Deepak Pathak

Deepak Pathak is an academic researcher in artificial intelligence and robotics. He is the Raj Reddy Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is a member of the Robotics Institute and is affiliated with the Machine Learning Department.

Education

Pathak received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He earned his PhD in Robotics from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was advised by Alyosha Efros and Trevor Darrell.

Academic career

After completing his doctorate, Pathak spent a year as a researcher at Meta AI Research, collaborating with Jitendra Malik, and served as a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, working with Pieter Abbeel.

He later joined Carnegie Mellon University, where he leads a research group focused on artificial intelligence at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, and robotics.

His research addresses learning-based methods for embodied agents, including self-supervised learning, representation learning, and robot learning from visual and sensory data.

Pathak is best known for pioneering curiosity-driven learning for reinforcement learning agents, most notably the Intrinsic Curiosity Module (ICM) introduced in 2017. This work addressed a fundamental bottleneck in robotics and RL: how agents learn in sparse-reward or no-reward environments. It was adopted conceptually by teams at OpenAI, Google Brain, Meta AI, and robotics labs working on manipulation and locomotion.

Pathak is developing a general-purpose brain for robotics with a long-term goal of AGI grounded in the physical world, self-supervised learning, artificial curiosity, and sim2real adaptation for robot learning.

Pathak co-founded Skild AI with Abhinav Gupta, it is a company developing foundation models for robotics.

Awards and honors

Pathak has received several academic awards and recognitions, including the Sloan Research Fellowship, and the MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 Award.