Kei Suzuki

Kei Suzuki
Kei's Quick Links

  • Biography

    Kei's graduate research focused on audio-visual integration for robots. After joining Mitsubishi Electric in 2022, he worked on computer vision and AI robotics, such as anomaly detection and reinforcement learning for dexterous hands, and since 2024, he has focused on vision-language models, including robust classification against adversarial attacks. At MERL, he explores vision-language-action (VLA) robot foundation models. His broader interests include multimodal perception and cross-embodiment generalization in robotics.

  • Recent News & Events

    •  NEWS    MERL contributes to IROS 2026
      Date: September 27, 2026 - October 1, 2026
      Where: The IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
      MERL Contacts: Siddarth Jain; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jing Liu; Daniel N. Nikovski; Arvind Raghunathan; Alexander Schperberg; Kei Suzuki; Ye Wang
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Control, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing
      Brief
      • MERL made broad contributions to the technical program and robotics community at the 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2026), held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. MERL researchers presented one main-conference paper and five workshop papers, participated in an editorial board meeting, competed in the Humanoid IKEA Assembly Challenge, and contributed to the organization of an IROS workshop.

        Main Conference Paper
        • ORIGAMI: Object Representation Inferred Geometrically for Articulated ManIpulation, Yunfu Deng and Daniel N. Nikovski (TR2026-141)


          • The work introduces a geometric representation for articulated-object manipulation, enabling robots to infer compact representations of previously unknown articulated mechanisms for downstream learning and control.

        Workshop Papers
        • Deliberate Practice: Learning Robot Skills under a Budget Shivam Vats, Sudarshan Harithas, Mete Akbulut, Arvind Raghunathan, and George Konidaris (TR2026-147)


        • ReCoVLA: VLM-Guided Reward Compilation for Failure Recovery in Vision-Language-Action Policies, Haodi Hu, Chung-Ta Huang, Jing Liu, Ye Wang, Kei Suzuki, Matthew Brand, and Toshiaki Koike-Akino (TR2026-148)


        • Test-Time Attention: Can Robots Better Follow Commands? Jing Liu, Ye Wang, Kei Suzuki, and Toshiaki Koike-Akino (TR2026-142)


        • Read the Manual: Grounding Behavior Tree Synthesis for Multi-Machine Factory Operation, Chak Lam Shek, Ye Wang, Jing Liu, Kei Suzuki, Pratap Tokekar, and Toshiaki Koike-Akino (TR2026-149)


        • DYNAMIT: Dynamic Zero-Shot Manipulation via Instruction-Grounded Visual Tracking and Interception in Industrial Conveyor Environments, Harsh Singh, Kei Suzuki, Ye Wang, Jing Liu, Paola Cascante-Bonilla, and Toshiaki Koike-Akino (TR2026-146)

          Together, these works address a range of challenges in modern robotics, including articulated-object manipulation, efficient robot skill learning, vision-language-action policies, test-time adaptation, autonomous factory operation, and dynamic manipulation. The paper on ReCoVLA was nominated as a spotlight talk.


        Robotics Community Contributions

        MERL Principal Research Scientist Dr. Siddarth Jain participated in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) editorial board meeting at IROS. Dr. Jain serves as an Associate Editor of RA-L, contributing to the peer-review and editorial activities of the robotics research community.

        Former MERL scientist Dr. Diego Romeres was also among the organizers of the 1st International Workshop on Industrial Applications of Robot Learning (IARL 2026). The workshop brought together researchers from academia and industry to discuss how advances in robot learning can be translated into reliable and scalable real-world industrial robotic systems.

        Humanoid IKEA Assembly Challenge

        MERL also participated in the IROS 2026 Humanoid IKEA Assembly Challenge with Team MEL-Craft. The team achieved first place in the competition, demonstrating autonomous humanoid manipulation capabilities for a challenging furniture-assembly task. The MEL-Craft team included MERL researchers Kei Suzuki, Jing Liu, Alexander Schperberg, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, and Ye Wang, with contributions from MERL interns Haodi Hu, Harsh Singh, Chak Lam Shek, and Maxwell Asselmeier. The competition achievement is highlighted separately in MERL's related award announcement.

        About IROS

        The IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) is a major international robotics conference bringing together researchers, engineers, and industry practitioners working across intelligent robots and systems. IROS 2026 took place in Pittsburgh from September 27 to October 1, 2026.

    •  

  • Research Highlights

  • MERL Publications

    •  Shek, C.L., Wang, Y., Liu, J., Suzuki, K., Tokekar, P., Koike-Akino, T., "Read the Manual: Grounding Behavior Tree Synthesis for Multi-Machine Factory Operation", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop, September 2026.
      BibTeX TR2026-149 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Shek2026sep,
      • author = {Shek, Chak.Lam and Wang, Ye and Liu, Jing and Suzuki, Kei and Tokekar, Pratap and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki},
      • title = {{Read the Manual: Grounding Behavior Tree Synthesis for Multi-Machine Factory Operation}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-149}
      • }
    •  Singh, H., Suzuki, K., Wang, Y., Liu, J., Cascante-Bonilla, P., Koike-Akino, T., "DYNAMIT: Dynamic Zero-Shot Manipulation via Instruction-Grounded Visual Tracking and Interception in Industrial Conveyor Environments", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop, September 2026.
      BibTeX TR2026-146 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Singh2026sep,
      • author = {Singh, Harsh and Suzuki, Kei and Wang, Ye and Liu, Jing and Cascante-Bonilla, Paola and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki},
      • title = {{DYNAMIT: Dynamic Zero-Shot Manipulation via Instruction-Grounded Visual Tracking and Interception in Industrial Conveyor Environments}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-146}
      • }
    •  Liu, J., Wang, Y., Suzuki, K., Koike-Akino, T., "Test-Time Attention: Can Robots Better Follow Commands?", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) IARL Workshop, September 2026.
      BibTeX TR2026-142 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Liu2026sep,
      • author = {Liu, Jing and Wang, Ye and Suzuki, Kei and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki},
      • title = {{Test-Time Attention: Can Robots Better Follow Commands?}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) IARL Workshop},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-142}
      • }
    •  Hu, H., Huang, C.-T., Liu, J., Wang, Y., Suzuki, K., Brand, M., Koike-Akino, T., "ReCoVLA: VLM-Guided Reward Compilation for Failure Recovery in Vision-Language-Action Policies", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop, September 2026.
      BibTeX TR2026-148 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Hu2026sep,
      • author = {Hu, Haodi and Huang, Chung-Ta and Liu, Jing and Wang, Ye and Suzuki, Kei and Brand, Matthew and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki},
      • title = {{ReCoVLA: VLM-Guided Reward Compilation for Failure Recovery in Vision-Language-Action Policies}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-148}
      • }
    •  Otsu, S., Suzuki, K., Koike-Akino, T., Liu, J., Wang, Y., "Beyond Heavy Log Curation: Perplexity-Based APT Detection via Unsupervised, Context-Augmented Language Models", arXiv, July 2026.
      BibTeX arXiv
      • @article{Otsu2026jul,
      • author = {Otsu, Shoya and Suzuki, Kei and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki and Liu, Jing and Wang, Ye},
      • title = {{Beyond Heavy Log Curation: Perplexity-Based APT Detection via Unsupervised, Context-Augmented Language Models}},
      • journal = {arXiv},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = jul,
      • url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20832}
      • }
    See All MERL Publications for Kei