Published in arXiv preprint, 2026
Recommended citation: Hajj-Ahmad, A., Guha, Z. K., Fofonoff, T., Teoh, Z. E., O'Neill, C. T., Thacher, B., Fala, I., Surendran, V., Wonsick, M., Whitney, P., & Watkins, D. (2026). Koala Gripper: Co-designing Robotic Grippers and Data-Capture Devices for Scaling Dexterous Manipulation Learning. arXiv:2608.20546. paper
Published in Submitted to ICRA 2027, 2026
Recommended citation: Surendran, V., Peri, N., & Watkins, D. (2026). Bridging Handheld and Teleoperated Supervision for Contact-Rich Manipulation via State-Gated Experts. Submitted to the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). paper
Published in RSS 2026 Workshop: It's the Demos, 2026
Recommended citation: Kapoor, K., Khan, S., McCalmon, J., Michel, J., Mohammed, A., Nikiforova, K., Oppenheimer, A., Szabo, V., & Watkins, D. (2026). Maintaining Demonstration Quality in a 100-Robot Teleoperation Pipeline. Workshop on "It's the Demos: A Deep Look at the Role of Demonstration Quality in Imitation-Based Robot Manipulation" at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), Sydney, Australia. paper
Published in MIT Press, 2025
Recommended citation: Tellex, S., & Watkins, D. (2026). Elephants Don’t Write Sonnets: The Grounded Turing Test for Embodied AI. In G. Konidaris (Ed.), Designing an Intelligence. MIT Press. (Forthcoming) paper
Published in CoRL 2024, 2024
Recommended citation: Shang, J., Schmeckpeper, K., May, B. B., Minniti, M. V., Kelestemur, T., Watkins, D., & Herlant, L. (2025, January). Theia: Distilling Diverse Vision Foundation Models for Robot Learning. In Conference on Robot Learning (pp. 724-748). PMLR. paper
Published in IJCAI 2024, 2024
Recommended citation: Cohen, V., Liu, J. X., Mooney, R., Tellex, S., & Watkins, D. (2024, August). A survey of robotic language grounding: tradeoffs between symbols and embeddings. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 7999-8009). paper
Published in ICML 2023 Workshop on The Many Facets of Preference-Based Learning, 2023
Recommended citation: Novoseller, E., Goecks, V. G., Watkins, D., Miller, J., & Waytowich, N. R. (2023). DIP-RL: Demonstration-Inferred Preference Learning in Minecraft. In ICML 2023 Workshop on The Many Facets of Preference-Based Learning. paper
Published in International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2023), 2023
Recommended citation: Choromanski, K., Sehanobish, A., Lin, H., Zhao, Y., Berger, E., Parshakova, T., Pan, A., Watkins, D., Zhang, T., Likhosherstov, V., Basu Roy Chowdhury, S., Dubey, K. A., Jain, D., Sarlos, T., Chaturvedi, S., & Weller, A. (2023, July). Efficient graph field integrators meet point clouds. In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (pp. 5978-6004). PMLR. paper
Published in arXiv preprint, 2023
Recommended citation: Hu, J., Watkins, D., & Allen, P. (2023). Teleoperated Robot Grasping in Virtual Reality Spaces. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.13064. paper
Published in IROS 2022, 2022
Recommended citation: Watkins-Valls, D., Maia H., Varley J., Seshadri M., Sanabria J., Waytowich, N., \& Allen, P. (2022). Mobile Manipulation Leveraging Multiple Views. 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2022 paper
Published in arXiv, 2022
Recommended citation: Watkins, D., Allen, P., Choromanski, K., Varley, J., & Waytowich, N. (2022). Multiple View Performers for Shape Completion. arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.06291. paper
Published in PhD Thesis, Columbia University, 2022
Recommended citation: Watkins, D. (2022). Learning Mobile Manipulation. PhD Thesis, Columbia University. arXiv:2206.03448. paper
Published in NeurIPS 2021 Competitions and Demonstrations Track (PMLR), 2022
Recommended citation: Shah, R., Wang, S. H., Wild, C., Milani, S., Kanervisto, A., Goecks, V. G., Waytowich, N., Watkins-Valls, D., Prakash, B., Mills, E., Garg, D., Fries, A., Souly, A., Chan, J. S., del Castillo, D., & Lieberum, T. (2022). Retrospective on the 2021 MineRL BASALT Competition on Learning from Human Feedback. Proceedings of the NeurIPS 2021 Competitions and Demonstrations Track, PMLR 176:259-272. paper
Published in AAAI-MAKE, 2022
Recommended citation: Goecks, Vinicius G., et al. “Combining Learning from Human Feedback and Knowledge Engineering to Solve Hierarchical Tasks in Minecraft.” ArXiv:2112.03482 [Cs], Dec. 2021. arXiv.org, http://arxiv.org/abs/2112.03482. paper
Published in IROS, 2020
Recommended citation: D. Watkins-Valls, J. Xu, N. Waytowich and P. Allen, "Learning Your Way Without Map or Compass: Panoramic Target Driven Visual Navigation," 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2020, pp. 5816-5823, doi: 10.1109/IROS45743.2020.9341511. paper
Published in ICRA, 2020
Recommended citation: I. Akinola et al., "Accelerated Robot Learning via Human Brain Signals," 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020, pp. 3799-3805, doi: 10.1109/ICRA40945.2020.9196566. paper
Published in NSF, 2020
Recommended citation: Wu, Bohan, Akinola, Iretiayo, Gupta, Abhi, Xu, Feng, Varley, Jacob, Watkins-Valls, David, and Allen, Peter K. Generative Attention Learning: a “GenerAL” framework for high-performance multi-fingered grasping in clutter. Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10164432. Autonomous Robots . Web. doi:10.1007/s10514-020-09907-y. paper
Published in ICRA, 2019
Recommended citation: D. Watkins-Valls, J. Varley and P. Allen, "Multi-Modal Geometric Learning for Grasping and Manipulation," 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2019, pp. 7339-7345, doi: 10.1109/ICRA.2019.8794233. paper
Published in Columbia University, 2017
Recommended citation: Watkins-Valls, D., & Allen, P. (2017). Optimizing the Shape Completion Pipeline. Columbia University.
Published in RSS, 2017
Recommended citation: Jacob Varley, David Watkins, and Peter Allen. “Visual-Tactile Geometric Reasoning (Abstract and Poster)”. In: Data-Driven Manipulation workshop, Robotics: Science and Systems (2017). paper
Published in NEMS, 2017
Recommended citation: David Watkins-Valls, Chaiwen Chou, Caroline Weinberg, Jacob Varley, Lynne Weber, Adam Blanchard, Peter Allen, Joel Stein "Human Robot Interface for Assistive Grasping (Poster)". In: New England Manipulation Symposium (2017). paper
Published in arXiv, 2017
Recommended citation: David Watkins-Valls, Chaiwen Chou, Caroline Weinberg, Jacob Varley, Kenneth Lyons, Sanjay Joshi, Lynne Weber, Joel Stein, and Peter Allen. "Human Robot Interface for Assistive Grasping." arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.02462 (2018). paper
Published in Columbia University, 2014
Recommended citation: Watkins, David. "Scrypt Mining With ASICs." (2017). paper