Renaud Detry

inline_image I am an Associate Professor of robot learning at KU Leuven in Belgium, where I hold a dual appointment in electrical and mechanical engineering (groups PSI and RAM). I sit on the steering committee of Leuven.AI, I am a member of the ELLIS Society, and I am a technical advisor for OpalAI.

Formerly I was group lead for the Perception Systems group at inline_image NASA JPL, Pasadena, CA, and an Assistant Professor at UCLouvain, Belgium. I am a visiting researcher at ULiege and KTH.

My research interests include robot learning and computer vision, and their application to manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, on-orbit operations and planetary exploration. At JPL, I was machine-vision lead for the surface mission of the NASA/ESA Mars Sample Return campaign (summarized in this invited lecture), and I worked on fun climbing robots such as the one shown in this video.

I am an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) and IEEE Transactions on Robot Learning (T-RL), and I regularly serve as associate editor for IROS and ICRA.

Office:	01.07 (at ESAT)
Post:	Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 – box 2441 B–3001 Leuven Belgium
e-mail:
Phone:	+32 16 37 70 36 Students: email only please.
Web:	Google Scholar, LinkedIn, Twitter, KU Leuven, Leuven.AI
ORCID:	0000-0003-0597-1167

News

More announcements available on my LinkedIn feed.

Apr 27, 2026	New RSS paper: Multimodal planning and adaptive l-return stabilizes deep imagination in long-horizon visual MPC!
Apr 27, 2026	New RSS paper: AR-VLA is an autoregressive action expert that boosts the temporal consistency of VLAs and diffusion policies!
Feb 10, 2026	Exciting week + talk at the ROMANDIC winter school!
Nov 19, 2025	ELLIIT Focus Period in Lund
Oct 20, 2025	Two IROS WS invited talks: Perception and Planning for Mobile Manipulation in Changing Environments, and Learning, Planning, and Reasoning in Dynamic Environments
Sep 24, 2025	New paper: Reevaluating CNNs for Spectral Analysis – A Focus on Raman Spectroscopy
Aug 27, 2025	Talk on equivariance, diffusion and RL at UCLA
Aug 20, 2025	Giving a talk at the Generative Physical AI at CASE 2025 tomorrow morning
Aug 05, 2025	New paper: Grasp model designed for rotation equivariance == greatly improved sample efficiency 🌀
Jun 07, 2025	Mini-diffuser reduces by an order of magnitude the time and memory needed to train multi-task vision-language robotic diffusion policies!

Older news →

Selected Recent Publications

See my publication page for a complete list.

AR-VLA: True Autoregressive Action Expert for Vision-Language-Action Models.

Yutong Hu, Jan-Nico Zaech, Nikolay Nikolov, Yuanqi Yao, Sombit Dey, Giuliano Albanese, Renaud Detry, Luc Van Gool, and Danda Paudel.

In Robotics: Science and Systems, 2026.

@inproceedings{hu2026a,
  author = {Hu, Yutong and Zaech, Jan-Nico and Nikolov, Nikolay and Yao, Yuanqi and Dey, Sombit and Albanese, Giuliano and Detry, Renaud and Gool, Luc Van and Paudel, Danda},
  title = {AR-VLA: True Autoregressive Action Expert for Vision-Language-Action Models},
  year = {2026},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  booktitle = {Robotics: Science and Systems},
  primaryclass = {cs.RO},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10126}
}

ELVIS: Ensemble-Calibrated Latent Imagination for Long-Horizon Visual MPC.

Yurui Du, Pinhao Song, Yutong Hu, and Renaud Detry.

In Robotics: Science and Systems, 2026.

@inproceedings{du2026a,
  author = {Du, Yurui and Song, Pinhao and Hu, Yutong and Detry, Renaud},
  title = {ELVIS: Ensemble-Calibrated Latent Imagination for Long-Horizon Visual MPC},
  year = {2026},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  booktitle = {Robotics: Science and Systems},
  primaryclass = {cs.RO},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04709}
}

TASC: Task-Aware Shared Control for Teleoperated Manipulation.

Ze Fu, Pinhao Song, Yutong Hu, and Renaud Detry.

2025.

@misc{fu2025a,
  author = {Fu, Ze and Song, Pinhao and Hu, Yutong and Detry, Renaud},
  title = {TASC: Task-Aware Shared Control for Teleoperated Manipulation},
  year = {2025},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  howpublished = {arXiv:2509.10416 [cs.RO]},
  primaryclass = {cs.RO},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10416}
}

Equivariant Volumetric Grasping.

Pinhao Song, Yutong Hu, Pengteng Li, and Renaud Detry.

2025.

@misc{song2025a,
  author = {Song, Pinhao and Hu, Yutong and Li, Pengteng and Detry, Renaud},
  title = {Equivariant Volumetric Grasping},
  year = {2025},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  howpublished = {arXiv:2507.18847 [cs.RO]},
  primaryclass = {cs.RO},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18847}
}

Mini Diffuser: Fast Multi-task Diffusion Policy Training Using Two-level Mini-batches.

Yutong Hu, Pinhao Song, Kehan Wen, and Renaud Detry.

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2025.

@article{hu2025a,
  author = {Hu, Yutong and Song, Pinhao and Wen, Kehan and Detry, Renaud},
  title = {Mini Diffuser: Fast Multi-task Diffusion Policy Training Using Two-level Mini-batches},
  year = {2025},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  doi = {10.1109/LRA.2025.3632751},
  journal = {{IEEE} Robotics and Automation Letters},
  primaryclass = {cs.RO},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09430},
}

More publications →