Diego Romeres
- Phone: 617-621-7561
- Email:
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Position:
Research / Technical Staff
Senior Principal Research Scientist,
Team Leader -
Education:
Ph.D., University of Padova, 2017 -
Research Areas:
External Links:
Diego's Quick Links
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Biography
Diego's research interests are in machine learning, system identification and robotic applications. At MERL he is currently working on applying nonparametric machine learning techniques for the control of robotic platforms. His Ph.D. thesis is about the combination of nonparametric data-driven models and physics-based models in gaussian processes for robot dynamics learning.
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Recent News & Events
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EVENT MERL Contributes to ICASSP 2025 Date: Sunday, April 6, 2025 - Friday, April 11, 2025
Location: Hyderabad, India
MERL Contacts: Wael H. Ali; Petros T. Boufounos; Radu Corcodel; François Germain; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jonathan Le Roux; Yanting Ma; Hassan Mansour; Yoshiki Masuyama; Joshua Rapp; Diego Romeres; Anthony Vetro; Pu (Perry) Wang; Gordon Wichern
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & AudioBrief- MERL has made numerous contributions to both the organization and technical program of ICASSP 2025, which is being held in Hyderabad, India from April 6-11, 2025.
Sponsorship
MERL is proud to be a Silver Patron of the conference and will participate in the student job fair on Thursday, April 10. Please join this session to learn more about employment opportunities at MERL, including openings for research scientists, post-docs, and interns.
MERL is pleased to be the sponsor of two IEEE Awards that will be presented at the conference. We congratulate Prof. Björn Erik Ottersten, the recipient of the 2025 IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing, and Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan, the recipient of the 2025 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award. Both awards will be presented in-person at ICASSP by Anthony Vetro, MERL President & CEO.
Technical Program
MERL is presenting 15 papers in the main conference on a wide range of topics including source separation, sound event detection, sound anomaly detection, speaker diarization, music generation, robot action generation from video, indoor airflow imaging, WiFi sensing, Doppler single-photon Lidar, optical coherence tomography, and radar imaging. Another paper on spatial audio will be presented at the Generative Data Augmentation for Real-World Signal Processing Applications (GenDA) Satellite Workshop.
MERL Researchers Petros Boufounos and Hassan Mansour will present a Tutorial on “Computational Methods in Radar Imaging” in the afternoon of Monday, April 7.
Petros Boufounos will also be giving an industry talk on Thursday April 10 at 12pm, on “A Physics-Informed Approach to Sensing".
About ICASSP
ICASSP is the flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on the research advances and latest technological development in signal and information processing. The event has been attracting more than 4000 participants each year.
- MERL has made numerous contributions to both the organization and technical program of ICASSP 2025, which is being held in Hyderabad, India from April 6-11, 2025.
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NEWS MERL Papers and Workshops at AAAI 2025 Date: February 25, 2025 - March 4, 2025
Where: The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
MERL Contacts: Ankush Chakrabarty; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jing Liu; Kuan-Chuan Peng; Diego Romeres; Ye Wang
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, OptimizationBrief- MERL researchers presented 2 conference papers, 2 workshop papers, and co-organized 1 workshop at the AAAI 2025 conference, which was held in Philadelphia from Feb. 25 to Mar. 4, 2025. AAAI is one of the most prestigious and competitive international conferences in artificial intelligence (AI). Details of MERL contributions are provided below.
- AAAI Papers in Main Tracks:
1. "Forget to Flourish: Leveraging Machine-Unlearning on Pretrained Language Models for Privacy Leakage" by M.R.U. Rashid, J. Liu, T. Koike-Akino, Y. Wang, and S. Mehnaz. [Oral Presentation]
This work proposes a novel unlearning-based model poisoning method that amplifies privacy breaches during fine-tuning. Extensive empirical studies show the proposed method’s efficacy on both membership inference and data extraction attacks. The attack is stealthy enough to bypass detection based defenses, and differential privacy cannot effectively defend against the attacks without significantly impacting model utility.
