Unnat Jain

Biography

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. Toward building general-purpose embodied intelligence, my research focuses on the intersection of computer vision (perception) and robot learning (action).

I have worked across industry, academia, and startups at Meta‘s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) Labs, Carnegie Mellon University, and Skild AI, collaborating with Abhinav Gupta, Deepak Pathak, and Xinlei Chen. I received my PhD from UIUC, advised by Alex Schwing and Svetlana Lazebnik, and previously graduated from IIT Kanpur.

Opportunities

I am actively seeking motivated students interested in joining my research group. If you mention your interests in working with me in your application, I will review them carefully.

Deadline for Ph.D. Applications: December 15th

UC Irvine is a resourceful, friendly, and warm ecosystem and the campus is ideal for learning-tinkering-building AI systems.

For Current UCI Students: If you are interested in collaborating, please email me with:

1. Your resume.
2. Your UCI transcript.
3. A description of your research interests, including your performance in relevant courses (AI/ML).

Core Research Themes

Accelerate generalization and scale-up embodied intelligence via:

• Vision-Language-Action Models: Efficient pre-, mid-, post-training strategies.
• Human-to-Robot Learning: Extracting action insights from human videos.
• Sim-to-Real Transfer: Scaling embodied AI using advanced simulation.
• Pre-training & Self-Supervised Learning: Adapting self-supervision lessons from CV/NLP to embodied agents.
• Multi-Agent Learning: Designing systems for collaborative tasks requiring multiple agents or robots.

Education

Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)

B.Tech., Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Kanpur)