Ted Xiao

I'm a research scientist at Google DeepMind, where I work on making robots smarter. My research focuses on robot learning, internet-scale foundation models, and reinforcement learning. I am particularly interested in methods that can scale and generalize in the real world.

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xiaoted at gmail dot com

Some recent highlights:

Gemini Robotics

RT-2

RT-1 and SayCan

WIRED article Google's Gemini Robotics AI Model Reaches Into the Physical World

ICRA award IEEE ICRA 2024 Best Conference Paper Award: Open X-Embodiment

Google DeepMind blog post "Shaping the Future of Advanced Robotics"

TechCrunch article "Google Outlines New Methods for Training Robots with Video and Large Language Models"

New York Times article "With the Aid of A.I., Google's Robots Get Smart"

Google DeepMind blog post "Scaling Up Learning Across Many Different Robot Types"

CNET video "Google's Most Advanced Robot Brain Just Got a Body"

CoRL Special Innovation Award

Google AI blog post "Efficiently Initializing Reinforcement Learning With Prior Policies"

60 Minutes video "Is Artificial Intelligence Advancing Too Quickly?"

Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI into the Physical World

Gemini Robotics Team
Preprint
Website • PDF • Blog •

Gen2Act: Human Video Generation in Novel Scenarios enables Generalizable Robot Manipulation

Homanga Bharadhwaj, Debidatta Dwibedi, Abhinav Gupta, Shubham Tulsiani, Carl Doersch, Ted Xiao, Dhruv Shah, Fei Xia, Dorsa Sadigh, Sean Kirmani
Preprint
Website • PDF • Video

STEER: Flexible Robotic Manipulation via Dense Language Grounding

Laura Smith, Alex Irpan, Montserrat Gonzalez Arenas, Sean Kirmani, Dmitry Kalashnikov, Dhruv Shah, Ted Xiao
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025
Website • PDF

RT-Affordance: Affordances are Versatile Intermediate Representations for Robot Manipulation

Soroush Nasiriany, Sean Kirmani, Tianli Ding, Laura Smith, Yuke Zhu, Danny Driess, Dorsa Sadigh, Ted Xiao
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025
Website • PDF

Vision Language Models are In-Context Value Learners

Yecheng Jason Ma, Joey Hejna, Ayzaan Wahid, Chuyuan Fu, Dhruv Shah, Jacky Liang, Zhuo Xu, Sean Kirmani, Peng Xu, Danny Driess, Ted Xiao, Jonathan Tompson, Osbert Bastani, Dinesh Jayaraman, Wenhao Yu, Tingnan Zhang, Dorsa Sadigh, Fei Xia
★ Spotlight ★ International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025
Website • PDF • Demo

OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model

Moo Jin Kim*, Karl Pertsch*, Siddharth Karamcheti*, Ted Xiao, Ashwin Balakrishna, Suraj Nair, Rafael Rafailov, Ethan Foster, Grace Lam, Pannag Sanketi, Quan Vuong, Thomas Kollar, Benjamin Burchfiel, Russ Tedrake, Dorsa Sadigh, Sergey Levine, Percy Liang, Chelsea Finn
★ Outstanding Paper Award Finalist ★ Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2024
Website • PDF • Code • Models

RT-Sketch: Goal-Conditioned Imitation Learning from Hand-Drawn Sketches

Priya Sundaresan, Quan Vuong, Jiayuan Gu, Peng Xu, Ted Xiao, Sean Kirmani, Tianhe Yu, Michael Stark, Ajinkya Jain, Karol Hausman, Dorsa Sadigh*, Jeannette Bohg*, Stefan Schaal*
★ Oral Presentation ★ Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2024
Website • PDF

Evaluating Real-World Robot Manipulation Policies in Simulation

Xuanlin Li*, Kyle Hsu*, Jiayuan Gu*, Karl Pertsch, Oier Mees, Homer Rich Walke, Chuyuan Fu, Ishikaa Lunawat, Isabel Sieh, Sean Kirmani, Sergey Levine, Jiajun Wu, Chelsea Finn, Hao Su*, Quan Vuong*, Ted Xiao*
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2024
Website • PDF • Code • Colab

