Siddarth Jain

Phone: 617-621-7581
Email:

Position:
Research / Technical Staff

Principal Research Scientist
Education:
Ph.D., Northwestern University, 2019
Research Areas:
External Links:
- Google Scholar

Biography

Siddarth's research lies at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. His doctoral thesis investigated mathematical models for probabilistic human intent recognition, shared autonomy for assistive human-robot systems, and perception algorithms involving point cloud processing with geometric methods and machine learning. Prior to joining MERL in 2019, he was affiliated with the Shirley Ryan Abilitylab, Chicago (nation's top ranked physical medicine and rehabilitation research hospital) where his research lead to developments in the assistive robotics domain, involving user studies and interactive robotic systems that integrate perception, machine learning, planning, and control to act with people in practical applications. Currently, Siddarth's research focuses on the core challenges in active perception, robotic manipulation, autonomy, and human-robot interaction.
Recent News & Events
- NEWS MERL contributes to ICRA 2025
  Date: May 19, 2025 - May 23, 2025
  Where: IEEE ICRA
  MERL Contacts: Stefano Di Cairano; Jianlin Guo; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Philip V. Orlik; Arvind Raghunathan; Diego Romeres; Yuki Shirai; Abraham P. Vinod; Yebin Wang
  Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics, Human-Computer Interaction
  Brief
  - MERL made significant contributions to both the organization and the technical program of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025, which was held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, from May 19th to May 23rd.
    
    MERL was a Bronze sponsor of the conference, and MERL researchers chaired four sessions in the areas of Manipulation Planning, Human-Robot Collaboration, Diffusion Policy, and Learning for Robot Control.
    
    MERL researchers presented four papers in the main conference on the topics of contact-implicit trajectory optimization, proactive robotic assistance in human-robot collaboration, diffusion policy with human preferences, and dynamic and model learning of robotic manipulators. In addition, five more papers were presented in the workshops: “Structured Learning for Efficient, Reliable, and Transparent Robots,” “Safely Leveraging Vision-Language Foundation Models in Robotics: Challenges and Opportunities,” “Long-term Human Motion Prediction,” and “The Future of Intelligent Manufacturing: From Innovation to Implementation.”
    
    MERL researcher Diego Romeres delivered an invited talk titled “Dexterous Robotics: From Multimodal Sensing to Real-World Physical Interactions.”
    
    MERL also collaborated with the University of Padua on one of the conference’s challenges: the “3rd AI Olympics with RealAIGym” (https://ai-olympics.dfki-bremen.de).
    
    During the conference, MERL researchers received the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best New Application Paper Award for their paper titled “Smart Actuation for End-Edge Industrial Control Systems.”
    
