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Mel Vecerik

10 accepted papers

2025

On the Difficulty of Constructing a Robust and Publicly-Detectable Watermark

AISTATS 2025poster

This work investigates the theoretical boundaries of creating publicly-detectable schemes to enable the provenance of watermarked imagery. Metadata-based approaches like C2PA provide unforgeability and public-detectability. ML techniques offer robust retrieval and watermarking. However, no existing…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Deep SE(3)-Equivariant Geometric Reasoning for Precise Placement Tasks

ICLR 2024poster

Many robot manipulation tasks can be framed as geometric reasoning tasks, where an agent must be able to precisely manipulate an object into a position that satisfies the task from a set of initial conditions. Often, task success is defined based on the relationship between two objects - for instanc…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2024

RoboTAP: Tracking Arbitrary Points for Few-Shot Visual Imitation

ICRA 2024poster

For robots to be useful outside labs and specialized factories we need a way to teach them new useful behaviors quickly. Current approaches lack either the generality to onboard new tasks without task-specific engineering, or else lack the data-efficiency to do so in an amount of time that enables p…

Cited by 45SourceScholar
2023

TAPIR: Tracking Any Point with Per-Frame Initialization and Temporal Refinement

ICCV 2023poster

We present a novel model for Tracking Any Point (TAP) that effectively tracks any queried point on any physical surface throughout a video sequence. Our approach employs two stages: (1) a matching stage, which independently locates a suitable candidate point match for the query point on every other…

Cited by 337PDFcodeScholar
2022

Few-Shot Keypoint Detection as Task Adaptation via Latent Embeddings

ICRA 2022poster

Dense object tracking, the ability to localize specific object points with pixel-level accuracy, is an important computer vision task with numerous downstream applications in robotics. Existing approaches either compute dense keypoint embeddings in a single forward pass, meaning the model is trained…

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2020

S3K: Self-Supervised Semantic Keypoints for Robotic Manipulation via Multi-View Consistency

CoRL 2020

A robot’s ability to act is fundamentally constrained by what it can perceive. Many existing approaches to visual representation learning utilize general-purpose training criteria, e.g. image reconstruction, smoothness in latent space, or usefulness for control, or else make use of large datasets an

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2020

Scaling data-driven robotics with reward sketching and batch reinforcement learning

RSS 2020poster

By harnessing a growing dataset of robot experience, we learn control policies for a diverse and increasing set of related manipulation tasks. To make this possible, we introduce reward sketching: an effective way of eliciting human preferences to learn the reward function for a new task. This rewar…

2019

A Practical Approach to Insertion with Variable Socket Position Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

ICRA 2019poster

Insertion is a challenging haptic and visual control problem with significant practical value for manufacturing. Existing approaches in the model-based robotics community can be highly effective when task geometry is known, but are complex and cumbersome to implement, and must be tailored to each in…

Cited by 136SourceScholar
2019

Generative predecessor models for sample-efficient imitation learning

ICLR 2019poster

We propose Generative Predecessor Models for Imitation Learning (GPRIL), a novel imitation learning algorithm that matches the state-action distribution to the distribution observed in expert demonstrations, using generative models to reason probabilistically about alternative histories of demonstra…

Cited by 41SourcePDFScholar
2019

Improved Exploration through Latent Trajectory Optimization in Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient

IROS 2019poster

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms such as Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) often require additional exploration strategies, especially if the actor is of deterministic nature. This work evaluates the use of model-based trajectory optimization methods used for exploration in Deep…

Cited by 15SourceScholar