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Unnat Jain

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. Toward building general-purpose embodied intelligence, my research focuses on the intersection of computer vision (perception) and robot learning (action). I have worked across industry, academia, and startups at Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) Labs, Carnegie Mellon University, and Skild AI, collaborating with Abhinav Gupta, Deepak Pathak, and Xinlei Chen. I received my PhD from UIUC, advised by Alex Schwing and Svetlana Lazebnik, and previously graduated from IIT Kanpur. Helpful links for applicants: UC Irvine offers what I believe are important conditions for focused research: an active AI/ML intellectual community, research infrastructure to support ambitious projects, guaranteed affordable housing for all years (a rarity in California), and a safe environment with year-round access to nature. The campus has established pathways to real-world impact, and proximity to Southern California's AI and robotics industry creates opportunities for meaningful collaborations and diverse career paths. The deadline for PhD applications is December 15, 2025. For opportunities to work with me, see my UCI profile. CV | E-Mail | Google Scholar | Github | UCI Profile | Twitter Follow @unnatjain2010 People Our research spans vision-language-action models, human-to-robot learning, sim-to-real transfer, pre-training strategies for embodied agents, and multi-agent collaboration. We're building systems that enable robots to learn from diverse data sources and work together on complex real-world tasks. I am extremely fortunate to work with an amazing set of students and collaborators. I'm deeply grateful for their support. We are continuing to grow our group. Dwip Dalal Daniel Feng Aditya Mittal Sagar Patil Shivansh Patel Yuchen Song Affiliations IIT Kanpur 2011-2016 UIUC 2016-2022 CMU & Meta 2022-2024 Skild AI 2024-2025 UC Irvine 2025- Internships                UMass Amherst Summer 2015 Uber ATG Summer 2017 Allen Institute for AI Summer 2018, 2020 FAIR (collab w/ UT Austin) Summer 2019, FA19, SP20 Google DeepMind Summer 2021, FA21 Updates Area Chairing Currently: CVPR 2026, ICLR 2026, NeurIPS 2025 CoRL 2025; CVPR 2023, 2024, 2025; ICCV 2025; ICLR 2025; NeurIPS 2023, 2024 Oct 2025 First quarter at UC Irvine as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science. Nov 2024 For those on the faculty job search, here is a note I wrote: Hidden Curriculum of Faculty Job Search June 2024 Organizing the community-building workshop 'CV 20/20: A Retrospective Vision' at CVPR 2024. June 2024 Accepted faculty position at UC Irvine. Spending the next year at Skild AI and will start in 2025. Jun 2023 Organizing the 'Scholars & Big Models: How Can Academics Adapt?' workshop at CVPR 2023. Dec 2022 Organizing the RoboAdapt Workshop at CoRL 2023. + previous news Mar 2022 Started at Meta AI & CMU w/ Abhinav, Deepak, and Xinlei -- diving into embodied learning (from & for humans), representations, and robotics. Oct 2021 In 2021, CMAE accepted at ICML, GridToPix & CoMON at ICCV, LAW at EMNLP, and ADVISOR at NeurIPS. Jul 2021 Invited talk on 'Collaborative Embodied Agents' at Visual Geometry Group at University of Oxford. [slides] [video] Jun 2021 Awarded C. W. Gear Outstanding Graduate Student 2021. May 2021 Passed preliminary examination. Thanks committee members: Alex, Lana, Derek, Kristen, and Nan. [slides] Feb 2021 Organizing SoundSpaces Challenge and MultiON Challenge at the Embodied AI Workshop, CVPR 2021. Dec 2020 Awarded 'AI2 Outstanding Intern of 2020' -- thank you, mentors! Oct 2020 Released NeurIPS 2020 paper on Multi-Object Navigation in AIHabitat. Oct 