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Spring 2025 GRASP on Robotics: Phillip Isola, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Robots and Artificial Life from Visual Foundation Models”
April 25, 2025 @ 10:30 am - 11:45 am
This was a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance…
ABSTRACT
I will talk about two ways we can design agents with the help of powerful vision/graphics models. In the first project, LucidSim, we augment a traditional robotics simulation engine (MuJoCo) with visual detail from an image generative model. The generator adds diversity and realism to the barebones MuJoCo content, and results in a RGB-only policy trained entirely in sim that generalizes zero-shot to the real world. In the second project, ASAL, we use a visual recognition model to search for artificial lifeforms that display distinct and interesting behaviors. This process can discover cellular automata that are open-ended like Conway’s Game of Life, particle swarms that flock like Boids, and more.
Presenter
Phillip Isola - Learn More
Phillip Isola is the Class of 1948 Career Development associate professor in EECS at MIT. He studies computer vision, machine learning, robotics, and AI. He completed his Ph.D. in Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and has since spent time at UC Berkeley, OpenAI, and Google Research. His work has particularly impacted generative AI and self-supervised representation learning. Dr. Isola’s research has been recognized by a Google Faculty Research Award, a PAMI Young Researcher Award, a Samsung AI Researcher of the Year Award, a Packard Fellowship, and a Sloan Fellowship. His teaching has been recognized by the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Distinguished Teaching. His current research focuses on trying to scientifically understand human-like intelligence.