João Carvalho
Postdoctoral Researcher @ TU Darmstadt
Contact: joao@robot-learning.de
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I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS) group from TU Darmstadt, where I recently obtained my Ph.D. in Computer Science advised by Jan Peters.
My research interests are developing machine learning and reinforcement learning algorithms for robot manipulation. I've developed algorithms that use deep generative models for visuomotor policies, motion planning and grasping, and on reinforcement learning methods to solve contact-rich tasks like insertions. In the past, I've also worked on sample efficient off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms, and on variance reduction techniques for policy gradients.
news
| 13 Mar 2025 | Four papers accepted at the 1st German Robotics Conference. |
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| 01 Feb 2025 | I started a new position as Postdoctoral Researcher at IAS. |
| 17 Jan 2025 | I’ve defended my Ph.D. thesis on Enhancing Robot Manipulation Skills through Learning. |
key publications
2025
2024
2023
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Diminishing Return of Value Expansion Methods in Model-Based Reinforcement LearningIn The Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2023, Kigali, Rwanda, May 1-5, 2023, 2023
2022
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Adapting Object-Centric Probabilistic Movement Primitives with Residual Reinforcement LearningIn 21st IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Humanoids 2022, Ginowan, Japan, November 28-30, 2022, 2022 -
Conditioned Score-Based Models for Learning Collision-Free Trajectory GenerationIn NeurIPS 2022 Workshop on Score-Based Methods, 2022
