Pannag R. Sanketi

EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert

dblp:61/8732 · also Pannag Sanketi · DBLP profile ↗

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12ranked-venue papers

2as first author

9since 2021 · last 2025

—ORCID · none

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 10 · 9 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 8 · 7 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 first-authorHuman-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1 · 1 first-author

Year	Publication	Venue	Position
2025	SAS-Prompt: Large Language Models as Numerical Optimizers for Robot Self-Improvement abstract We demonstrate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform iterative self-improvement of robot policies. An important insight of this paper is that LLMs have a built-in ability to perform (stochastic) numerical optimization and that this property can be leveraged for explainable robot policy search. Based on this insight, we introduce the SAS Prompt (Summarize, Analyze, Synthesize) – a single prompt that enables iterative learning and adaptation of robot behavior by combining the LLM's ability to retrieve, reason and optimize over previous robot traces in order to synthesize new, unseen behavior. Our approach can be regarded as an early example of a new family of explainable policy search methods that are entirely implemented within an LLM. We evaluate our approach both in simulation and on a real-robot table tennis task. Project website: sites.google.com/asu.edu/sas-llm/ Heni Ben Amor, Laura Graesser, Atil Iscen, David B. D'Ambrosio, Saminda Abeyruwan, Alex Bewley, Kamalesh Kalirathinam, Swaroop Mishra, Pannag R. Sanketi	ICRA	10
2025	Robo-DM: Data Management for Large Robot Datasets abstract Recent results suggest that very large datasets of teleoperated robot demonstrations can be used to train transformer-based models that have the potential to generalize to new scenes, robots, and tasks. However, curating, distributing, and loading large datasets of robot trajectories, which typically consist of video, textual, and numerical modalities - including streams from multiple cameras - remains challenging. We propose Robo-DM, an efficient open-source cloud-based data management toolkit for collecting, sharing, and learning with robot data. With Robo-DM, robot datasets are stored in a self-contained format with Extensible Binary Meta Language (EBML). Robo-DM can significantly reduce the size of robot trajectory data, transfer costs, and data load time during training. Compared to the RLDS format used in OXE datasets, Robo-DM's compression saves space by up to 70x (lossy) and 3.5x (lossless). Robo-DM also accelerates data retrieval by load-balancing video decoding with memory-mapped decoding caches. Compared to LeRobot, a framework that also uses lossy video compression, Robo-DM is up to 50x faster when decoding sequentially. We physically evaluate a model trained by Robo-DM with lossy compression, a pick-and-place task, and In-Context Robot Transformer. Robo-DM uses 75x compression of the original dataset and does not suffer reduction in downstream task accuracy. Code and evaluation scripts can be found on website https://github.com/BerkeleyAutomation/fog_x. Kaiyuan Chen 0001, Letian Fu, Yunliang Chen 0001, Kush Hari, Ashwin Balakrishna, Ted Xiao, Pannag R. Sanketi, John Kubiatowicz, Kenneth Y. Goldberg	ICRA	10
2025	Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis abstract Achieving human-level performance on real world tasks is a north star for the robotics community. We present the first learned robot agent that reaches amateur humanlevel performance in competitive table tennis. Table tennis is a physically demanding sport that takes humans years to master. We contribute (1) a hierarchical and modular policy architecture consisting of (i) low level controllers with their skill descriptors that model their capabilities and (ii) a high level controller that chooses the low level skills, (2) techniques for enabling zero-shot sim-to-real and curriculum building, including an iterative approach (train in sim, deploy in real), and (3) real time adaptation to unseen opponents. Policy performance was assessed through 29 robot vs. human matches of which the robot won 45 % (13/29). All humans were unseen players and their skill level varied from beginner to tournament level. Whilst the robot lost all matches vs. the most advanced players it won 100 % matches vs. beginners and 55 % matches vs. intermediate players, demonstrating solidly amateur humanlevel performance. Videos of the matches can be viewed here1.See sites https://google.com/view/competitive-robot-table-tennis. David B. D'Ambrosio, Saminda Abeyruwan, Laura Graesser, Atil Iscen, Heni Ben Amor, Alex Bewley, Barney J. Reed, Krista Reymann, Leila Takayama, Yuval Tassa, Krzysztof Choromanski, Erwin Coumans, Deepali Jain, Navdeep Jaitly, Natasha Jaques, Satoshi Kataoka, Yuheng Kuang, Nevena Lazic, Reza Mahjourian, Sherry Moore, Kenneth Oslund, Anish Shankar, Vikas Sindhwani, Vincent Vanhoucke, Grace Vesom, Peng Xu 0010, Pannag R. Sanketi	ICRA	27
