Albert Wilcox

I am a PhD student in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing studying machine learning and robotics. I am advised by Professor Animesh Garg.

Previously I did my BA and MS at BAIR with Professor Ken Goldberg. I've also spent time with Nuro and AWS.

Beyond research, I enjoy outdoor activities of any sort, climbing, playing guitar/bass, and endurance sports (I was on Berkeley's triathlon team). Feel free to follow me on Strava!

Email / Resume / Google Scholar / Twitter / Github / LinkedIn

Research

I'm interested in methods utilizing internet-scale data for learning to complete robotic manipulation tasks. Specifically, I'm looking into reinforcement learning, imitation learning and generative modeling.

	QueST: Self-Supervised Skill Abstractions for Learning Continuous Control Atharva Mete, Haotian Xue, Albert Wilcox, Yongxin Chen, Animesh Garg. Preprint, 2024. PDF / Website A novel multitask and fewshot behavior cloning algorithm which first learns to tokenize continuous robot action sequences before using an autoregressive transformer to learn a policy in the token space.
	Self-Supervised Visuo-Tactile Pretraining to Locate and Follow Garment Features Justin Kerr, Huang Huang, Albert Wilcox, Ryan Hoque, Jeffrey Ichnowski, Roberto Calandra, and Ken Goldberg. Robotics Science and Systems (RSS), 2023. PDF / Website Learning a shared latent space between visual and tactile observations which is useful for a variety of downstream tasks.
	Monte Carlo Augmented Actor-Critic for Sparse Reward Deep Reinforcement Learning from Suboptimal Demonstrations Albert Wilcox, Ashwin Balakrishna, Daniel Brown, Jules Dedieu, Wyame Benslimane, Ken Goldberg Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022. PDF / Website / Bibtex An easy-to-implement change that can be made to any off-policy actor critic algorithm to speed up and stabilize sparse reward deep reinforcement learning from demonstrations.
	Learning to Localize, Grasp and Hand Over Unmodified Surgical Needles Albert Wilcox, Justin Kerr, Brijen Thananjeyan, Jeff Ichnowski, Minho Hwang, Samuel Paradis, Danyal Fer, Ken Goldberg IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022. PDF / Website / Bibtex An algorithm combining active sensing, perception and imitation learning to reliably hand unmodified surgical needles from one arm to the other on a daVinci Research Kit surgical robot.
	LS3: Latent Space Safe Sets for Long-Horizon Visuomotor Control of Iterative Tasks Albert Wilcox, Ashwin Balakrishna, Brijen Thananjeyan, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ken Goldberg Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2021. PDF / Website / Bibtex Safe and efficient RL from image observations by leveraging suboptimal demonstrations to structure exploration and examples of constraint violations to satisfy user-specified constraints.
	ThriftyDAgger: Budget-Aware Novelty and Risk Gating for Interactive Imitation Learning Ryan Hoque, Ashwin Balakrishna, Ellen Novoseller, Daniel S. Brown, Albert Wilcox, Ken Goldberg Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2021. Oral Presentation (6.5% of papers). PDF / Website / Bibtex An interactive imitation learning algorithm that reasons about both state novelty and risk to actively query for human interventions. The algorithm balances supervisor burden and task performance more successfully than prior robot-gated algorithms and is competitive with an oracle human-gated baseline.
	Learning Accurate Long-term Dynamics for Model-based Reinforcement Learning Nathan O Lambert, Albert Wilcox, Howard Zhang, Kristofer SJ Pister, Roberto Calandra IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2021. PDF / Website / Bibtex Reframing the model-based RL framework with long-term rather than single step state predictions using continuous "trajectory-based" models.

As with the other 90% of budding ML researchers, I got my website template from Jon Barron.