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Jean Mercat

13 accepted papers

2026

A Systematic Study of Data Modalities and Strategies for Co-training Large Behavior Models for Robot Manipulation

RSS 2026poster

Large behavior models (LBMs) have shown strong dexterous manipulation capabilities by extending imitation learning to large-scale training on extensive multi-task robot data, yet their generalization remains limited by the insufficient coverage of available robot data. To expand this coverage withou…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Cross-Embodiment Transfer Via Behavior-Aligned Representations

ICRA 2026poster

Recent progress in large-scale imitation learning for robot manipulation has been driven by leveraging datasets across a wide range of robot embodiments. However, achieving significant cross-embodiment transfer is often still challenging. In this work, we study the role of using behavior-aligned rep…

Cited by 0codeScholar
2026

OpenThoughts: Data Recipes for Reasoning Models

ICLR 2026oral

Reasoning models have made rapid progress on many benchmarks involving math, code, and science. Yet, there are still many open questions about the best train- ing recipes for reasoning since state-of-the-art models often rely on proprietary datasets with little to no public information available. To…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Language models scale reliably with over-training and on downstream tasks

ICLR 2025poster

Scaling laws are useful guides for derisking expensive training runs, as they predict performance of large models using cheaper, small-scale experiments. However, there remain gaps between current scaling studies and how language models are ultimately trained and evaluated. For instance, scaling is…

2025

Should VLMs be Pre-trained with Image Data?

ICLR 2025poster

Pre-trained LLMs that are further trained with image data perform well on vision-language tasks. While adding images during a second training phase effectively unlocks this capability, it is unclear how much of a gain or loss this two-step pipeline gives over VLMs which integrate images earlier int…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

DROID: A Large-Scale In-The-Wild Robot Manipulation Dataset

RSS 2024poster

The creation of large, diverse, high-quality robot manipulation datasets is an important stepping stone on the path toward more capable and robust robotic manipulation policies. However, creating such datasets is challenging: collecting robot manipulation data in diverse environments poses logistica…

Cited by 216SourcePDFScholar
2024

DataComp-LM: In search of the next generation of training sets for language models

NeurIPS 2024poster

We introduce DataComp for Language Models, a testbed for controlled dataset experiments with the goal of improving language models. As part of DCLM, we provide a standardized corpus of 240T tokens extracted from Common Crawl, effective pretraining recipes based on the OpenLM framework, and a broad s…

Cited by 64SourcePDFScholar
2024

Multi-Modal Representation Learning with Tactile Data

IROS 2024poster

Advancements in embodied language models like PALM-E and RT-2 have significantly enhanced language-conditioned robotic manipulation. However, these advances remain predominantly focused on vision and language, often overlooking the pivotal role of tactile feedback which is advantageous in contact-ri…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Residual Q-Learning: Offline and Online Policy Customization without Value

NeurIPS 2023poster

Imitation Learning (IL) is a widely used framework for learning imitative behavior from demonstrations. It is especially appealing for solving complex real-world tasks where handcrafting reward function is difficult, or when the goal is to mimic human expert behavior. However, the learned imitative…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2022

Control-Aware Prediction Objectives for Autonomous Driving

ICRA 2022poster

Autonomous vehicle software is typically structured as a modular pipeline of individual components (e.g., perception, prediction, and planning) to help separate concerns into interpretable sub-tasks. Even when end-to-end training is possible, each module has its own set of objectives used for safety…

Cited by 29SourceScholar
2022

Dynamics-Aware Comparison of Learned Reward Functions

ICLR 2022spotlight

The ability to learn reward functions plays an important role in enabling the deployment of intelligent agents in the real world. However, $\textit{comparing}$ reward functions, for example as a means of evaluating reward learning methods, presents a challenge. Reward functions are typically compare…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2022

RAP: Risk-Aware Prediction for Robust Planning

CoRL 2022oral

Robust planning in interactive scenarios requires predicting the uncertain future to make risk-aware decisions. Unfortunately, due to long-tail safety-critical events, the risk is often under-estimated by finite-sampling approximations of probabilistic motion forecasts. This can lead to overconfiden…

Cited by 17SourcecodeScholar
2020

Multi-Head Attention for Multi-Modal Joint Vehicle Motion Forecasting

ICRA 2020poster

This paper presents a novel vehicle motion forecasting method based on multi-head attention. It produces joint forecasts for all vehicles on a road scene as sequences of multi-modal probability density functions of their positions. Its architecture uses multi-head attention to account for interactio…

Cited by 231SourceScholar