Krishna Murthy Jatavallabhula

World Models for Robots

I am an incoming assistant professor with the CS department at Johns Hopkins University, where I will direct the SciPhy lab.

I strive to build full-stack robotic systems that perceive, reason, and act with human-level efficiency, ultimately surpassing them. My work lies at the perception-action interface, tackling both how robots should represent the world around them, and how they use it for action.

Prior to this, I spent time as a research scientist at Meta’s robotics team, as a postdoc at MIT CSAIL and as a PhD candidate at Universite de Montreal. My work has been recognized with PhD fellowship awards from NVIDIA and Google, a best-paper award from IEEE RAL, and an induction to the RSS Pioneers 2020 cohort.

News

Oct 19, 2025 Announcing the SciPhy lab at Johns Hopkins University, starting Fall 2026.
Jun 12, 2025 By Fall 2026, I will join the CS department at Johns Hopkins University as an assistant professor.
Sep 15, 2024 I joined FAIR, Meta as an AI research scientist.
Sep 13, 2024 I will serve as an area chair for CVPR 2025.
Sep 12, 2024 I completed an eventful 2.5-year postdoc stint at MIT CSAIL.
May 31, 2024 Serving as OpenReview chair for CoRL 2024
Feb 29, 2024 Speaking at the UMD/Microsoft future leaders in robotics and AI seminar series
Jan 28, 2024 6 papers accepted to ICRA 2024.
Jan 22, 2024 Serving as associate editor for IROS and RA-L.
Sep 27, 2023 Another webpage update, featuring new work, including ConceptGraphs.
Feb 11, 2023 Long overdue webpage update, including the featured Conceptfusion work.
Mar 14, 2022 I moved to MIT to start my potsdoc with Josh Tenenbaum and Antonio Torralba.
Mar 10, 2022 Got my PhD with grade: exceptional!
Feb 1, 2022 Serving as associate editor for IROS 2022
Sep 14, 2021 Organizing workshops Diff3D ICCV 2021, and the PRIBR at Neurips 2021.
Sep 4, 2021 Teaching the realistic/advanced image synthesis class at McGill university (Fall 2021).
Jan 21, 2021 Awarded a Google PhD fellowship (declined)
Dec 20, 2020 Organizing the rethinking ML papers workshop at ICLR 2021
Nov 30, 2020 Honored to have received an NVIDIA graduate fellowship for 2021-22
Nov 9, 2020 gradSLAM is available as an open-source PyTorch framework here
Sep 2, 2020 Organizing the robot learning seminar series at Mila
Aug 31, 2020 Organizing the differentiable vision, graphics, physics workshop at Neurips 2020
Jul 5, 2020 Selected to the RSS pioneers cohort for 2020
Jun 4, 2020 Our paper, MapLite, named best paper, IEEE RAL 2019.
Feb 11, 2020 Our paper on fully differentiable dense SLAM will be (virtually) presented at ICRA 2020
Nov 13, 2019 Released NVIDIA Kaolin: a 3D deep learning library

Featured publications

  1. A gif depicting the 3D mapping process implemented as part of ConceptGraphs.

    ConceptGraphs: Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Perception and Planning

    ICRA 2024
  2. A gif depicting the types of multimodal queries (text, image, audio, click) supported by ConceptFusion.

    ConceptFusion: Open-set Multimodal 3D Mapping

    RSS 2023
  3. A few physical systems implemented in gradSim.

    gradSim: Differentiable simulation for system identification and visuomotor control

    ICLR 2021
  4. An overview of the various components of gradSLAM

    gradSLAM: Dense SLAM meets automatic differentiation

    Krishna Murthy JatavallabhulaGanesh Iyer, and Liam Paull
    ICRA 2020