Unnat Jain

I will be joining the University of California, Irvine in 2025 as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. My research focuses on building general-purpose embodied intelligence, situated at the intersection of computer vision (perception) and robot learning (action). I am also investigating broader applications of AI for Social Good and AI for Science.

Currently, I am a Research Scientist at Skild AI. Previously, I spent two years as a researcher at Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) Labs and postdoc at Robotics Institute at CMU with Abhinav Gupta, Deepak Pathak, and Xinlei Chen. I received my PhD from UIUC advised by Alex Schwing & Svetlana Lazebnik, and graduated from IIT Kanpur before that.

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:

• 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 (SSL): Adapting self-supervision lessons from CV/NLP to embodied agents.
• Multi-Agent Learning: Designing systems for collaborative tasks requiring multiple agents or robots.

AI + Science:

• Vision + Science: eg. incorporating satellite imagery for climate simulation, pre-training on synthetic data in these data-scarce domains, etc.
• RL + Science: eg. capturing sequential decision making, non-differentiable losses, teacher-student learning of neural surrogates for numerical simulation, etc.

Education

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

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