I am a researcher working at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and computer vision to equip embodied agents with greater understanding of the world for better decision making. I'm particularly excited enabling general-purpose embodied agents by bridging 3D understanding and embodied actions in the real world to reconstruct, reason, and react. Most recently, I've been building zero-shot algorithms to support robotic manipulation and investigating foundation models for vision and robotics. I am currently a Senior Research Scientist in the Large Behavior Models research team at the Toyota Research Institute.

Research interests: Robot learning, Object-Centric Representations, Zero-Shot Vision, Embodied Foundation Models

I have a PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT. During my graduate studies, I conducted research with the Robust Robotics Group at CSAIL, advised by Dr. Nicholas Roy. My thesis focused on navigation and estimation in GPS-denied environments of size, weight, and power constrained vehicles. Before that, I obtained my B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, San Diego.

Below are a few selected publications. For more, check out my Research page or my Google Scholar. You can email me at the dot katherine dot liu at gmail dot com.