My name is Ben Eisner, and I’m a Machine Learning and Robotics researcher. I build robotic systems that learn to interact with the unstructured world.

I’m currently a 3rd-Year Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. I’m a member of the Robots Perceiving and Doing Lab, led by Prof. David Held. Right now, I’m working on some techniques for policy transfer. My research is supported in part by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Here is a recent version of my academic cv, my Google Scholar profile, and my Github profile.

You can reach me at ben.a.eisner@gmail.com.

❗❗❗ Recent News ❗❗❗

• 9/10/22: Our paper on learning dense, optimization-based pose estimation for robotics tasks, was accepted to CoRL 2022!

• 7/11/22: I started an internship at DeepMind on the Robotics team in London!

• 6/20/22: Our paper on learning 3D flow for articulation manipulation was nominated for Best Paper at RSS 2022!

• 1/31/22: Our paper on transparent liquid seqmentation was accepted to ICRA 2022!

• 2/28/21: Our paper on learning to grasp objects from grasp proposal was accepted to ICRA 2021!

• 8/31/20: I started my Ph.D. program in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University!

• 3/30/20: I was selected to receive the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for the fellowship class of 2020!

Publications:

2022

TAX-Pose: Task-Specific Cross-Pose Estimation for Robot Manipulation
Chuer Pan*, Brian Okorn*, Harry Zhang*, Ben Eisner*, David Held
CoRL 2022
website | OpenReview

FlowBot3D: Learning 3D Articulation Flow to Manipulate Articulated Objects
Ben Eisner*, Harry Zhang*, David Held
RSS 2022, Best Paper Finalist
website | arXiv

Deep Sequenced Linear Dynamical Systems for Manipulation Policy Learning
M. Nomaan Qureshi, Ben Eisner, David Held
Under review at ICML 2022
website

Self-supervised Transparent Liquid Segmentation for Robotic Pouring
Gautham Narasimhan, Kai Zhang, Ben Eisner, Xingyu Lin, David Held
ICRA 2022
website | arXiv

2021

Robotic Grasping through Combined image-Based Grasp Proposal and 3D Reconstruction
Daniel Yang, Tarik Tosun, Ben Eisner, Volkan Isler, Daniel Lee
ICRA 2021
arxiv

2020

Reward Prediction Error as an Exploration Objective in Deep RL
Riley Simmons-Edler, Ben Eisner, Daniel Yang, Anthony Bisulco, Eric Mitchell, Sebastian Seung, Daniel Lee
IJCAI 2020 (Earlier draft presented at NeurIPS 2020 Workshop on Deep RL)
arxiv

2019

Pixels to Plans: Learning Non-Prehensile Manipulation by Imitating a Planner
Tarik Tosun*, Eric Mitchell*, Ben Eisner, Jinwook Huh, Bhoram Lee, Daewon Lee, Volkan Isler, Sebastian Seung, Daniel Lee
IROS 2019
arxiv | website | video

Q-Learning for Continuous Actions with Cross-Entropy Guided Policies
Riley Simmons-Edler*, Ben Eisner*, Eric Mitchell, Sebastian Seung, Daniel Lee
ICML 2019 Workshop on RL4RealLife
arxiv

2017

Deep Learning Methods for 3D Segmentation of Neural Tissue in EM Images
Ben Eisner
Princeton University Senior Thesis
thesis | project

2016

emoji2vec: Learning emoji representations from their description
Ben Eisner, Tim Rocktäschel, Isabelle Augenstein, Matko Bošnjak, Sebastian Riedel
Best Paper at EMNLP 2016 Workshop on SocialNLP
arxiv | project