Human Robot Systems (HRS)-Reading Group

Fall 2025 Meeting Schedule

Join us this fall for our weekly paper reading group sessions! We will meet every Tuesday from 10:30 AM to 11:30 AM in N09, EB.

Topics of Discussion

We will explore a wide range of topics in AI and robotics, including but not limited to:

  • Robotics
  • Task and Motion Planning
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Computer Vision

Come prepared to engage in insightful discussions and deepen your understanding of these cutting-edge fields. We look forward to seeing you there!

Current Reading List

Previous Paper Reading Sessions

2025-08-26 10:30 AM -0400
N09, EB
Leader: Austin

ViPE: Video Pose Engine for 3D Geometric Perception

Huang, Jiahui and Zhou, Qunjie and Rabeti, Hesam and Korovko, Aleksandr and Ling, Huan and Ren, Xuanchi and Shen, Tianchang and Gao, Jun and Slepichev, Dmitry and Lin, Chen-Hsuan and Ren, Jiawei and Xie, Kevin and Biswas, Joydeep and Leal-Taixe, Laura and Fidler, Sanja
NVIDIA Research Whitepapers
Computer Vision
2025-05-07 03:00 PM -0400
N09, EB
Leader: Yohei

π_{0.5}: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization

Physical Intelligence, Kevin Black, Noah Brown, James Darpinian, Karan Dhabalia, Danny Driess, Adnan Esmail, Michael Equi, Chelsea Finn, Niccolo Fusai, Manuel Y. Galliker, Dibya Ghosh, Lachy Groom, Karol Hausman, Brian Ichter, Szymon Jakubczak, Tim Jones, Liyiming Ke, Devin LeBlanc, Sergey Levine, Adrian Li-Bell, Mohith Mothukuri, Suraj Nair, Karl Pertsch, Allen Z. Ren, Lucy Xiaoyang Shi, Laura Smith, Jost Tobias Springenberg, Kyle Stachowicz, James Tanner, Quan Vuong, Homer Walke, Anna Walling, Haohuan Wang, Lili Yu, Ury Zhilinsky
Arxiv
VLAOpen-World Generalization
2023-11-13 12:00 PM -0500
N09, EB
Leader: Zainab Altaweel

Video Language Planning

Yilun Du, Mengjiao Yang, Pete Florence, Fei Xia, Ayzaan Wahid, Brian Ichter, Pierre Sermanet, Tianhe Yu, Pieter Abbeel, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Leslie Kaelbling, Andy Zeng, Jonathan Tompson
ICLR (Under review)
LearningPlanning
2023-09-25 01:00 PM -0400
N09, EB
Leader: Eisuke Hirota

Robot Parkour Learning

Ziwen Zhuang, Zipeng Fu, Jianren Wang, Christopher Atkeson, Sören Schwertfeger, Chelsea Finn, and Hang Zhao
CoRL
Learning
2022-09-01 12:00 PM -0400
N09, EB
Leader: Yan Ding

Florence: A New Foundation Model for Computer Vision

Lu Yuan, Dongdong Chen, Yi-Ling Chen, Noel Codella, Xiyang Dai, Jianfeng Gao, Houdong Hu, Xuedong Huang, Boxin Li, Chunyuan Li, Ce Liu, Mengchen Liu, Zicheng Liu, Yumao Lu, Yu Shi, Lijuan Wang, Jianfeng Wang, Bin Xiao, Zhen Xiao, Jianwei Yang, Michael Zeng, Luowei Zhou, and Pengchuan Zhang
Event Name Not Provided
Learning and Planning
2022-04-13 03:30 PM -0400
Online
Leader: Yan Ding

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

Michael Ahn, Anthony Brohan, Noah Brown, Yevgen Chebotar, Omar Cortes, Byron David, Chelsea Finn, Chuyuan Fu, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Karol Hausman, Alex Herzog, Daniel Ho, Jasmine Hsu, Julian Ibarz, Brian Ichter, Alex Irpan, Eric Jang, Rosario Jauregui Ruano, Kyle Jeffrey, Sally Jesmonth, Nikhil J Joshi, Ryan Julian, Dmitry Kalashnikov, Yuheng Kuang, Kuang-Huei Lee, Sergey Levine, Yao Lu, Linda Luu, Carolina Parada, Peter Pastor, Jornell Quiambao, Kanishka Rao, Jarek Rettinghouse, Diego Reyes, Pierre Sermanet, Nicolas Sievers, Clayton Tan, Alexander Toshev, Vincent Vanhoucke, Fei Xia, Ted Xiao, Peng Xu, Sichun Xu, Mengyuan Yan, and Andy Zeng
Event Name Not Provided
Task-Motion PlanningLearning
2022-03-02 02:30 PM -0500
Online
Leader: Yohei Hayamizu

Outracing champion Gran Turismo drivers with deep reinforcement learning

Peter R. Wurman, Samuel Barrett, Kenta Kawamoto, James MacGlashan, Kaushik Subramanian, Thomas J. Walsh, Roberto Capobianco, Alisa Devlic, Franziska Eckert, Florian Fuchs, Leilani Gilpin, Piyush Khandelwal, Varun Kompella, HaoChih Lin, Patrick MacAlpine, Declan Oller, Takuma Seno, Craig Sherstan, Michael D. Thomure, Houmehr Aghabozorgi, Leon Barrett, Rory Douglas, Dion Whitehead, Peter Dürr, Peter Stone, Michael Spranger, and Hiroaki Kitano
Nature 2022
Human Robot Interaction
2020-05-07 12:00 PM -0400
Online
Leader: Yan Ding

Imagination-Augmented Agents for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Théophane Weber, Sébastien Racanière, David P. Reichert, Lars Buesing, Arthur Guez, Danilo Jimenez Rezende, Adria Puigdomènech Badia, Oriol Vinyals, Nicolas Heess, Yujia Li, Razvan Pascanu, Peter Battaglia, Demis Hassabis, David Silver, and Daan Wierstra
NIPS, 2017
Learning