Siddarth Jain

Siddarth Jain
Siddarth's Quick Links

  • Biography

    Siddarth's research lies at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. His doctoral thesis investigated mathematical models for probabilistic human intent recognition, shared autonomy for assistive human-robot systems, and perception algorithms involving point cloud processing with geometric methods and machine learning. Prior to joining MERL in 2019, he was affiliated with the Shirley Ryan Abilitylab, Chicago (nation's top ranked physical medicine and rehabilitation research hospital) where his research lead to developments in the assistive robotics domain, involving user studies and interactive robotic systems that integrate perception, machine learning, planning, and control to act with people in practical applications. Currently, Siddarth's research focuses on the core challenges in active perception, robotic manipulation, autonomy, and human-robot interaction.

  • Recent News & Events

    •  NEWS    MERL contributes to IROS 2026
      Date: September 27, 2026 - October 1, 2026
      Where: The IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
      MERL Contacts: Siddarth Jain; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jing Liu; Daniel N. Nikovski; Arvind Raghunathan; Alexander Schperberg; Kei Suzuki; Ye Wang
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Control, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing
      Brief
      • MERL made broad contributions to the technical program and robotics community at the 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2026), held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. MERL researchers presented one main-conference paper and five workshop papers, participated in an editorial board meeting, competed in the Humanoid IKEA Assembly Challenge, and contributed to the organization of an IROS workshop.

        Main Conference Paper
        • ORIGAMI: Object Representation Inferred Geometrically for Articulated ManIpulation, Yunfu Deng and Daniel N. Nikovski (TR2026-141)


          • The work introduces a geometric representation for articulated-object manipulation, enabling robots to infer compact representations of previously unknown articulated mechanisms for downstream learning and control.

        Workshop Papers
        • Deliberate Practice: Learning Robot Skills under a Budget Shivam Vats, Sudarshan Harithas, Mete Akbulut, Arvind Raghunathan, and George Konidaris (TR2026-147)


        • ReCoVLA: VLM-Guided Reward Compilation for Failure Recovery in Vision-Language-Action Policies, Haodi Hu, Chung-Ta Huang, Jing Liu, Ye Wang, Kei Suzuki, Matthew Brand, and Toshiaki Koike-Akino (TR2026-148)


        • Test-Time Attention: Can Robots Better Follow Commands? Jing Liu, Ye Wang, Kei Suzuki, and Toshiaki Koike-Akino (TR2026-142)


        • Read the Manual: Grounding Behavior Tree Synthesis for Multi-Machine Factory Operation, Chak Lam Shek, Ye Wang, Jing Liu, Kei Suzuki, Pratap Tokekar, and Toshiaki Koike-Akino (TR2026-149)


        • DYNAMIT: Dynamic Zero-Shot Manipulation via Instruction-Grounded Visual Tracking and Interception in Industrial Conveyor Environments, Harsh Singh, Kei Suzuki, Ye Wang, Jing Liu, Paola Cascante-Bonilla, and Toshiaki Koike-Akino (TR2026-146)

          Together, these works address a range of challenges in modern robotics, including articulated-object manipulation, efficient robot skill learning, vision-language-action policies, test-time adaptation, autonomous factory operation, and dynamic manipulation. The paper on ReCoVLA was nominated as a spotlight talk.


        Robotics Community Contributions

        MERL Principal Research Scientist Dr. Siddarth Jain participated in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) editorial board meeting at IROS. Dr. Jain serves as an Associate Editor of RA-L, contributing to the peer-review and editorial activities of the robotics research community.

        Former MERL scientist Dr. Diego Romeres was also among the organizers of the 1st International Workshop on Industrial Applications of Robot Learning (IARL 2026). The workshop brought together researchers from academia and industry to discuss how advances in robot learning can be translated into reliable and scalable real-world industrial robotic systems.