Paper: https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-017
2. "User-Preference Meets Pareto-Optimality: Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization with Local Gradient Search" by J.H.S. Ip, A. Chakrabarty, A. Mesbah, and D. Romeres. [Poster Presentation]
This paper introduces a sample-efficient multi-objective Bayesian optimization method that integrates user preferences with gradient-based search to find near-Pareto optimal solutions. The proposed method achieves high utility and reduces distance to Pareto-front solutions across both synthetic and real-world problems, underscoring the importance of minimizing gradient uncertainty during gradient-based optimization. Additionally, the study introduces a novel utility function that respects Pareto dominance and effectively captures diverse user preferences.
Paper: https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-018
- AAAI Workshop Papers:
1. "Quantum Diffusion Models for Few-Shot Learning" by R. Wang, Y. Wang, J. Liu, and T. Koike-Akino.
This work presents the quantum diffusion model (QDM) as an approach to overcome the challenges of quantum few-shot learning (QFSL). It introduces three novel algorithms developed from complementary data-driven and algorithmic perspectives to enhance the performance of QFSL tasks. The extensive experiments demonstrate that these algorithms achieve significant performance gains over traditional baselines, underscoring the potential of QDM to advance QFSL by effectively leveraging quantum noise modeling and label guidance.
Paper: https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-025
2. "Quantum Implicit Neural Compression", by T. Fujihashi and T., Koike-Akino.
This work introduces a quantum counterpart of implicit neural representation (quINR) which leverages the exponentially rich expressivity of quantum neural networks to improve the classical INR-based signal compression methods. Evaluations using some benchmark datasets show that the proposed quINR-based compression could improve rate-distortion performance in image compression compared with traditional codecs and classic INR-based coding methods.
Paper: https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-024
- AAAI Workshops Contributed by MERL:
1. "Scalable and Efficient Artificial Intelligence Systems (SEAS)"
K.-C. Peng co-organized this workshop, which offers a timely forum for experts to share their perspectives in designing and developing robust computer vision (CV), machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, and translating them into real-world solutions.
Workshop link: https://seasworkshop.github.io/aaai25/index.html
2. "Quantum Computing and Artificial Intelligence"
T. Koike-Akino served a session chair of Quantum Neural Network in this workshop, which focuses on seeking contributions encompassing theoretical and applied advances in quantum AI, quantum computing (QC) to enhance classical AI, and classical AI to tackle various aspects of QC.
Workshop link: https://sites.google.com/view/qcai2025/
- MERL researchers presented 2 conference papers, 2 workshop papers, and co-organized 1 workshop at the AAAI 2025 conference, which was held in Philadelphia from Feb. 25 to Mar. 4, 2025. AAAI is one of the most prestigious and competitive international conferences in artificial intelligence (AI). Details of MERL contributions are provided below.
See All News & Events for Diego -
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Awards
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AWARD University of Padua and MERL team wins the AI Olympics with RealAIGym competition at IROS24 Date: October 17, 2024
Awarded to: Niccolò Turcato, Alberto Dalla Libera, Giulio Giacomuzzo, Ruggero Carli, Diego Romeres
MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, RoboticsBrief- The team composed of the control group at the University of Padua and MERL's Optimization and Robotic team ranked 1st out of the 4 finalist teams that arrived to the 2nd AI Olympics with RealAIGym competition at IROS 24, which focused on control of under-actuated robots. The team was composed by Niccolò Turcato, Alberto Dalla Libera, Giulio Giacomuzzo, Ruggero Carli and Diego Romeres. The competition was organized by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Technical University of Darmstadt and Chalmers University of Technology.
The competition and award ceremony was hosted by IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) on October 17, 2024 in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Diego Romeres presented the team's method, based on a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm called MC-PILCO.
- The team composed of the control group at the University of Padua and MERL's Optimization and Robotic team ranked 1st out of the 4 finalist teams that arrived to the 2nd AI Olympics with RealAIGym competition at IROS 24, which focused on control of under-actuated robots. The team was composed by Niccolò Turcato, Alberto Dalla Libera, Giulio Giacomuzzo, Ruggero Carli and Diego Romeres. The competition was organized by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Technical University of Darmstadt and Chalmers University of Technology.
