Siddarth Jain

Siddarth Jain
Siddarth's Quick Links

  • 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

    •  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 & 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.
    •  
    •  NEWS    MERL at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024
      Date: May 13, 2024 - May 17, 2024
      Where: Yokohama, Japan
      MERL Contacts: Anoop Cherian; Radu Corcodel; Stefano Di Cairano; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Jonathan Le Roux; Diego Romeres; William S. Yerazunis
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics, Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • MERL made significant contributions to both the organization and the technical program of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024, which was held in Yokohama, Japan from May 13th to May 17th.

        MERL was a Bronze sponsor of the conference, and exhibited a live robotic demonstration, which attracted a large audience. The demonstration showcased an Autonomous Robotic Assembly technology executed on MELCO's Assista robot arm and was the collaborative effort of the Optimization and Robotics Team together with the Advanced Technology department at Mitsubishi Electric.

        MERL researchers from the Optimization and Robotics, Speech & Audio, and Control for Autonomy teams also presented 8 papers and 2 invited talks covering topics on robotic assembly, applications of LLMs to robotics, human robot interaction, safe and robust path planning for autonomous drones, transfer learning, perception and tactile sensing.
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    See All News & Events for Siddarth

  • Awards

    See All Awards for MERL

  • Internships with Siddarth

    • OR0127: Internship - Deep Learning for Robotic Manipulation

      MERL is looking for a highly motivated and qualified intern to work on deep learning methods for detection and pose estimation of objects using vision and tactile sensing, in manufacturing and assembly environments. This role involves developing, fine-tuning and deploying models on existing hardware. The method will be applied for robotic manipulation where the knowledge of accurate position and orientation of objects within the scene would allow the robot to interact with the objects. The ideal candidate would be a Ph.D. student familiar with the state-of-the-art methods for pose estimation and tracking of objects. The successful candidate will work closely with MERL researchers to develop and implement novel algorithms, conduct experiments, and publish research findings at a top-tier conference. Start date and expected duration of the internship is flexible. Interested candidates are encouraged to apply with their updated CV and list of relevant publications.

      Required Specific Experience

      • Prior experience in Computer Vision and Robotic Manipulation.
      • Experience with ROS and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch are essential.
      • Strong programming skills in Python.
      • Experience with simulation tools, such as PyBullet, Issac Lab, or MuJoCo.

    See All Internships at MERL

  • MERL Publications

    •  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), March 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}
      • }
    •  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}
      • }
    •  Suresh, P., Romeres, D., Dosh, P., Jain, S., "Open Human-Robot Collaboration Systems (OHRCS): A Research Perspective", IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Machine Intelligence (CogML 2024), DOI: 10.1109/​CogMI62246.2024.00023, October 2024, pp. 103-110.
      BibTeX TR2024-150 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Suresh2024nov,
      • author = {Suresh, Prasanth and Romeres, Diego and Dosh, Prashant and Jain, Siddarth},
      • title = {{Open Human-Robot Collaboration Systems (OHRCS): A Research Perspective}},
      • booktitle = {2024 IEEE 6th International Conference on Cognitive Machine Intelligence (CogMI)},
      • year = 2024,
      • pages = {103--110},
      • month = oct,
      • publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
      • doi = {10.1109/CogMI62246.2024.00023},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-150}
      • }
    •  Suresh, P., Jain, S., Doshi, P., Romeres, D., "Open Human-Robot Collaboration using Decentralized Inverse Reinforcement Learning", 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024), DOI: 10.1109/​IROS58592.2024.10801889, October 2024, pp. 7092-7098.
      BibTeX TR2024-135 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Suresh2024oct,
      • author = {Suresh, Prasanth and Jain, Siddarth and Doshi, Prashant and Romeres, Diego},
      • title = {{Open Human-Robot Collaboration using Decentralized Inverse Reinforcement Learning}},
      • booktitle = {2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024)},
      • year = 2024,
      • pages = {7092--7098},
      • month = oct,
      • publisher = {IEEE},
      • doi = {10.1109/IROS58592.2024.10801889},
      • issn = {2153-0866},
      • isbn = {979-8-3503-7770-5},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-135}
      • }
    •  Chang, H., Boularias, A., Jain, S., "Insert-One: One-Shot Robust Visual-Force Servoing for Novel Object Insertion with 6-DoF Tracking", 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024), DOI: 10.1109/​IROS58592.2024.10801884, October 2024, pp. 2935-2942.
      BibTeX TR2024-137 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Chang2024oct,
      • author = {Chang, Haonan and Boularias, Abdeslam and Jain, Siddarth},
      • title = {{Insert-One: One-Shot Robust Visual-Force Servoing for Novel Object Insertion with 6-DoF Tracking}},
      • booktitle = {2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024)},
      • year = 2024,
      • pages = {2935--2942},
      • month = oct,
      • publisher = {IEEE},
      • doi = {10.1109/IROS58592.2024.10801884},
      • issn = {2153-0866},
      • isbn = {979-8-3503-7770-5},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-137}
      • }
    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}
      • }

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  • 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