RT-H: Action Hierarchies Using Language

Suneel Belkhale, Tianli Ding, Ted Xiao, Pierre Sermanet, Quan Vuong, Jonathan Tompson, Yevgen Chebotar, Debidatta Dwibedi, Dorsa Sadigh
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2024
Website • PDF

Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy

Octo Model Team, Dibya Ghosh, Homer Walke, Karl Pertsch, Kevin Black, Oier Mees, Sudeep Dasari, Joey Hejna, Tobias Kreiman, Charles Xu, Jianlan Luo, You Liang Tan, Lawrence Yunliang Chen, Pannag Sanketi, Quan Vuong, Ted Xiao, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2024
Website • PDF • Code • Model Weights

Efficient Data Collection for Robotic Manipulation via Compositional Generalization

Jensen Gao, Annie Xie, Ted Xiao, Chelsea Finn, Dorsa Sadigh
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2024
Website • PDF • Video

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

Jesse Farebrother, Jordi Orbay, Quan Vuong, Adrien Ali Taïga, Yevgen Chebotar, Ted Xiao, Alex Irpan, Sergey Levine, Pablo Samuel Castro, Aleksandra Faust, Aviral Kumar, Rishabh Agarwal
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2024
PDF

PIVOT: Iterative Visual Prompting Elicits Actionable Knowledge for VLMs

Soroush Nasiriany*, Fei Xia*, Wenhao Yu*, Ted Xiao*, Jacky Liang, Ishita Dasgupta, Annie Xie, Danny Driess, Ayzaan Wahid, Zhuo Xu, Quan Vuong, Tingnan Zhang, Tsang-Wei, Edward Lee, Kuang-Huei Lee, Peng Xu, Sean Kirmani, Yuke Zhu, Andy Zeng, Karol Hausman, Nicolas Heess, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine, Brian Ichter*
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2024
Website • PDF • Demo

Learning to Learn Faster from Human Feedback with Language Model Predictive Control

Jacky Liang, Fei Xia, Wenhao Yu, Andy Zeng, Montserrat Gonzalez Arenas, Maria Attarian, Maria Bauza, Matthew Bennice, Alex Bewley, Adil Dostmohamed, Chuyuan Kelly Fu, Nimrod Gileadi, Marissa Giustina, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Leonard Hasenclever, Jan Humplik, Jasmine Hsu, Nikhil Joshi, Ben Jyenis, Chase Kew, Sean Kirmani, Tsang-Wei Edward Lee, Kuang-Huei Lee, Assaf Hurwitz Michaely, Joss Moore, Ken Oslund, Dushyant Rao, Allen Ren, Baruch Tabanpour, Quan Vuong, Ayzaan Wahid, Ted Xiao, Ying Xu, Vincent Zhuang, Peng Xu, Erik Frey, Ken Caluwaerts, Tingnan Zhang, Brian Ichter, Jonathan Tompson, Leila Takayama, Vincent Vanhoucke, Izhak Shafran, Maja Mataric, Dorsa Sadigh, Nicolas Heess, Kanishka Rao, Nik Stewart, Jie Tan, Carolina Parada
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2024
Website • PDF • Code • Demo

AutoRT: Embodied Foundation Models for Large Scale Orchestration of Robotic Agents

Michael Ahn, Debidatta Dwibedi, Chelsea Finn, Montse Gonzalez Arenas, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Karol Hausman, Brian Ichter, Alex Irpan, Nikhil Joshi, Ryan Julian, Sean Kirmani, Isabel Leal, Edward Lee, Sergey Levine, Yao Lu, Sharath Maddineni, Kanishka Rao, Dorsa Sadigh, Pannag Sanketi, Pierre Sermanet, Quan Vuong, Stefan Welker, Fei Xia, Ted Xiao, Peng Xu, Steve Xu, Zhuo Xu
Preprint
Website • PDF • Blogpost