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AWARD Honorable Mention Award at NeurIPS 23 Instruction Workshop Date: December 15, 2023
Awarded to: Lingfeng Sun, Devesh K. Jha, Chiori Hori, Siddharth Jain, Radu Corcodel, Xinghao Zhu, Masayoshi Tomizuka and Diego Romeres
MERL Contacts: Radu Corcodel; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, RoboticsBrief- MERL Researchers received an "Honorable Mention award" at the Workshop on Instruction Tuning and Instruction Following at the NeurIPS 2023 conference in New Orleans. The workshop was on the topic of instruction tuning and Instruction following for Large Language Models (LLMs). MERL researchers presented their work on interactive planning using LLMs for partially observable robotic tasks during the oral presentation session at the workshop.
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AWARD Joint University of Padua-MERL team wins Challenge 'AI Olympics With RealAIGym' Date: August 25, 2023
Awarded to: Alberto Dalla Libera, Niccolo' Turcato, Giulio Giacomuzzo, Ruggero Carli, Diego Romeres
MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, RoboticsBrief- A joint team consisting of members of University of Padua and MERL ranked 1st in the IJCAI2023 Challenge "Al Olympics With RealAlGym: Is Al Ready for Athletic Intelligence in the Real World?". The team was composed by MERL researcher Diego Romeres and a team from University Padua (UniPD) consisting of Alberto Dalla Libera, Ph.D., Ph.D. Candidates: Niccolò Turcato, Giulio Giacomuzzo and Prof. Ruggero Carli from University of Padua.
The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) is a premier gathering for AI researchers and organizes several competitions. This year the competition CC7 "AI Olympics With RealAIGym: Is AI Ready for Athletic Intelligence in the Real World?" consisted of two stages: simulation and real-robot experiments on two under-actuated robotic systems. The two robotics systems were treated as separate tracks and one final winner was selected for each track based on specific performance criteria in the control tasks.
The UniPD-MERL team competed and won in both tracks. The team's system made strong use of a Model-based Reinforcement Learning algorithm called (MC-PILCO) that we recently published in the journal IEEE Transaction on Robotics.
- A joint team consisting of members of University of Padua and MERL ranked 1st in the IJCAI2023 Challenge "Al Olympics With RealAlGym: Is Al Ready for Athletic Intelligence in the Real World?". The team was composed by MERL researcher Diego Romeres and a team from University Padua (UniPD) consisting of Alberto Dalla Libera, Ph.D., Ph.D. Candidates: Niccolò Turcato, Giulio Giacomuzzo and Prof. Ruggero Carli from University of Padua.
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MERL Publications
- , "FDPP: Fine-tune Diffusion Policy with Human Preference", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2025.BibTeX TR2025-053 PDF
- @inproceedings{Chen2025may,
- author = {Chen, Yuxin and Jha, Devesh K. and Tomizuka, Masayoshi and Romeres, Diego},
- title = {{FDPP: Fine-tune Diffusion Policy with Human Preference}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
- year = 2025,
- month = may,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-053}
- }
- , "Learning global control of underactuated double pendulum with Model-Based Reinforcement Learning", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) - 3rd AI Olympics with RealAIGym Competition, April 2025.BibTeX TR2025-046 PDF
- @inproceedings{Turcato2025apr,
- author = {Turcato, Niccolò and Cali, Marco and Dalla Libera, Alberto and Giacomuzzo, Giulio and Carli, Ruggero and Romeres, Diego},
- title = {{Learning global control of underactuated double pendulum with Model-Based Reinforcement Learning}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) - 3rd AI Olympics with RealAIGym Competition},
- year = 2025,
- month = apr,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-046}
- }
- , "Interactive Robot Action Replanning using Multimodal LLM Trained from Human Demonstration Videos", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), April 2025.BibTeX TR2025-034 PDF
- @inproceedings{Hori2025mar,
- author = {Hori, Chiori and Kambara, Motonari and Sugiura, Komei and Ota, Kei and Khurana, Sameer and Jain, Siddarth and Corcodel, Radu and Jha, Devesh K. and Romeres, Diego and {Le Roux}, Jonathan},
- title = {{Interactive Robot Action Replanning using Multimodal LLM Trained from Human Demonstration Videos}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
- year = 2025,
- month = mar,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-034}
- }
- , "Coactive Preference-Guided Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization: An Application to Policy Learning in Personalized Plasma Medicine", IEEE Control Systems Letters, February 2025.BibTeX TR2025-021 PDF
- @article{Shao2025feb,
- author = {Shao, Ketong and Chakrabarty, Ankush and Mesbah, Ali and Romeres, Diego},
- title = {{Coactive Preference-Guided Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization: An Application to Policy Learning in Personalized Plasma Medicine}},
- journal = {IEEE Control Systems Letters},
- year = 2025,
- month = feb,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-021}
- }
- , "User Preference Meets Pareto-Optimality in Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization", AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, February 2025.BibTeX TR2025-018 PDF
- @inproceedings{Ip2025feb,
- author = {{{Ip, Joshua Hang Sai and Chakrabarty, Ankush and Mesbah, Ali and Romeres, Diego}}},
- title = {{{User Preference Meets Pareto-Optimality in Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization}}},
- booktitle = {AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
- year = 2025,
- month = feb,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-018}
- }
- , "FDPP: Fine-tune Diffusion Policy with Human Preference", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2025.