2025	Learning Diverse Robot Striking Motions with Diffusion Models and Kinematically Constrained Gradient Guidance abstract Advances in robot learning have enabled robots to generate skills for a variety of tasks. Yet, robot learning is typically sample inefficient, struggles to learn from data sources exhibiting varied behaviors, and does not naturally incorporate constraints. These properties are critical for fast, agile tasks such as playing table tennis. Modern techniques for learning from demonstration improve sample efficiency and scale to diverse data, but are rarely evaluated on agile tasks. In the case of reinforcement learning, achieving good performance requires training on high-fidelity simulators. To overcome these limitations, we develop a novel diffusion modeling approach that is offline, constraint-guided, and expressive of diverse agile behaviors. The key to our approach is a kinematic constraint gradient guidance (KCGG) technique that computes gradients through both the forward kinematics of the robot arm and the diffusion model to direct the sampling process. KCGG minimizes the cost of violating constraints while simultaneously keeping the sampled trajectory in-distribution of the training data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for time-critical robotic tasks by evaluating KCGG in two challenging domains: simulated air hockey and real table tennis. In simulated air hockey, we achieved a 25.4% increase in block rate, while in table tennis, we achieved a 17.3% increase in success rate compared to imitation learning baselines. Kin Man Lee, Sean Ye, Qingyu Xiao, Zulfiqar Zaidi, David B. D'Ambrosio, Pannag R. Sanketi, Matthew C. Gombolay	ICRA	7
2025	Robo2VLM: Improving Visual Question Answering using Large-Scale Robot Manipulation Data abstract Vision-Language Models (VLMs) acquire real-world knowledge and general reasoning ability through Internet-scale image-text corpora. They can augment robotic systems with scene understanding and task planning, and assist visuomotor policies that are trained on robot trajectory data. We explore the reverse paradigm — using rich, real, multi-modal robot trajectory data to enhance and evaluate VLMs. In this paper, we present Robo2VLM, a Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset generation framework for VLMs. Given a human tele-operated robot demonstration with video and robot data, Robo2VLM derives ground-truth from non-visual and non-descriptive sensory modalities, such as end-effector pose, gripper aperture, and force sensing. Based on these modalities, it segments the robot trajectory into a sequence of manipulation phases. At each phase, Robo2VLM uses scene and interaction understanding to identify 3D properties of the robot, task goal, and the target object. The properties are used to generate representative VQA queries – images with textural multiple-choice questions – based on spatial, goal-conditioned, and interaction reasoning question templates. We use a subset of Open X-Embodiment to generate Robo2VLM-1, a large-scale in-the-wild dataset with 684,710 questions based on 463 distinct scenes and 3,396 robotic manipulation tasks from 176k real robot trajectories. Results suggest that Robo2VLM-1 can benchmark and improve VLM capabilities in spatial and interaction reasoning. Kaiyuan Chen 0001, Shuangyu Xie, Zehan Ma, Pannag R. Sanketi, Kenneth Y. Goldberg	NeurIPS	4
2025	Self-Improving Embodied Foundation Models abstract Foundation models trained on web-scale data have revolutionized robotics, but their application to low-level control remains largely limited to behavioral cloning. Drawing inspiration from the success of the reinforcement learning stage in fine-tuning large language models, we propose a two-stage post-training approach for robotics. The first stage, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), fine-tunes pretrained foundation models using both: a) behavioral cloning, and b) steps-to-go prediction objectives. In the second stage, Self-Improvement, steps-to-go prediction enables the extraction of a well-shaped reward function and a robust success detector, enabling a fleet of robots to autonomously practice downstream tasks with minimal human supervision. Through extensive experiments on real-world and simulated robot embodiments, our novel post-training recipe unveils significant results on Embodied Foundation Models. First, we demonstrate that the combination of SFT and Self-Improvement is significantly more sample-efficient