        Humanoid IKEA Assembly Challenge

        MERL also participated in the IROS 2026 Humanoid IKEA Assembly Challenge with Team MEL-Craft. The team achieved first place in the competition, demonstrating autonomous humanoid manipulation capabilities for a challenging furniture-assembly task. The MEL-Craft team included MERL researchers Kei Suzuki, Jing Liu, Alexander Schperberg, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, and Ye Wang, with contributions from MERL interns Haodi Hu, Harsh Singh, Chak Lam Shek, and Maxwell Asselmeier. The competition achievement is highlighted separately in MERL's related award announcement.

        About IROS

        The IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) is a major international robotics conference bringing together researchers, engineers, and industry practitioners working across intelligent robots and systems. IROS 2026 took place in Pittsburgh from September 27 to October 1, 2026.

    •  
    •  NEWS    MERL researchers present 9 papers at IEEE ICRA 2026
      Date: June 1, 2026 - June 5, 2026
      Where: Vienna, Austria
      MERL Contacts: Radu Corcodel; Stefano Di Cairano; Purnanand Elango; Siddarth Jain; Alexander Schperberg; Kento Tomita
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics
      Brief
      • MERL researchers presented nine papers at the recently concluded IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2026 in Vienna, Austria. The papers covered a broad set of topics in robotics, including robot perception, visuo-tactile sensing, contact and pose estimation, manipulation, reinforcement learning, diffusion policies, loco-manipulation, contact-implicit trajectory optimization, legged locomotion, localization, and perception-aware planning.

        IEEE ICRA is the flagship conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on research advances and the latest technological developments in robotics. The event attracts nearly 8,000 participants and receives more than 5,000 paper submissions.
    •  

    See All News & Events for Siddarth

  • Awards

    •  AWARD    Honorable Mention Award at NeurIPS 23 Instruction Workshop
      Date: December 15, 2023
      Awarded to: Lingfeng Sun, Devesh K. Jha, Chiori Hori, Siddharth Jain, Radu Corcodel, Xinghao Zhu, Masayoshi Tomizuka and Diego Romeres
      MERL Contacts: Radu Corcodel; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics
      Brief
      • MERL Researchers received an "Honorable Mention award" at the Workshop on Instruction Tuning and Instruction Following at the NeurIPS 2023 conference in New Orleans. The workshop was on the topic of instruction tuning and Instruction following for Large Language Models (LLMs). MERL researchers presented their work on interactive planning using LLMs for partially observable robotic tasks during the oral presentation session at the workshop.
    •  
    See All Awards for MERL

