Jonathan Francis

See full publication list on Google Scholar.

Selected Papers

	Learning Versatile Humanoid Manipulation with Touch Dreaming Y. Niu, Z. Fang, B. Chen, S. Zhou, R. Senthilkumaran, H. Zhang, B. Chen, C. Qiu, H. E. Tseng, J. Francis, D. Zhao arXiv, 2026 paper website
	RIO: Flexible Real-time Robot I/O for Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning P. A. Ortega-Kral, E. Xing, A. Bucker, V. Luk, J. Kim, O. Kwon, A. Xie, N. Sobanbabu, Y. Yuan, M. Lee, D. Ameria, B. Ayapilla, J. Bussell, G. Shi, J. Francis, J. Oh To appear: 22nd Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS 2026) paper website
	LightTact: A Visual-Tactile Fingertip Sensor for Deformation-Independent Contact Sensing C Lin, B Huo, M Yu, E Ruppel, B Chen, J Francis, D Zhao To appear: 22nd Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS 2026) paper website
	SOFTMAP: Sim2Real Soft Robot Forward Modeling via Topological Mesh Alignment and Physics Prior Z. Ma, U. Yoo, J. Francis, W. Zhi, J. Ichnowski, J. Oh arXiv, 2026 paper website
	APEX: Learning Adaptive High-Platform Traversal for Humanoid Robots Y. Wang, T. Leng, C. Lin, S. Liu, S. Simon, B. Chen, J. Francis, D. Zhao arXiv, 2026 paper website
	GRAPPA: Generalizing and Adapting Robot Policies via Online Agentic Guidance A. Bucker, P. Ortega-Kral, J. Francis, J. Oh IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L, 2026) —> IROS 2026 + RSS SemRob 2025 paper website
	DYMO-Hair: Generalizable Volumetric Dynamics Modeling for Robot Hair Manipulation C Zhao, U Yoo, AN Chaudhury, G Nam, J Francis, J Ichnowski, J Oh 43rd IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA 2026) [Oral] paper website
	STRIVE: Structured Representation Integrating VLM Reasoning for Efficient Object Navigation H. Zhu, Z. Li, Z. Liu, W. Wang, J. Zhang, J. Francis, J. Oh 43rd IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA 2026) + RSS SemRob 2025 paper website
	LongComp: Long-Tail Compositional Zero-Shot Generalization for Robust Trajectory Prediction B Stoler, J Francis, J Oh arXiv, 2025 paper
	Visuo-Acoustic Hand Pose and Contact Estimation Y. Mao, U. Yoo, Y Yao, S. N. Syed, L. Bondi, J. Francis, J. Oh, J. Ichnowski arXiv, 2025 paper website
	RCG: Safety-Critical Scenario Generation for Robust Autonomous Driving via Real-World Crash Grounding B. Stoler, J. Yang, J. Francis, J. Oh arXiv, 2025 paper
	KineSoft: Learning Proprioceptive Manipulation Policies with Soft Robot Hands U. Yoo, J. Francis, J. Oh, J. Ichnowski 9th Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2025) [Oral] + ICLR WRL 2025 paper website
	GraphEQA: Using 3D Semantic Scene Graphs for Real-time Embodied Question Answering S. Saxena, B. Buchanan, C. Paxton, B. Chen, N. Vaskevicius, L. Palmieri, J. Francis, O. Kroemer 9th Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2025) + RSS SemRob 2025 paper website
	SEAL: Towards Safe Autonomous Driving via Skill-Enabled Adversary Learning for Closed-Loop Scenario Generation B. Stoler, I. Navarro, J. Francis, J. Oh IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L, 2025) —> ICRA 2026 paper code
	MOSAIC: Generating Consistent, Privacy-Preserving Scenes from Multiple Depth Views in Multi-Room Environments Z. Liu, H. Zhu, R. Chen, J. Francis, S. Hwang, J. Zhang, J. Oh 20th International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2025) paper website
	Your Learned Constraint is Secretly a Backward Reachable Tube M. Qadri, G. Swamy, J. Francis, M. Kaess, A. Bajcsy 2nd Reinforcement Learning Conference (RLC 2025) paper