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Other Publications
- , "On-line bayesian system identification", Control Conference (ECC), 2016 European, 2016, pp. 1359-1364.BibTeX
- @Inproceedings{romeres2016line,
- author = {Romeres, Diego and Prando, Giulia and Pillonetto, Gianluigi and Chiuso, Alessandro},
- title = {On-line bayesian system identification},
- booktitle = {Control Conference (ECC), 2016 European},
- year = 2016,
- pages = {1359--1364},
- organization = {IEEE}
- }
- , "Online semi-parametric learning for inverse dynamics modeling", Decision and Control (CDC), 2016 IEEE 55th Conference on, 2016, pp. 2945-2950.BibTeX
- @Inproceedings{romeres2016online,
- author = {Romeres, Diego and Zorzi, Mattia and Camoriano, Raffaello and Chiuso, Alessandro},
- title = {Online semi-parametric learning for inverse dynamics modeling},
- booktitle = {Decision and Control (CDC), 2016 IEEE 55th Conference on},
- year = 2016,
- pages = {2945--2950},
- organization = {IEEE}
- }
- , "Online semi-parametric learning for inverse dynamics modeling", Decision and Control (CDC), 2016 IEEE 55th Conference on, 2016, pp. 2945-2950.BibTeX
- @Inproceedings{romeres2016onlinesemiparametric,
- author = {Romeres, Diego and Zorzi, Mattia and Camoriano, Raffaello and Chiuso, Alessandro},
- title = {Online semi-parametric learning for inverse dynamics modeling},
- booktitle = {Decision and Control (CDC), 2016 IEEE 55th Conference on},
- year = 2016,
- pages = {2945--2950},
- organization = {IEEE}
- }
- , "Classical vs. Bayesian methods for linear system identification: Point estimators and confidence sets", Control Conference (ECC), 2016 European, 2016, pp. 1365-1370.BibTeX
- @Inproceedings{tprando2016classical,
- author = {Prando, Giulia and Romeres, Diego and Pillonetto, Gianluigi and Chiuso, Alessandro},
- title = {Classical vs. Bayesian methods for linear system identification: Point estimators and confidence sets},
- booktitle = {Control Conference (ECC), 2016 European},
- year = 2016,
- pages = {1365--1370},
- organization = {IEEE}
- }
- , "Online identification of time-varying systems: A Bayesian approach", Decision and Control (CDC), 2016 IEEE 55th Conference on, 2016, pp. 3775-3780.BibTeX
- @Inproceedings{tprando2016online,
- author = {Prando, Giulia and Romeres, Diego and Chiuso, Alessandro},
- title = {Online identification of time-varying systems: A Bayesian approach},
- booktitle = {Decision and Control (CDC), 2016 IEEE 55th Conference on},
- year = 2016,
- pages = {3775--3780},
- organization = {IEEE}
- }
- , "Region of attraction of power systems", IFAC Proceedings Volumes, Vol. 46, No. 27, pp. 49-54, 2013.BibTeX
- @Article{munz2013region,
- author = {Muenz, Ulrich and Romeres, Diego},
- title = {Region of attraction of power systems},
- journal = {IFAC Proceedings Volumes},
- year = 2013,
- volume = 46,
- number = 27,
- pages = {49--54},
- publisher = {Elsevier}
- }
- , "Novel results on slow coherency in consensus and power networks", Control Conference (ECC), 2013 European, 2013, pp. 742-747.BibTeX
- @Inproceedings{romeres2013novel,
- author = {Romeres, Diego and Doerfler, Florian and Bullo, Francesco},