Physically Grounded Vision-Language Models for Robotic Manipulation

Jensen Gao, Bidipta Sarkar, Fei Xia, Ted Xiao, Jiajun Wu, Brian Ichter, Anirudha Majumdar, Dorsa Sadigh
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024
Website • PDF • Video • Dataset • Model

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

Montserrat Gonzalez Arenas, Ted Xiao, Sumeet Singh, Vidhi Jain, Allen Z Ren, Quan Vuong, Jake Varley, Alexander Herzog, Isabel Leal, Sean Kirmani, Dorsa Sadigh, Vikas Sindhwani, Kanishka Rao, Jacky Liang, Andy Zeng
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024,
★ Oral Presentation ★ Robot Learning Workshop (WRL) at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2023
PDF

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

Open X-Embodiment Collaboration [>170 Authors]
★ Best Paper Award ★IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024
Website • PDF • Code • Dataset • Blogpost

Decomposing the Generalization Gap in Imitation Learning for Visual Robotic Manipulation

Annie Xie, Lisa Lee, Ted Xiao, Chelsea Finn
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024
Robot Learning Workshop (WRL) at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2023
Website • PDF

RT-Trajectory: Robotic Task Generalization via Hindsight Trajectory Sketches

Jiayuan Gu, Sean Kirmani, Paul Wohlhart, Yao Lu, Montserrat Gonzalez Arenas, Kanishka Rao, Wenhao Yu, Chuyuan Fu, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Zhuo Xu, Priya Sundaresan, Peng Xu, Hao Su, Karol Hausman, Chelsea Finn, Quan Vuong, Ted Xiao
★ Spotlight ★ International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2024
Website • PDF • Blogpost

Open-World Object Manipulation using Pre-Trained Vision-Language Models

Austin Stone*, Ted Xiao*, Yao Lu*, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Kuang-Huei Lee, Quan Vuong, Paul Wohlhart, Sean Kirmani, Brianna Zitkovich, Fei Xia, Chelsea Finn, Karol Hausman
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2023
Webpage • PDF • Video

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

Anthony Brohan, Noah Brown, Justice Carbajal, Yevgen Chebotar, Xi Chen, Krzysztof Choromanski, Tianli Ding, Danny Driess, Avinava Dubey, Chelsea Finn, Pete Florence, Chuyuan Fu, Montse Gonzalez Arenas, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Kehang Han, Karol Hausman, Alex Herzog, Jasmine Hsu, Brian Ichter, Alex Irpan, Nikhil Joshi Ryan Julian, Dmitry Kalashnikov, Yuheng Kuang, Isabel Leal, Lisa Lee, Tsang-Wei Edward Lee, Sergey Levine, Yao Lu, Henryk Michalewski, Igor Mordatch, Karl Pertsch, Kanishka Rao, Krista Reymann, Michael Ryoo, Grecia Salazar, Pannag Sanketi, Pierre Sermanet, Jaspiar Singh, Anikait Singh, Radu Soricut, Huong Tran, Vincent Vanhoucke, Quan Vuong, Ayzaan Wahid, Stefan Welker, Paul Wohlhart, Jialin Wu, Fei Xia, Ted Xiao, Peng Xu, Sichun Xu, Tianhe Yu, Brianna Zitkovich
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2023
Webpage • PDF • Video • Blogpost

Language to Rewards for Robotic Skill Synthesis

Wenhao Yu, Nimrod Gileadi, Chuyuan Fu, Sean Kirmani, Kuang-Huei Lee, Montse Gonzalez Arenas, Hao-Tien, Lewis Chiang, Tom Erez, Leonard Hasenclever, Jan Humplik, Brian Ichter, Ted Xiao, Peng Xu, Andy Zeng, Tingnan Zhang, Nicolas Heess, Dorsa Sadigh, Jie Tan, Yuval Tassa, Fei Xia
★ Oral Presentation ★, Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2023
Webpage • PDF • Code • Blogpost

Robotic Skill Acquisition via Instruction Augmentation with Vision-Language Models