than scaling imitation data collection for supervised learning, and that it leads to policies with significantly higher success rates. Further ablations highlight that the combination of web-scale pretraining and Self-Improvement is the key to this sample-efficiency. Next, we demonstrate that our proposed combination uniquely unlocks a capability that current methods cannot achieve: autonomously practicing and acquiring novel skills that generalize far beyond the behaviors observed in the imitation learning datasets used during training. These findings highlight the transformative potential of combining pretrained foundation models with online Self-Improvement to enable autonomous skill acquisition in robotics. Seyed Kamyar Seyed Ghasemipour, Ayzaan Wahid, Jonathan Tompson, Pannag R. Sanketi, Igor Mordatch	NeurIPS	4
2024	Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models : Open X-Embodiment Collaboration abstract Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for many applications. Can such a consolidation happen in robotics? Conventionally, robotic learning methods train a separate model for every application, every robot, and even every environment. Can we instead train "generalist" X-robot policy that can be adapted efficiently to new robots, tasks, and environments? In this paper, we provide datasets in standardized data formats and models to make it possible to explore this possibility in the context of robotic manipulation, alongside experimental results that provide an example of effective X-robot policies. We assemble a dataset from 22 different robots collected through a collaboration between 21 institutions, demonstrating 527 skills (160266 tasks). We show that a high-capacity model trained on this data, which we call RT-X, exhibits positive transfer and improves the capabilities of multiple robots by leveraging experience from other platforms. The project website is robotics-transformer-x.github.io. Abigail O'Neill, Abhiram Maddukuri, Abhishek Gupta 0004, Abhishek Padalkar, Abraham Lee, Acorn Pooley, Agrim Gupta, Ajay Mandlekar, Ajinkya Jain, Albert Tung, Alex Bewley, Alex Irpan, Alexander Khazatsky, Anant Rai, Anchit Gupta, Andrew E. Wang, Anikait Singh, Animesh Garg, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Annie Xie, Anthony Brohan, Antonin Raffin, Archit Sharma, Arefeh Yavary, Arhan Jain, Ashwin Balakrishna, Ayzaan Wahid, Ben Burgess-Limerick, Bernhard Schölkopf, Blake Wulfe, Brian Ichter, Cewu Lu, Charles Xu 0003, Charlotte Le, Chelsea Finn, Chen Wang 0053, Chenfeng Xu, Cheng Chi 0001, Chenguang Huang, Christine Chan, Christopher Agia, Chuer Pan, Chuyuan Fu, Coline Devin, Danfei Xu, Daniel Morton, Danny Drieß, Daphne Chen, Deepak Pathak, Dhruv Shah, Dieter Büchler, Dinesh Jayaraman, Dmitry Kalashnikov, Dorsa Sadigh, Edward Johns, Ethan Paul Foster, Fangchen Liu, Federico Ceola, Fei Xia 0002, Feiyu Zhao, Freek Stulp, Gaoyue Zhou, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Gautam Salhotra, Gilbert Feng, Giulio Schiavi, Glen Berseth, Gregory Kahn, Guanzhi Wang, Hao Su 0001, Haoshu Fang, Henghui Bao, Heni Ben Amor, Henrik I. Christensen, Hiroki Furuta, Homer Walke, Hongjie Fang, Huy Ha, Igor Mordatch, Ilija Radosavovic, Isabel Leal, Jacky Liang, Jad Abou-Chakra, Jaehyung Kim 0001, Jaimyn Drake, Jan Peters 0001, Jan Schneider 0007, Jasmine Hsu, Jeannette Bohg, Jeffrey T. Bingham, Jensen Gao, Jiaheng Hu, Jiajun Wu 0001, Jiankai Sun, Jianlan Luo, Jiayuan Gu, Jie Tan 0001, Jihoon Oh, Jimmy Wu, Jingpei Lu, Jitendra Malik, João Silvério, Joey Hejna, Jonathan Booher, Jonathan Tompson, Jonathan Yang, Jordi Salvador, Joseph J. Lim, Junhyek Han, Kanishka Rao, Karl Pertsch, Karol Hausman, Keegan Go, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Kenneth Y. Goldberg, Kendra Byrne, Kenneth Oslund, Kento Kawaharazuka, Kevin Black, Kevin Zhang 0002, Kiana Ehsani, Kiran Lekkala, Kirsty Ellis, Krishan Rana, Krishnan Srinivasan, Kuan Fang, Kunal Pratap Singh, Kuo-Hao Zeng, Kyle Hatch, Kyle Hsu, Laurent Itti, Yunliang Chen 0001, Lerrel Pinto, Li Fei-Fei 0001, Liam Tan, Linxi Fan, Lionel Ott, Lisa Lee, Luca Weihs, Magnum Chen, Marion Lepert, Marius Memmel, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Masha Itkina, Mateo Guaman Castro, Max Spero, Maximilian Du, Michael Ahn, Michael C. Yip, Mingtong Zhang 0003, Mingyu Ding, Minho Heo, Mohan Kumar Srirama, Mohit Sharma 0001, Moo Jin Kim, Naoaki Kanazawa, Nicklas Hansen 0001, Nicolas Heess, Nikhil J. Joshi, Niko Sünderhauf, Norman Di Palo, Nur Muhammad Shafiullah, Oier Mees, Oliver Kroemer, Osbert Bastani, Pannag R. Sanketi, Patrick Tree Miller, Patrick Yin, Paul Wohlhart, Peng Xu 0010, Peter David Fagan, Peter Mitrano, Pierre Sermanet, Pieter Abbeel, Priya Sundaresan, Qiuyu Chen, Rafael Rafailov, Ria Doshi, Roberto Martin Martin, Rohan Baijal, Rosario