Quan Vuong

Vuong has written that as an undergraduate he worked with Keith Ross on reinforcement learning and with Godfried Toussaint on computational geometry, and also did research on synthetic biology and spectral clustering; a paper he contributed to on the complexity of two-dimensional binary patterns appeared at the 2015 IAPR International Conference on Machine Vision Applications. His team developed a smart driving assistant app that won the UAE’s national innovation competition for university students, receiving a cash prize worth $250,000. He also trained as a debater and served as vice president of the student government.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

He pursued a PhD at the University of California San Diego, advised by Henrik I. Christensen and Hao Su, in the fields of deep reinforcement learning, computer vision, and robotics. During his PhD, he did research internships at MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry Research (2019), Google Research (2020), and the robotics team at Google Brain (2021).⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

The paper “RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale” was submitted to arXiv, with Vuong as one of its authors.⁠[2][2][2]

He is one of the authors of the RT-2 paper. The work incorporates vision-language models trained on Internet-scale data directly into end-to-end robotic control to boost generalization and enable emergent semantic reasoning.⁠[3][3][3][3]

Vuong and Pannag Sanketi announced Open X-Embodiment in a Google DeepMindGoogle DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry post: working with 33 academic labs, the team pooled data from 22 different robot types into a dataset, and released RT-1-X, a model derived from RT-1 and trained on that dataset, showing that skills transfer across many robot embodiments. RT-1-X was tested in five research labs on five commonly used robots, with an average 50% improvement in success rate over the methods those labs had developed. The related paper was submitted to arXiv on the 13th of that month.⁠[4][4][4][4][5][5]

Vuong co-founded Physical Intelligence with Karol Hausman, Adnan Esmail, Chelsea Finn, Lachy Groom, Brian Ichter, and Sergey Levine. The company is based in San Francisco and aims to develop a model that can control any robot to do any task; Redpoint invested in its Series A in 2024.⁠[6][6][6][7]

Physical Intelligence released its first generalist robot policy, π0, which combines large-scale multi-task and multi-robot data collection with a new network architecture; Vuong is one of the authors.⁠[8][9][7]

At the Runway AIRunwayRunway (Runway AI, Inc.) is a New York–based artificial intelligence company that grew out of the ITP program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2018. It develops video generation models and tools for the film, advertising and creative industries, has released the Gen-1 through Gen-4.5 series of models, and has extended its research to “general world models” that simulate the world in real time.Open the full entry Summit in San Francisco, Vuong, as co-founder of Physical Intelligence, spoke with The Bot Company co-founder and CTO Paril JainParil JainParil Jain is a robotics and AI engineer and the co-founder and chief technology officer of The Bot Company, a home-robot company; he previously led the AI tech team at Tesla.Open the full entry in the session “The State of General-Purpose Robotics,” discussing the different paths the field is taking toward general-purpose robotics.⁠[10][10][10]

Personal website: https://quanvuong.github.io/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

Physical Intelligence: Official website: https://www.pi.website/ (opens in a new window).⁠[6]