Ted Xiao*, Harris Chan*, Pierre Sermanet, Ayzaan Wahid, Anthony Brohan, Karol Hausman, Sergey Levine, Jonathan Tompson
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2023
Webpage • PDF

Scaling Robot Learning with Semantically Imagined Experience

Tianhe Yu, Ted Xiao, Austin Stone, Jonathan Tompson, Anthony Brohan, Su Wang, Jaspiar Singh, Clayton Tan, Dee M, Jodilyn Peralta, Brian Ichter, Karol Hausman, Fei Xia
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2023
Webpage • PDF • Video

Deep RL at Scale: Sorting Waste in Office Buildings with a Fleet of Mobile Manipulators

Alexander Herzog*, Kanishka Rao* Karol Hausman*, Yao Lu*, Paul Wohlhart*, Mengyuan Yan, Jessica Lin, Montserrat Gonzalez Arenas, Ted Xiao, Daniel Kappler, Daniel Ho, Jarek Rettinghouse, Yevgen Chebotar, Kuang-Huei Lee, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Ryan Julian, Adrian Li, Chuyuan Kelly Fu, Bob Wei, Sangeetha Ramesh, Khem Holden, Kim Kleiven, David Rendleman, Sean Kirmani, Jeff Bingham, Jon Weisz, Ying Xu, Wenlong Lu, Matthew Bennice, Cody Fong, David Do, Jessica Lam, Yunfei Bai, Benjie Holson, Michael Quinlan, Noah Brown, Mrinal Kalakrishnan, Julian Ibarz, Peter Pastor, Sergey Levine
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2023
Webpage • PDF • Video • Blogpost

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

Anthony Brohan, Noah Brown, Justice Carbajal, Yevgen Chebotar, Joseph Dabis, Chelsea Finn, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Karol Hausman, Alex Herzog, Jasmine Hsu, Julian Ibarz, Brian Ichter, Alex Irpan, Tomas Jackson, Sally Jesmonth, Nikhil J Joshi, Ryan Julian, Dmitry Kalashnikov, Yuheng Kuang, Isabel Leal, Kuang-Huei Lee, Sergey Levine, Yao Lu, Utsav Malla, Deeksha Manjunath, Igor Mordatch, Ofir Nachum, Carolina Parada, Jodilyn Peralta, Emily Perez, Karl Pertsch, Jornell Quiambao, Kanishka Rao, Michael Ryoo, Grecia Salazar, Pannag Sanketi, Kevin Sayed, Jaspiar Singh, Sumedh Sontakke, Austin Stone, Clayton Tan, Huong Tran, Vincent Vanhoucke, Steve Vega, Quan Vuong, Fei Xia, Ted Xiao, Peng Xu, Sichun Xu, Tianhe Yu, Brianna Zitkovich
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2023
Webpage • PDF • Video • Code • Blogpost

Token Turing Machines

Michael S. Ryoo, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Kumara Kahatapitiya, Ted Xiao, Kanishka Rao, Austin Stone, Yao Lu, Julian Ibarz, Anurag Arnab
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2023
PDF • Code

Jump-Start Reinforcement Learning

Ikechukwu Uchendu, Ted Xiao, Yao Lu, Banghua Zhu, Mengyuan Yan, Joséphine Simon, Matthew Bennice, Chuyuan Fu, Cong Ma, Jiantao Jiao, Sergey Levine, Karol Hausman
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2023
Webpage • PDF • Blogpost

Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Models

Wenlong Huang*, Fei Xia*, Ted Xiao*, Harris Chan, Jacky Liang, Pete Florence, Andy Zeng, Jonathan Tompson, Igor Mordatch, Yevgen Chebotar, Pierre Sermanet, Noah Brown, Tomas Jackson, Linda Luu, Sergey Levine, Karol Hausman, Brian Ichter
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2022
Webpage • PDF • Video • 2 Minute Papers

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, Andy Zeng
★ Oral Presentation, Special Innovation Award ★, Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2022
Webpage • PDF • Video • Code • Google AI Blog • Wired • Washington Post • CNET