- title = {Novel results on slow coherency in consensus and power networks},
- booktitle = {Control Conference (ECC), 2013 European},
- year = 2013,
- pages = {742--747},
- organization = {IEEE}
- }
- , "Distributed multi-hop reactive power compensation in smart micro-grids subject to saturation constraints", Decision and Control (CDC), 2012 IEEE 51st Annual Conference on, 2012, pp. 1118-1123.BibTeX
- @Inproceedings{bolognani2012distributed,
- author = {Bolognani, Saverio and Carron, Andrea and Di Vittorio, Alberto and Romeres, Diego and Schenato, Luca and Zampieri, Sandro},
- title = {Distributed multi-hop reactive power compensation in smart micro-grids subject to saturation constraints},
- booktitle = {Decision and Control (CDC), 2012 IEEE 51st Annual Conference on},
- year = 2012,
- pages = {1118--1123},
- organization = {IEEE}
- }
- , "On-line bayesian system identification", Control Conference (ECC), 2016 European, 2016, pp. 1359-1364.
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Software & Data Downloads
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Videos
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MERL Issued Patents
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Title: "System and Method for Robust Robotic Manipulation using Chance Constrained Optimization"
Inventors: Jha, Devesh; Raghunathan, Arvind U.; Romeres, Diego
Patent No.: 12,049,007
Issue Date: Jul 30, 2024 -
Title: "OBJECT MANIPULATION WITH COLLISION AVOIDANCE USING COMPLEMENTARITY CONSTRAINTS"
Inventors: Raghunathan, Arvind U.; Jha, Devesh; Romeres, Diego
Patent No.: 11,883,962
Issue Date: Jan 30, 2024 -
Title: "System and Method for Robotic Assembly Based on Adaptive Compliance"
Inventors: Nikovski, Daniel N.; Romeres, Diego; Jha, Devesh; Yerazunis, William S.
Patent No.: 11,673,264
Issue Date: Jun 13, 2023 -
Title: "System and Method for Policy Optimization using Quasi-Newton Trust Region Method"
Inventors: Jha, Devesh; Raghunathan, Arvind U; Romeres, Diego
Patent No.: 11,650,551
Issue Date: May 16, 2023 -
Title: "Systems and Methods Automatic Anomaly Detection in Mixed Human-Robot Manufacturing Processes"
Inventors: Laftchiev, Emil; Romeres, Diego
Patent No.: 11,472,028
Issue Date: Oct 18, 2022 -
Title: "Systems and Methods for Advance Anomaly Detection in a Discrete Manufacturing Process with a Task Performed by a Human-Robot Team"
Inventors: Laftchiev, Emil; Romeres, Diego
Patent No.: 11,442,429
Issue Date: Sep 13, 2022 -
Title: "System and Design of Derivative-free Model Learning for Robotic Systems"
Inventors: Romeres, Diego; Libera, Alberto Dalla; Jha, Devesh; Nikovski, Daniel Nikolaev
Patent No.: 11,389,957
Issue Date: Jul 19, 2022 -
Title: "System and Method for Thermal Control Based on Invertible Causation Relationship"
Inventors: Laftchiev, Emil; Nikovski, Daniel N.; Romeres, Diego
Patent No.: 11,280,514
Issue Date: Mar 22, 2022 -
Title: "System and Method for Automatic Error Recovery in Robotic Assembly"
Inventors: Nikovski, Daniel Nikolaev; Jha, Devesh; Romeres, Diego
Patent No.: 11,161,244
Issue Date: Nov 2, 2021
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Title: "System and Method for Robust Robotic Manipulation using Chance Constrained Optimization"
