Research

  • GEMA: Generative Memory for Robotic Manipulation

    Zhiyan Li, Pembe Gizem Ozdil, Ben Zandonati, Ruojin Cai, Hang Le, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Weirui Ye (equal supervision), Yilun Du (equal supervision)

    CoRL 2026 Workshop on Memory for Robot Foundation Models

    TL;DR: GEMA turns a robot's past observations into task-specific guidance: a multimodal language model, acting as a memory foundation model, interprets what the robot saw to generate text-and-image references (or reuses a retrieved observation directly), which a world action model executes while a task agent picks subtasks and checks progress. On three memory-dependent manipulation tasks it averages 81.0% success, 12 points above the strongest memory-augmented baseline.

  • Generalized Planning Interfaces for Agentic Robotics

    Ben Zandonati, Yifan Kang, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling

    CoRL 2026 Workshop on Agentic Robotics

    TL;DR: Generalized planning interfaces let agents specify what a robot should achieve and how it should act, at any level of abstraction. SPROUT supplies the physical variables and constraints needed for execution, raising success by 29 percentage points over less flexible agent-robot interfaces.

  • KeyFlow: Agentic Policy Adaptation with Episodic Memory

    Yifan Kang (co-first author), Ben Zandonati (co-first author), Tomás Lozano-Pérez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling

    CoRL 2026 Learn@Deploy Workshop

    TL;DR: KeyFlow adapts a robot policy without retraining: a coding agent picks a few semantic 3D keypoints, writes short programs that turn an episodic memory of ten demonstrations into a flow field the robot follows, and revises both from its own play rollouts. On 13 RoboCasa tasks it beats π0.5 fine-tuned on ten times as many demonstrations (62.6% vs. 47.8%), and in IsaacSim its flow fields raise a base π0.5 policy's success by 37.2 points.

  • Rational Inverse Reasoning: Few-Shot Imitation by Inferring Programmatic Intent through Planning

    Ben Zandonati, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling

    CoRL 2026 LEAP Workshop

    TL;DR: This paper introduces a framework for few-shot learning from demonstration by inferring the embodied reasoning process behind observed actions. On challenging reasoning tasks, our method achieves strong generalization to new tasks with only 1-3 demonstrations, moving closer towards human performance.

  • Hierarchical Vision-Language Planning for Multi-Step Humanoid Manipulation

    André Schakkal, Ben Zandonati, Zhutian Yang, Navid Azizan

    RSS 2025 Workshop on Robot Planning in the Era of Foundation Models

    IEEE Humanoids 2026 Main Track

    TL;DR: This work introduces a hierarchical and modular vision-language architecture for multi-step humanoid manipulation tasks. Specifically, we leverage vision-language models (VLMs) for high-level planning and action-chunking transformer (ACT) and whole-body RL for mid and low-level control.

  • Investigating Vision Foundational Models for Tactile Representation Learning

    Ben Zandonati, Ruohan Wang, Ruihan Gao, Yan Wu

    2023

    TL;DR: This paper explores the use of vision foundational models and pre-trained representations to enhance tactile representation learning and multi-modal continual learning.

  • Towards Optimal Compression: Joint Pruning and Quantization

    Ben Zandonati, Glenn Bucagu, Adrian Alan Pol, Maurizio Pierini, Olya Sirkin, Tal Kopetz

    2023

    TL;DR: This work presents a method for simultaneously pruning and quantizing neural networks by approximately minimizing the distance in parameter space.

  • FIT: A Metric for Model Sensitivity

    Ben Zandonati, Adrian Alan Pol, Maurizio Pierini, Olya Sirkin, Tal Kopetz

    ICLR 2022

    TL;DR: This paper introduces a Fisher Information Metric approximation method for model sensitivity to low-bit quantization.