A Careful Examination of Multitask Transfer in TRI’s Large Behavior Models for Dexterous Manipulation
Date: April 25, 2025 @ 3:00-4:00PM | Location: Gates B03 | Speaker: Russ Tedrake | Affiliation: MIT
Abstract:
Many of us are collecting large scale multitask teleop demonstration data for manipulation, with the belief that it can enable rapidly deploying robots in novel applications and delivering robustness in the 'open world'. But rigorous evaluation of these models is a bottleneck. In this talk, I'll describe our recent efforts at TRI to quantify some of the key 'multitask hypotheses', and some of the tools that we've built in order to make key decisions about data, architecture, and hyperparameters more quickly and with more confidence. And, of course, I’ll bring some cool robot videos.
Bio:
Russ is the Toyota Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Mechanical Engineering at MIT, the Director of the Center for Robotics at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, and the leader of Team MIT's entry in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Russ is also the Senior Vice President of Robotics Research at the Toyota Research Institute. He is a recipient of the 2024 MIT School of Engineering Distinguished Educator Award, the 2024 MIT EECS Digital Innovation Award, the 2023 MIT Teaching with Digital Technology Award, the 2021 Jamieson Teaching Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the MIT Jerome Saltzer Award for undergraduate teaching, the DARPA Young Faculty Award in Mathematics, the 2012 Ruth and Joel Spira Teaching Award, and was named a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow.
Russ received his B.S.E. in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1999, and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2004, working with Sebastian Seung. After graduation, he joined the MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department as a Postdoctoral Associate. During his education, he has also spent time at Microsoft, Microsoft Research, and the Santa Fe Institute.