Scalise, Rose Hendrix, Roy Lin, Runjia Qian, Russell Mendonca, Rutav Shah, Ryan Hoque, Ryan Julian, Samuel Bustamante-Gomez, Sean Kirmani, Sergey Levine, Sherry Moore, Shikhar Bahl, Shivin Dass, Shubham D. Sonawani, Shuran Song, Sichun Xu, Siddhant Haldar, Siddharth Karamcheti, Simeon Adebola, Simon Guist, Soroush Nasiriany, Stefan Schaal, Stefan Welker, Stephen Tian, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, Sudeep Dasari, Suneel Belkhale, Sungjae Park, Suraj Nair 0003, Suvir Mirchandani, Takayuki Osa, Tanmay Gupta, Tatsuya Harada, Tatsuya Matsushima, Ted Xiao, Thomas Kollar, Tianhe Yu, Tianli Ding, Todor Davchev, Tony Z. Zhao, Travis Armstrong, Trevor Darrell, Trinity Chung, Vidhi Jain, Vincent Vanhoucke, Wolfram Burgard, Xiaolong Wang 0004, Xinghao Zhu, Xinyang Geng, Liangwei Xu, Yecheng Jason Ma 0001, Yejin Kim 0003, Yevgen Chebotar, Yilin Wu 0003, Yonatan Bisk, Yoonyoung Cho, Youngwoon Lee, Yuchen Cui, Yueh-Hua Wu, Yujin Tang, Yuke Zhu, Yunchu Zhang, Yunfan Jiang 0001, Yunshuang Li, Yunzhu Li, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Zehan Ma, Zichen Jeff Cui, Zichen Zhang 0016, Zipeng Lin	ICRA	177
2024	RoboVQA: Multimodal Long-Horizon Reasoning for Robotics abstract We present a scalable, bottom-up and intrinsically diverse data collection scheme that can be used for high-level reasoning with long and medium horizons and that has 2.2x higher throughput compared to traditional narrow top-down step-by-step collection. We collect realistic data by performing any user requests within the entirety of 3 office buildings and using multiple embodiments (robot, human, human with grasping tool). With this data, we show that models trained on all embodiments perform better than ones trained on the robot data only, even when evaluated solely on robot episodes. We explore the economics of collection costs and find that for a fixed budget it is beneficial to take advantage of the cheaper human collection along with robot collection. We release a large and highly diverse (29,520 unique instructions) dataset dubbed RoboVQA containing 829,502 (video, text) pairs for robotics-focused visual question answering. We also demonstrate how evaluating real robot experiments with an intervention mechanism enables performing tasks to completion, making it deployable with human oversight even if imperfect while also providing a single performance metric. We demonstrate a single video-conditioned model named RoboVQA-VideoCoCa trained on our dataset that is capable of performing a variety of grounded high-level reasoning tasks in broad realistic settings with a cognitive intervention rate 46% lower than the zeroshot state of the art visual language model (VLM) baseline and is able to guide real robots through long-horizon tasks. The performance gap with zero-shot state-of-the-art models indicates that a lot of grounded data remains to be collected for real-world deployment, emphasizing the critical need for scalable data collection approaches. Finally, we show that video VLMs significantly outperform single-image VLMs with an average error rate reduction of 19% across all VQA tasks. Thanks to video conditioning and dataset diversity, the model can be used as general video value functions (e.g. success and affordance) in situations where actions needs to be recognized rather than states, expanding capabilities and environment understanding for robots. Data and videos are available at robovqa.github.io Pierre Sermanet, Tianli Ding, Jeffrey Zhao, Fei Xia 0002, Debidatta Dwibedi, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Christine Chan, Gabriel Dulac-Arnold, Sharath Maddineni, Nikhil J. Joshi, Peter R. Florence, Wei Han 0002, Robert Baruch, Yao Lu 0006, Suvir Mirchandani, Peng Xu 0010, Pannag R. Sanketi, Karol Hausman, Izhak Shafran, Brian Ichter, Yuan Cao 0007	ICRA	17
2022	Learning High Speed Precision Table Tennis on a Physical Robot abstract Learning goal conditioned control in the real world is a challenging open problem in robotics. Reinforcement learning systems have the potential to learn autonomously via trial-and-error, but in practice the costs of manual reward design, ensuring safe exploration, and hyperparameter tuning are often enough to preclude real world deployment. Imitation learning approaches, on the other hand, offer a simple way to learn control in the real world, but typically require costly cu-rated demonstration data and lack a mechanism for continuous improvement. Recently, iterative imitation methods have been shown to be effective at relaxing both these constraints, learning goal directed control from undirected demonstration data, and improving continuously via self-supervised goal reaching. These approaches, however, have not yet been shown to scale beyond simple simulated environments. In this work, we present