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PhD Student · CU Boulder

Jay Vakil

I work on robot learning, mobile manipulation, and embodied AI, building intelligent agents that interact robustly with the physical world.

I'm a Computer Science PhD student at the University of Colorado Boulder, advised by Alessandro Roncone. Before my PhD, I was a Robotics Research Engineer at Meta AI (FAIR), where I contributed to large-scale initiatives such as RT-X, RoboAgent, and OK-Robot.

Publications

Google Scholar

* equal contribution · † equal advising

ICLR 2027Under review

Beyond the End-Effector: Learning Whole-Body Peripersonal Representations for Collision-Aware Manipulation

Jay Vakil, Amine Boubrit, Artemis Shaw, Ekshan Raj Verma, Caleb Escobedo, Anuj Pasricha, Carson Kohlbrenner, Qinzhengfang Li, Alessandro Roncone

CoRL 2025

Dynamics-Compliant Trajectory Diffusion

Payload-conditioned diffusion model for generating dynamic motions for robots handling up to 3× nominal payloads.

Anuj Pasricha, Joewie J. Koh, Jay Vakil, Alessandro Roncone

arXiv 2024

Towards Open-World Mobile Manipulation in Homes: Lessons from the NeurIPS 2023 HomeRobot Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation Challenge

Open-vocabulary mobile manipulation challenge. Benchmarking robot performance in novel home environments.

Sriram Yenamandra*, Arun Ramachandran*, Mukul Khanna*, Karmesh Yadav*, Jay Vakil*, Andrew Melnik, Michael Büttner, Leon Harz, Lyon Brown, Gora Chand Nandi, Arjun PS, Gaurav Kumar Yadav, Rahul Kala, Robert Haschke, Yang Luo, Jinxin Zhu, Yansen Han, Bingyi Lu, Xuan Gu, Qinyuan Liu, Yaping Zhao, Qiting Ye, Chenxiao Dou, Yansong Chua, Volodymyr Kuzma, Vladyslav Humennyy, Ruslan Partsey, Jonathan Francis, Devendra Singh Chaplot, Gunjan Chhablani, Alexander Clegg, Theophile Gervet, Vidhi Jain, Ram Ramrakhya, Andrew Szot, Austin Wang, Tsung-Yen Yang, Aaron Edsinger, Charlie Kemp, Binit Shah, Zsolt Kira, Dhruv Batra, Roozbeh Mottaghi, Yonatan Bisk, Chris Paxton

Education & experience

  1. MyoLab.AI

    MyoLab.AI

    Feb 2025 – May 2025

    Research Scientist Intern

    Multimodal LLM-agent planning, diffusion-based human-motion synthesis, and generative modeling on human-motion manifolds.

  2. University of Colorado Boulder

    University of Colorado Boulder

    Aug 2024 – Present

    PhD in Computer Science

    Researching robot learning, mobile manipulation, and embodied AI. Advised by Alessandro Roncone, Nikolaus Correll, and Christoffer Heckman.

  3. Meta

    Meta AI (FAIR)

    Apr 2022 – Jul 2024

    Robotics Research Engineer

    Designed a distributed robotic arm cluster for large-scale experimentation. Developed universal agents for complex manipulation tasks (RoboAgent).

  4. University of Washington

    University of Washington

    Sep 2018 – Mar 2022

    BS in Electrical Engineering

    Minor in Mathematics and Computer Science. Dean's List recipient. Focus on signal processing, robotics, and embedded systems.

Teaching & service

Teaching Assistant

  • CSCI 3302Introduction to Robotics
  • CSCI 3202Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
  • CSCI 2400Computer Systems

University of Colorado Boulder · 2024 – Present

Reviewer

  • 2026NeurIPSIROSRSSICLR
  • 2025RSSICMLICRA
  • 2024ICRACoRL
  • JournalRA-L
  • WorkshopsIROS '26 ReS AIIROS '26 S2RCC

Affiliations

University of Colorado Boulder
University of Colorado Boulder
Meta AI (FAIR)
Meta AI (FAIR)
MyoLab.AI
MyoLab.AI
University of Washington
University of Washington
North Seattle College
North Seattle College