical dynamics of real scenes by processing massive latent point clouds containing 100K+ particles. To enable efficiency at this scale, we introduce a novel family of Point Cloud Transformers (P…

Cited by 1SourceScholar
2024

SARA-RT: Scaling up Robotics Transformers with Self-Adaptive Robust Attention

ICRA 2024poster

We present Self-Adaptive Robust Attention for Robotics Transformers (SARA-RT): a new paradigm for addressing the emerging challenge of scaling up Robotics Transformers (RT) for on-robot deployment. SARA-RT relies on the new method of fine-tuning proposed by us, called up-training. It converts pre-tr…

Cited by 10SourceScholar
2023

Robots That Ask For Help: Uncertainty Alignment for Large Language Model Planners

CoRL 2023oral

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a wide range of promising capabilities --- from step-by-step planning to commonsense reasoning --- that may provide utility for robots, but remain prone to confidently hallucinated predictions. In this work, we present KnowNo, a framework for measuring and aligni…

Cited by 248SourceScholar
2023

Visual Backtracking Teleoperation: A Data Collection Protocol for Offline Image-Based Reinforcement Learning

ICRA 2023poster

We consider how to most efficiently leverage teleoperator time to collect data for learning robust image-based value functions and policies for sparse reward robotic tasks. To accomplish this goal, we modify the process of data collection to include more than just successful demonstrations of the de…

Cited by 11SourceScholar
2022

Hybrid Random Features

ICLR 2022poster

We propose a new class of random feature methods for linearizing softmax and Gaussian kernels called hybrid random features (HRFs) that automatically adapt the quality of kernel estimation to provide most accurate approximation in the defined regions of interest. Special instantiations of HRFs lead…

2022

Implicit Kinematic Policies: Unifying Joint and Cartesian Action Spaces in End-to-End Robot Learning

ICRA 2022poster

Action representation is an important yet often overlooked aspect in end-to-end robot learning with deep networks. Choosing one action space over another (e.g. target joint positions, or Cartesian end-effector poses) can result in surprisingly stark performance differences between various downstream…

Cited by 18SourceScholar
2022

Learning Model Predictive Controllers with Real-Time Attention for Real-World Navigation

CoRL 2022poster

Despite decades of research, existing navigation systems still face real-world challenges when deployed in the wild, e.g., in cluttered home environments or in human-occupied public spaces. To address this, we present a new class of implicit control policies combining the benefits of imitation lear…

Cited by 53SourceScholar
2021

Scaling Up Multi-Task Robotic Reinforcement Learning

CoRL 2021poster

General-purpose robotic systems must master a large repertoire of diverse skills. While reinforcement learning provides a powerful framework for acquiring individual behaviors, the time needed to acquire each skill makes the prospect of a generalist robot trained with RL daunting. In this paper, we…

Cited by 38SourcecodeScholar