2020 Here is a *spoof* scholar page my friends put together on my birthday in 2020. User discretion advised :p Sep 2020 AllenAct (BETA) has been released -- Check out the webpage and github repo. Jul 2020 Talk at Summer Seminar Series, Utah Center for Data Science on Collaborative Embodied Agents (video). Jun 2020 Cordial Sync and SoundSpaces accepted as spotlights to ECCV 2020. May 2020 Summer #2 at Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Seattle. Dec 2019 Released AV Embodied Navigation preprint (intern work at Facebook AI Research). Nov 2019 NeurIPS camera ready, code, and slides for TAB-VCR are up on project page! May 2019 Summer at Facebook AI Research, Menlo Park. Mar 2019 Named Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2019 Finalists. Feb 2019 Awarded best presenter at AI session of CSL student conference 2019. Nov 2018 MS thesis selected for David J. Kuck outstanding MS thesis award 2019. [CS News] May 2018 Summer at Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Seattle. Apr 2018 Accepted UIUC's Ph.D. offer. Will begin fall'18! Feb 2017 Paper on two sided evaluation of visual dialog got accepted to CVPR 2018 Sep 2017 Received Siebel Scholar Award 2017 by Thomas and Stacey Siebel foundation [CS News] May 2017 Summer at Uber ATG (self-driving), Pittsburgh. May 2017 Received Student volunteer award from CVF and conference travel grant from UIUC for CVPR 2017. Mar 2017 Paper accepted to Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV) 2017 based on IIT Kanpur's thesis. Jan 2017 Paper accepted at CVPR 2017 as spotlight presentation! Jul 2016 Received Director's Gold Medal and Cadence Gold Medal from IIT Kanpur for best all-rounder and best thesis, respectively. Publications ViPRA: Video Prediction for Robot Actions Sandeep Routray, Hengkai Pan, Unnat Jain, Shikhar Bahl, Deepak Pathak arXiv 2025 Best Paper Award at NeurIPS 2025 Embodied World Models Workshop project | paper | code Constructive Distortion: Improving MLLMs with Attention-Aware Image Warping Dwip Dalal, Gautam Vashishtha, Utkarsh Mishra, Jeonghwan Kim, Madhav Kanda, Hyeonjeong Ha, Svetlana Lazebnik, Heng Ji, Unnat Jain arXiv 2025 paper | project | code Robotic Manipulation by Imitating Generated Videos Without Physical Demonstrations Shivansh Patel, Shraddhaa Mohan, Hanlin Mai, Unnat Jain*, Svetlana Lazebnik*, Yunzhu Li* arXiv 2025 paper | project | code An Image is Worth More Than 16x16 Patches: Exploring Transformers on Individual Pixels Duy-Kien Nguyen, Mahmoud Assran, Unnat Jain, Martin R Oswald, Cees GM Snoek, Xinlei Chen ICLR 2025 paper Exploitation-Guided Exploration for Semantic Embodied Navigation Justin Wasserman, Girish Chowdhary, Abhinav Gupta, Unnat Jain ICRA 2024 Best Paper at NeurIPS 2023 Robot Learning Workshop paper | project | code Habitat 3.0: A Co-Habitat for Humans, Avatars and Robots Xavi Puig*, Eric Undersander*, Andrew Szot*, Mikael Cote*, Ruslan Partsey*, Jimmy Yang*, Ruta Desai*, Alexander Clegg*, Michal Hlavac, Tiffany Min, Theo Gervet, Vladimír Vondruš, Vincent-Pierre Berges, John Turner, Oleksandr Maksymets, Zsolt Kira, Mrinal Kalakrishnan, Jitendra Malik, Devendra Chaplot, Unnat Jain, Dhruv Batra, Akshara Rai**, Roozbeh Mottaghi** ICLR 2024 paper | project | code Media: An Unbiased Look at Datasets for Visuo-Motor Pre-Training Sudeep Dasari, Mohan Kumar Srirama, Unnat Jain*, Abhinav Gupta* CoRL 2023 project | pdf Pretrained Language Models as Visual Planners for Human Assistance Dhruvesh Patel, Hamid Eghbalzadeh, Nitin Kamra, Michael Louis Iuzzolino, Unnat Jain*, Ruta Desai* ICCV 2023 paper | code Adaptive Coordination in Social Embodied Rearrangement Andrew Szot, Unnat Jain, Dhruv Batra, Zsolt Kira, Ruta Desai, Akshara Rai ICML 2023 paper | code