    About ICRA
    
    The IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) is the flagship conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on research advances and the latest technological developments in robotics. The event attracts over 7,000 participants, 143 partners and exhibitors, and receives more than 4,000 paper submissions.
- 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; Pu (Perry) Wang; Gordon Wichern
  Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
  Brief
  - 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.
See All News & Events for Siddarth
Awards
- 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, Robotics
  Brief
  - 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.
See All Awards for MERL
MERL Publications
- Choi, H.J., Jain, S., "A Unified Framework for Gaussian-Based Scene Representation and Reactive Robot Control", Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2025 Workshop on Gaussian Representations for Robot Autonomy, June 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-096 PDF
  - @inproceedings{Choi2025jun,
  - author = {Choi, Ho Jin and Jain, Siddarth},
  - title = {{A Unified Framework for Gaussian-Based Scene Representation and Reactive Robot Control}},
  - booktitle = {Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2025 Workshop on Gaussian Representations for Robot Autonomy},
  - year = 2025,
  - month = jun,
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-096}
  - }
- De Lazzari, D., Terreran, M., Giacomuzzo, G., Jain, S., Falco, P., Carli, R., Romeres, D., "Human Monitoring with Correlation-based Dynamic Time Warping for Collaborative Assembly", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) - Workshop on The Future of Intelligent Manufacturing: From innovation to implementation, May 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-067 PDF Video
  - @inproceedings{DeLazzari2025may2,
  - author = {De Lazzari, Davide and Terreran, Matteo and Giacomuzzo, Giulio and Jain, Siddarth and Falco, Pietro and Carli, Ruggero and Romeres, Diego},
  - title = {{Human Monitoring with Correlation-based Dynamic Time Warping for Collaborative Assembly}},
  - booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) - Workshop on The Future of Intelligent Manufacturing: From innovation to implementation},
  - year = 2025,
  - month = may,
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-067}
  - }
- De Lazzari, D., Terreran, M., Giacomuzzo, G., Jain, S., Falco, P., Carli, R., Romeres, D., "PACE: Proactive Assistance in Human-Robot Collaboration through Action-Completion Estimation", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-064 PDF Video
  - @inproceedings{DeLazzari2025may,
  - author = {De Lazzari, Davide and Terreran, Matteo and Giacomuzzo, Giulio and Jain, Siddarth and Falco, Pietro and Carli, Ruggero and Romeres, Diego},
  - title = {{PACE: Proactive Assistance in Human-Robot Collaboration through Action-Completion Estimation}},
  - booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  - year = 2025,
  - month = may,
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-064}
  - }
- Hori, C., Kambara, M., Sugiura, K., Ota, K., Khurana, S., Jain, S., Corcodel, R., Jha, D.K., Romeres, D., Le Roux, J., "Interactive Robot Action Replanning using Multimodal LLM Trained from Human Demonstration Videos", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), DOI: 10.1109/ICASSP49660.2025.10887717, 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,
  - doi = {10.1109/ICASSP49660.2025.10887717},
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-034}
  - }
- Cherian, A., Corcodel, R., Jain, S., Romeres, D., "LLMPhy: Complex Physical Reasoning Using Large Language Models and World Models", arXiv, November 2024.
  BibTeX arXiv
  - @article{Cherian2024oct,
  - author = {Cherian, Anoop and Corcodel, Radu and Jain, Siddarth and Romeres, Diego},
  - title = {{LLMPhy: Complex Physical Reasoning Using Large Language Models and World Models}},
  - journal = {arXiv},
  - year = 2024,
  - month = nov,
  - url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.08027}
  - }
See All MERL Publications for Siddarth
Other Publications
- Siddarth Jain and Brenna Argall, "Probabilistic Human Intent Recognition for Shared Autonomy in Assistive Robotics", ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI), 2019.
  BibTeX
  - @Article{jain2019intent,
  - author = {Jain, Siddarth and Argall, Brenna},
  - title = {Probabilistic Human Intent Recognition for Shared Autonomy in Assistive Robotics},
  - booktitle = {ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI)},
  - year = 2019,
  - organization = {ACM}
  - }
- Siddarth Jain and Brenna Argall, "Recursive Bayesian Human Intent Recognition in Shared-Control Robotics", In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2018.
  BibTeX
  - @Inproceedings{jain2018recursive,
  - author = {Jain, Siddarth and Argall, Brenna},
  - title = {Recursive Bayesian Human Intent Recognition in Shared-Control Robotics},
  - booktitle = {In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  - year = 2018,
  - organization = {IEEE}
  - }
- Deepak Gopinath, Siddarth Jain and Brenna D Argall, "Human-in-the-loop optimization of shared autonomy in assistive robotics", IEEE robotics and automation letters, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 247-254, 2016.
  BibTeX
  - @Article{gopinath2016human,
  - author = {Gopinath, Deepak and Jain, Siddarth and Argall, Brenna D},
  - title = {Human-in-the-loop optimization of shared autonomy in assistive robotics},
  - journal = {IEEE robotics and automation letters},
  - year = 2016,
  - volume = 2,
  - number = 1,
  - pages = {247--254},
  - publisher = {IEEE}
  - }
- Siddarth Jain and Brenna Argall, "Grasp detection for assistive robotic manipulation", In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2016.
  BibTeX
  - @Inproceedings{jain2016grasp,
  - author = {Jain, Siddarth and Argall, Brenna},
  - title = {Grasp detection for assistive robotic manipulation},
  - booktitle = {In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  - year = 2016,
  - organization = {IEEE}
  - }
- Siddarth Jain, Ali Farshchiansadegh, Alexander Broad, Farnaz Abdollahi, Ferdinando Mussa-Ivaldi and Brenna Argall, "Assistive robotic manipulation through shared autonomy and a body-machine interface", In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on rehabilitation robotics (ICORR), 2015.
  BibTeX
  - @Inproceedings{jain2015assistive,
  - author = {Jain, Siddarth and Farshchiansadegh, Ali and Broad, Alexander and Abdollahi, Farnaz and Mussa-Ivaldi, Ferdinando and Argall, Brenna},
  - title = {Assistive robotic manipulation through shared autonomy and a body-machine interface},
  - booktitle = {In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on rehabilitation robotics (ICORR)},
  - year = 2015,
  - organization = {IEEE}
  - }
- Siddarth Jain, Katherine A Barsness and Brenna Argall, "Automated and objective assessment of surgical training: detection of procedural steps on videotaped performances", In Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (DICTA), 2015.
  BibTeX
  - @Inproceedings{jain2015automated,
  - author = {Jain, Siddarth and Barsness, Katherine A and Argall, Brenna},
  - title = {Automated and objective assessment of surgical training: detection of procedural steps on videotaped performances},
  - booktitle = {In Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (DICTA)},
  - year = 2015,
  - organization = {IEEE}
  - }
- Siddarth Jain and Brenna Argall, "Automated perception of safe docking locations with alignment information for assistive wheelchairs", In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2014.
  BibTeX
  - @Inproceedings{jain2014automated,
  - author = {Jain, Siddarth and Argall, Brenna},
  - title = {Automated perception of safe docking locations with alignment information for assistive wheelchairs},
  - booktitle = {In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  - year = 2014,
  - organization = {IEEE}
  - }
Software & Data Downloads
- Instance Segmentation GAN
Videos

[ICRA25] Proactive Assistance in Human-Robot Collaboration through Task Progress Estimation

[IROS 2024] Few-shot Transparent Instance Segmentation for Bin Picking

Autonomous Robotic Assembly

Large Language Models for Partially Observable Robotic Task Planning
MERL Issued Patents
- Title: "System and Method for Controlling a Motion of a Robot"
  Inventors: Lin, Chungwei; Wang, Yebin; Quirynen, Rien; Jha, Devesh; Wang, Bingnan; Vetterling, William; Jain, Siddarth; Bortoff, Scott A.
  Patent No.: 12,257,718
  Issue Date: Mar 25, 2025
- Title: "Simulation-in-the-loop Tuning of Robot Parameters for System Modeling and Control"
  Inventors: Jain, Siddarth; Van Baar, Jeroen; Corcodel, Radu Ioan; Sullivan, Alan; Benosman, Mouhacine
  Patent No.: 11,975,451
  Issue Date: May 7, 2024
- Title: "Interactive Tactile Perception Method for Classification and Recognition of Object Instances"
  Inventors: Corcodel, Radu Ioan; Jain, Siddarth; van Baar, Jeroen
  Patent No.: 11,794,350
  Issue Date: Oct 24, 2023
See All Patents for MERL