  • Research Highlights

  • Internships with Siddarth

    See All Internships at MERL

  • MERL Publications

    •  Hori, C., Korekata, R., Kambara, M., Masuyama, Y., Jain, S., Corcodel, R., Romeres, D., Le Roux, J., "Plan and Double-Check: Streaming Multimodal Q-Former for Online Robot Action Generation", Interspeech, September 2026.
      BibTeX TR2026-136 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Hori2026sep,
      • author = {{Hori, Chiori and Korekata, Ryosuke and Kambara, Motonari and Masuyama, Yoshiki and Jain, Siddarth and Corcodel, Radu and Romeres, Diego and Le Roux, Jonathan}},
      • title = {{Plan and Double-Check: Streaming Multimodal Q-Former for Online Robot Action Generation}},
      • booktitle = {Interspeech},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-136}
      • }
    •  Yang, Y., Romeres, D., Hori, C., Bertasius, G., Szafir, D., Jain, S., "Sensing Which Modality Matters: Evidence-Gated Regularization for Robust VLA Policies", arXiv, September 2026.
      BibTeX arXiv
      • @article{Yang2026sep,
      • author = {Yang, Yue and Romeres, Diego and Hori, Chiori and Bertasius, Gedas and Szafir, Daniel and Jain, Siddarth},
      • title = {{Sensing Which Modality Matters: Evidence-Gated Regularization for Robust VLA Policies}},
      • journal = {arXiv},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03142}
      • }
    •  Ma, C., Yang, Y., Corcodel, R., Jain, S., Wu, A., Hori, C., Romeres, D., "FurnitureVLA: Learning Long-Horizon Bimanual Furniture Assembly with Vision-Language-Action Model", arXiv, July 2026.
      BibTeX arXiv
      • @article{Ma2026jul,
      • author = {Ma, Chenyang and Yang, Yue and Corcodel, Radu and Jain, Siddarth and Wu, Andrew and Hori, Chiori and Romeres, Diego},
      • title = {{FurnitureVLA: Learning Long-Horizon Bimanual Furniture Assembly with Vision-Language-Action Model}},
      • journal = {arXiv},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = jul,
      • url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01212}
      • }
    •  Sanchez, R.R., Evans, D.J., Losey, D.P., Jain, S., "VOLT: Vision and Language Trajectory Segmentation for Faster-than-Demonstration Policies", arXiv, June 2026.
      BibTeX arXiv
      • @article{Sanchez2026jun,
      • author = {Sanchez, Robert Ramirez and Evans, Daniel J. and Losey, Dylan P. and Jain, Siddarth},
      • title = {{VOLT: Vision and Language Trajectory Segmentation for Faster-than-Demonstration Policies}},
      • journal = {arXiv},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = jun,
      • url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06323v2}
      • }
    •  Jain, S., Choi, H.J., "SplatCtrl: Perception–Action Coupling via Gaussian Scene Representations and Reactive Robot Control", 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), June 2026.
      BibTeX TR2026-069 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Jain2026jun,
      • author = {{Jain, Siddarth and Choi, Ho Jin}},
      • title = {{SplatCtrl: Perception–Action Coupling via Gaussian Scene Representations and Reactive Robot Control}},
      • booktitle = {2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics \& Automation (ICRA)},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = jun,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-069}
      • }
    See All MERL Publications for Siddarth

  • Other Publications

    •  Siddarth Jain and Brenna Argall, "Probabilistic Human Intent Recognition for Shared Autonomy in Assistive Robotics", ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI), 2019.
      BibTeX
      • @Article{jain2019intent,
      • author = {Jain, Siddarth and Argall, Brenna},
      • title = {Probabilistic Human Intent Recognition for Shared Autonomy in Assistive Robotics},
      • booktitle = {ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI)},
      • year = 2019,
      • organization = {ACM}
      • }
    •  Siddarth Jain and Brenna Argall, "Recursive Bayesian Human Intent Recognition in Shared-Control Robotics", In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2018.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{jain2018recursive,
      • author = {Jain, Siddarth and Argall, Brenna},
      • title = {Recursive Bayesian Human Intent Recognition in Shared-Control Robotics},
      • booktitle = {In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
      • year = 2018,
      • organization = {IEEE}
      • }
    •  Deepak Gopinath, Siddarth Jain and Brenna D Argall, "Human-in-the-loop optimization of shared autonomy in assistive robotics", IEEE robotics and automation letters, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 247-254, 2016.
      BibTeX
      • @Article{gopinath2016human,
      • author = {Gopinath, Deepak and Jain, Siddarth and Argall, Brenna D},
      • title = {Human-in-the-loop optimization of shared autonomy in assistive robotics},
      • journal = {IEEE robotics and automation letters},
      • year = 2016,
      • volume = 2,
      • number = 1,
      • pages = {247--254},
      • publisher = {IEEE}
      • }
    •  Siddarth Jain and Brenna Argall, "Grasp detection for assistive robotic manipulation", In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2016.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{jain2016grasp,
      • author = {Jain, Siddarth and Argall, Brenna},
      • title = {Grasp detection for assistive robotic manipulation},
      • booktitle = {In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
      • year = 2016,
      • organization = {IEEE}
      • }
    •  Siddarth Jain, Ali Farshchiansadegh, Alexander Broad, Farnaz Abdollahi, Ferdinando Mussa-Ivaldi and Brenna Argall, "Assistive robotic manipulation through shared autonomy and a body-machine interface", In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on rehabilitation robotics (ICORR), 2015.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{jain2015assistive,
      • author = {Jain, Siddarth and Farshchiansadegh, Ali and Broad, Alexander and Abdollahi, Farnaz and Mussa-Ivaldi, Ferdinando and Argall, Brenna},
      • title = {Assistive robotic manipulation through shared autonomy and a body-machine interface},
      • booktitle = {In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on rehabilitation robotics (ICORR)},
      • year = 2015,
      • organization = {IEEE}
      • }
    •  Siddarth Jain, Katherine A Barsness and Brenna Argall, "Automated and objective assessment of surgical training: detection of procedural steps on videotaped performances", In Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (DICTA), 2015.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{jain2015automated,
      • author = {Jain, Siddarth and Barsness, Katherine A and Argall, Brenna},
      • title = {Automated and objective assessment of surgical training: detection of procedural steps on videotaped performances},
      • booktitle = {In Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (DICTA)},
      • year = 2015,
      • organization = {IEEE}
      • }
    •  Siddarth Jain and Brenna Argall, "Automated perception of safe docking locations with alignment information for assistive wheelchairs", In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2014.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{jain2014automated,
      • author = {Jain, Siddarth and Argall, Brenna},
      • title = {Automated perception of safe docking locations with alignment information for assistive wheelchairs},
      • booktitle = {In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
      • year = 2014,
      • organization = {IEEE}
      • }