Affordances from Human Videos as a Versatile Representation for Robotics Shikhar Bahl*, Russell Mendonca*, Lili Chen, Unnat Jain, Deepak Pathak CVPR 2023 paper | project Media: MOPA: Modular Object Navigation with PointGoal Agents Sonia Raychaudhuri, Tommaso Campari, Unnat Jain, Manolis Savva, Angel X. Chang WACV 2024 paper | project | code Last-Mile Embodied Visual Navigation Justin Wasserman*, Karmesh Yadav, Girish Chowdhary, Abhinav Gupta, Unnat Jain* CoRL 2022 paper | project | code Retrospectives on the Embodied AI Workshop Matt Deitke, Dhruv Batra, Yonatan Bisk, ... Unnat Jain ... Luca Weihs, Jiajun Wu arXiv 2022 paper Learning State-Aware Visual Representations from Audible Interactions Himangi Mittal, Pedro Morgado, Unnat Jain, Abhinav Gupta NeurIPS 2022 paper | code Bridging the Imitation Gap by Adaptive Insubordination Luca Weihs*, Unnat Jain*, Iou-Jen Liu, Jordi Salvador, Svetlana Lazebnik, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Alexander Schwing NeurIPS 2021 paper | project | code Language-Aligned Waypoint (LAW) Supervision for Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments Sonia Raychaudhuri, Saim Wani, Shivansh Patel, Unnat Jain, Angel X. Chang EMNLP 2021 (short) paper | project | code GridToPix: Training Embodied Agents with Minimal Supervision Unnat Jain, Iou-Jen Liu, Svetlana Lazebnik, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Luca Weihs*, Alexander Schwing* ICCV 2021 paper | project Interpretation of Emergent Communication in Heterogeneous Collaborative Embodied Agents Shivansh Patel*, Saim Wani*, Unnat Jain*, Alexander Schwing, Svetlana Lazebnik, Manolis Savva, Angel X. Chang ICCV 2021 paper | project | code Cooperative Exploration for Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Iou-Jen Liu, Unnat Jain, Raymond Yeh, Alexander Schwing ICML 2021 (long oral) paper | project | code MultiON: Benchmarking Semantic Map Memory using Multi-Object Navigation Saim Wani*, Shivansh Patel*, Unnat Jain*, Angel X. Chang, Manolis Savva NeurIPS 2020 paper | project | code | challenge AllenAct: A Framework for Embodied AI Research Luca Weihs*, Jordi Salvador*, Klemen Kotar*, Unnat Jain, Kuo-Hao Zeng, Roozbeh Mottaghi, Aniruddha Kembhavi arXiv 2020 paper | project | code Media: A Cordial Sync: Going Beyond Marginal Policies For Multi-Agent Embodied Tasks Unnat Jain*, Luca Weihs*, Eric Kolve, Ali Farhadi, Svetlana Lazebnik, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Alexander Schwing ECCV 2020 (spotlight) paper | project | code SoundSpaces: Audio-Visual Navigation in 3D Environments Changan Chen*, Unnat Jain*, Carl Schissler, Sebastia Vicenc Amengual Gari, Ziad Al-Halah, Vamsi Krishna Ithapu, Philip Robinson, Kristen Grauman ECCV 2020 (spotlight) paper | project | code | challenge Media: TAB-VCR: Tags and Attributes based VCR Baselines Jingxiang Lin, Unnat Jain, Alexander Schwing NeurIPS 2019 paper | project | code Two Body Problem: Collaborative Visual Task Completion Unnat Jain*, Luca Weihs*, Eric Kolve, Mohammad Rastegari, Svetlana Lazebnik, Ali Farhadi, Alexander Schwing, Aniruddha Kembhavi CVPR 2019 (oral) paper | project | code Talk @ Amazon: video, ppt, pdf Talk @ CVPR'19: video, ppt, pdf, poster Two can play this Game: Visual Dialog with Discriminative Question Generation and Answering Unnat Jain, Svetlana Lazebnik, Alexander Schwing CVPR 2018 Creativity: Generating Diverse Questions using Variational Autoencoders Unnat Jain*, Ziyu Zhang*, Alexander Schwing CVPR 2017 (spotlight) video | paper Compact Environment-Invariant Codes for Robust Visual Place Recognition Unnat Jain, Vinay Namboodiri, Gaurav Pandey Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV) 2017 Template credits: Deepak, Jon, Saurabh, and Abhishek