Siddarth Jain

Phone: 617-621-7581
Email:

Position:
Research / Technical Staff

Principal Research Scientist
Education:
Ph.D., Northwestern University, 2019
Research Areas:
External Links:
- Google Scholar

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 at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024
  Date: May 13, 2024 - May 17, 2024
  Where: Yokohama, Japan
  MERL Contacts: Anoop Cherian; Radu Corcodel; Stefano Di Cairano; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Jonathan Le Roux; Diego Romeres; William S. Yerazunis
  Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics, Speech & Audio
  Brief
  - MERL made significant contributions to both the organization and the technical program of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024, which was held in Yokohama, Japan from May 13th to May 17th.
    
    MERL was a Bronze sponsor of the conference, and exhibited a live robotic demonstration, which attracted a large audience. The demonstration showcased an Autonomous Robotic Assembly technology executed on MELCO's Assista robot arm and was the collaborative effort of the Optimization and Robotics Team together with the Advanced Technology department at Mitsubishi Electric.
    
    MERL researchers from the Optimization and Robotics, Speech & Audio, and Control for Autonomy teams also presented 8 papers and 2 invited talks covering topics on robotic assembly, applications of LLMs to robotics, human robot interaction, safe and robust path planning for autonomous drones, transfer learning, perception and tactile sensing.
- TALK [MERL Seminar Series 2024] Stefanos Nikolaidis presents talk titled Enhancing the Efficiency and Robustness of Human-Robot Interactions
  Date & Time: Friday, March 8, 2024; 1:00 PM
  Speaker: Stefanos Nikolaidis, University of Southern California
  MERL Host: Siddarth Jain
  Research Areas: Machine Learning, Robotics, Human-Computer Interaction
  Abstract
  - While robots have been successfully deployed in factory floors and warehouses, there has been limited progress in having them perform physical tasks with people at home and in the workplace. I aim to bridge the gap between their current performance in human environments and what robots are capable of doing, by making human-robot interactions efficient and robust.
    
    In the first part of my talk, I discuss enhancing the efficiency of human-robot interactions by enabling robot manipulators to infer the preference of a human teammate and proactively assist them in a collaborative task. I show how we can leverage similarities between different users and tasks to learn compact representations of user preferences and use these representations as priors for efficient inference.
    
    In the second part, I talk about enhancing the robustness of human-robot interactions by algorithmically generating diverse and realistic scenarios in simulation that reveal system failures. I propose formulating the problem of algorithmic scenario generation as a quality diversity problem and show how standard quality diversity algorithms can discover surprising and unexpected failure cases. I then discuss the development of a new class of quality diversity algorithms that significantly improve the search of the scenario space and the integration of these algorithms with generative models, which enables the generation of complex and realistic scenarios.
    
    Finally, I conclude the talk with applications in mining operations, collaborative manufacturing and assistive care.
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; Devesh K. Jha; Diego Romeres
  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
MERL Publications
- Suresh, P., Romeres, D., Dosh, P., Jain, S., "Open Human-Robot Collaboration Systems (OHRCS): A Research Perspective", IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Machine Intelligence (CogML 2024), October 2024.
  BibTeX TR2024-150 PDF
  - @inproceedings{Suresh2024nov,
  - author = {{Suresh, Prasanth and Romeres, Diego and Dosh, Prashant and Jain, Siddarth}},
  - title = {Open Human-Robot Collaboration Systems (OHRCS): A Research Perspective},
  - booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Machine Intelligence (CogML 2024)},
  - year = 2024,
  - month = oct,
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-150}
  - }
- Giacomuzzo, G., Terreran, M., Jain, S., Romeres, D., "DECAF: a Discrete-Event based Collaborative Human-Robot Framework for Furniture Assembly", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), October 2024.
  BibTeX TR2024-138 PDF
  - @inproceedings{Giacomuzzo2024oct,
  - author = {Giacomuzzo, Giulio and Terreran, Matteo and Jain, Siddarth and Romeres, Diego}},
  - title = {DECAF: a Discrete-Event based Collaborative Human-Robot Framework for Furniture Assembly},
  - booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  - year = 2024,
  - month = oct,
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-138}
  - }
- Suresh, P., Jain, S., Doshi, P., Romeres, D., "Open Human-Robot Collaboration using Decentralized Inverse Reinforcement Learning", 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024), October 2024.
  BibTeX TR2024-135 PDF
  - @inproceedings{Suresh2024oct,
  - author = {Suresh, Prasanth and Jain, Siddarth and Doshi, Prashant and Romeres, Diego}},
  - title = {Open Human-Robot Collaboration using Decentralized Inverse Reinforcement Learning},
  - booktitle = {2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024)},
  - year = 2024,
  - month = oct,
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-135}
  - }
- Chang, H., Boularias, A., Jain, S., "Insert-One: One-Shot Robust Visual-Force Servoing for Novel Object Insertion with 6-DoF Tracking", 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024), October 2024.
  BibTeX TR2024-137 PDF
  - @inproceedings{Chang2024oct,
  - author = {Chang, Haonan and Boularias, Abdeslam and Jain, Siddarth}},
  - title = {Insert-One: One-Shot Robust Visual-Force Servoing for Novel Object Insertion with 6-DoF Tracking},
  - booktitle = {2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024)},
  - year = 2024,
  - month = oct,
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-137}
  - }
- Cherian, A., Corcodel, R., Jain, S., Romeres, D., "LLMPhy: Complex Physical Reasoning Using Large Language Models and World Models", International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), October 2024.
  BibTeX
  - @article{Cherian2024oct,
  - author = {Cherian, Anoop and Corcodel, Radu and Jain, Siddarth and Romeres, Diego}},
  - title = {LLMPhy: Complex Physical Reasoning Using Large Language Models and World Models},
  - journal = {International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
  - year = 2024,
  - month = oct
  - }
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
- Instance Segmentation GAN
Videos

Autonomous Robotic Assembly

Large Language Models for Partially Observable Robotic Task Planning
MERL Issued Patents
- 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