the first evidence that simple iterative imitation learning can scale to goal-directed behavior on a real robot in a dynamic setting: high speed, precision table tennis (e.g. “land the ball on this particular target”). We find that this approach offers a straightforward way to do continuous on-robot learning, without complexities such as reward design, value function learning, or sim-to-real transfer. We also find that this approach is scalable-sample efficient enough to train on a physical robot in just a few hours. In real world evaluations, we find that that the resulting policy can perform on par or better than amateur humans (with players sampled randomly from a robotics lab) at the task of returning the ball to specific targets on the table. Finally, we analyze the effect of an initial undirected bootstrap dataset size on performance, finding that a modest amount of unstructured demonstration data provided up-front drastically speeds up the convergence of a general purpose goal-reaching policy. See supplementary video for examples of the policy on a physical robot. Tianli Ding, Laura Graesser, Saminda Abeyruwan, David B. D'Ambrosio, Anish Shankar, Pierre Sermanet, Pannag R. Sanketi, Corey Lynch	IROS	7
2020	Robotic Table Tennis with Model-Free Reinforcement Learning abstract We propose a model-free algorithm for learning efficient policies capable of returning table tennis balls by controlling robot joints at a rate of 100Hz. We demonstrate that evolutionary search (ES) methods acting on CNN-based policy architectures for non-visual inputs and convolving across time learn compact controllers leading to smooth motions. Furthermore, we show that with appropriately tuned curriculum learning on the task and rewards, policies are capable of developing multi-modal styles, specifically forehand and backhand stroke, whilst achieving 80% return rate on a wide range of ball throws. We observe that multi-modality does not require any architectural priors, such as multi-head architectures or hierarchical policies. Laura Graesser, Krzysztof Choromanski, Xingyou Song, Nevena Lazic, Pannag R. Sanketi, Vikas Sindhwani, Navdeep Jaitly	IROS	6
2011	Localizing blurry and low-resolution text in natural images abstract There is a growing body of work addressing the problem of localizing printed text regions occurring in natural scenes, all of it focused on images in which the text to be localized is resolved clearly enough to be read by OCR. This paper introduces an alternative approach to text localization based on the fact that it is often useful to localize text that is identifiable as text but too blurry or small to be read, for two reasons. First, an image can be decimated and processed at a coarser resolution than usual, resulting in faster localization before OCR is performed (at full resolution, if needed). Second, in real-time applications such as a cell phone app to find and read text, text may initially be acquired from a lower-resolution video image in which it appears too small to be read; once the text's presence and location have been established, a higher-resolution image can be taken in order to resolve the text clearly enough to read it.We demonstrate proof of concept of this approach by describing a novel algorithm for binarizing the image and extracting candidate text features, called "blobs," and grouping and classifying the blobs into text and non-text categories. Experimental results are shown on a variety of images in which the text is resolved too poorly to be clearly read, but is still identifiable by our algorithm as text. Pannag R. Sanketi, Huiying Shen, James M. Coughlan	WACV	1
2010	Anti-blur feedback for visually impaired users of smartphone cameras abstract A wide range of smartphone applications are emerging that employ image processing and computer vision algorithms to interpret the contents of images acquired by the phone's built-in camera, including applications that read product barcodes and recognize a variety of documents and other objects. However, almost all of these applications are designed for normally sighted users; a major barrier for visually impaired users (who might benefit greatly from such applications) is the difficulty of taking good-quality images. To overcome this barrier, this paper focuses on reducing the incidence of motion blur, caused by camera shake and other movements, which is a common cause of poor-quality, unusable images. We propose a simple technique for detecting camera shake, using the smartphone's built-in accelerometer (i.e. tilt sensor) to alert the user in real-time to any shake, providing feedback that enables him/her to hold the camera more steadily. A preliminary experiment with a blind iPhone user demonstrates the feasibility of the approach. Pannag R. Sanketi, James M. Coughlan	ASSETS	1