  • Software & Data Downloads

  • Videos

  • MERL Issued Patents

    • Title: "One-Shot Robust Visual-Force Robotic Servoing for Novel Object Insertion with 6-DoF Tracking"
      Inventors: Jain, Siddarth; Chang, Haonan; Boularias, Abdeslam
      Patent No.: 12,766,733
      Issue Date: Oct 20, 2026
    • Title: "System and Method for Object Segmentation for Task Performance"
      Inventors: Cherian, Anoop; Jain, Siddarth; Marks, Tim
      Patent No.: 12,728,532
      Issue Date: Sep 8, 2026
    • Title: "Method and System for Generating a Sequence of Actions for Controlling a Robot"
      Inventors: Hori, Chiori; Le Roux, Jonathan; Jha, Devesh; Jain, Siddarth; Corcodel, Radu Ioan; Romeres, Diego; Peng, Puyuang; Liu, Xinyu; Harwath, David
      Patent No.: 12,613,523
      Issue Date: Apr 28, 2026
    • Title: "Eye-on-Hand Reinforcement Learner for Dynamic Grasping with Active Pose Estimation"
      Inventors: Jain, Siddarth; Huang, Baichuan; Yu, Jingjin
      Patent No.: 12,583,111
      Issue Date: Mar 24, 2026
    • Title: "System and Method for Controlling a Motion of a Robot"
      Inventors: Lin, Chungwei; Wang, Yebin; Quirynen, Rien; Jha, Devesh; Wang, Bingnan; Vetterling, William; Jain, Siddarth; Bortoff, Scott A.
      Patent No.: 12,257,718
      Issue Date: Mar 25, 2025
    • Title: "Simulation-in-the-loop Tuning of Robot Parameters for System Modeling and Control"
      Inventors: Jain, Siddarth; Van Baar, Jeroen; Corcodel, Radu Ioan; Sullivan, Alan; Benosman, Mouhacine
      Patent No.: 11,975,451
      Issue Date: May 7, 2024
    • Title: "Interactive Tactile Perception Method for Classification and Recognition of Object Instances"
      Inventors: Corcodel, Radu Ioan; Jain, Siddarth; van Baar, Jeroen
      Patent No.: 11,794,350
      Issue Date: Oct 24, 2023
    See All Patents for MERL