	Human2LocoMan: Learning Versatile Quadrupedal Manipulation with Human Pre-Training Y. Niu, Y. Zhang, M. Yu, C. Lin, C. Li, Y. Wang, Y. Yang, W. Yu, T. Zhang, B. Chen, J. Francis, Z. Li, J. Tan, D. Zhao 21st Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS 2025) + RSS EgoAct 2025 paper website
	STRAP: Robot Sub-Trajectory Retrieval for Augmented Policy Learning M. Memmel, J. Berg, B. Chen, A. Gupta†, J. Francis† 13th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025) + CoRL X-Embodiment 2024 paper arxiv website code
	CaDRE: Controllable and Diverse Generation of Safety-Critical Driving Scenarios using Real-World Trajectories P. Huang, W. Ding, B. Stoler, J. Francis, B. Chen, D. Zhao 42nd IEEE-RAS International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2025) paper
	RoPotter: Toward Robotic Pottery and Deformable Object Manipulation with Structural Priors U. Yoo, A. Hung, J. Francis, J. Oh, J. Ichnowski 23rd IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids 2024) ['Best Oral Finalist' award] paper arxiv website
	SafeShift: Safety-Informed Distribution Shifts for Robust Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving B. Stoler, I. Navarro, M. Jana, S. Hwang, J. Francis, J. Oh 35th IEEE-ITS Intelligent Vehicles (IV 2024) paper arxiv code
	Enhancing Vision-Language Models with Scene Graphs for Traffic Accident Understanding A. Lohner, F. Compagno, J. Francis, A. Oltramari 2nd IEEE International Automated Vehicle Validation Conference (IAVVC 2024) ['Best Paper Runner-up' award] paper arxiv
	Learning Unified Multi-Sensory Object Property Representations for Robot Learning via Interactive Perception G. Tatiya, J. Francis, H.-H. Wu, Y. Bisk, J. Sinapov 41st IEEE-RAS International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2024) paper arxiv code
	Cross-Tool and Cross-Behavior Perceptual Knowledge Transfer for Grounded Object Recognition G Tatiya, J Francis, J Sinapov arXiv, 2024 paper code
	Toward general-purpose robots via foundation models: A survey and meta-analysis Y. Hu, Q. Xie, V. Jain, J. Francis, J. Patrikar, N. Keetha, S. Kim, Y. Xie, T. Zhang, H.-S. Fang, S. Zhao, S. Omidshafiei, D.-K. Kim, A.-a. Agha-mohammadi, K. Sycara, M. Johnson-Roberson, D. Batra, X. Wang, S. Scherer, C. Wang, Z. Kira, F. Xia, Y. Bisk arXiv*, 2023 paper repo
	What Went Wrong? Closing the Sim-to-Real Gap via Differentiable Causal Discovery P. Huang, X. Zhang, Z. Cao, S. Liu, M. Xu, W. Ding, J. Francis, B. Chen, D. Zhao 7th Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2023) paper arxiv website
	Transferring Implicit Knowledge of Non-Visual Object Properties Across Heterogeneous Robot Morphologies G. Tatiya, J. Francis, J. Sinapov 40th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2023) paper arxiv code
	Core Challenges in Embodied Vision-Language Planning J. Francis, N. Kitamura, F. Labelle, X. Lu, I. Navarro, J. Oh Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR 2022) paper arxiv
	Learn-to-Race: A Multimodal Control Environment for Autonomous Racing J. Herman, J. Francis, S. Ganju, B. Chen, A. Koul, A. Gupta, A. Skabelkin, I. Zhukov, M. Kumskoy, E. Nyberg 16th IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2021) paper arxiv website code
	Diverse and Admissible Trajectory Forecasting through Multimodal Context Understanding S. H. Park, G. Lee, M. Bhat, J. Seo, M. Kang, J. Francis, A. R. Jadhav, P. P. Liang, L.-P. Morency 16th CVF European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2020) paper arxiv code