Under review • 2026
Robust Skills, Brittle Grounding: Diagnosing Restricted Generalization in Vision-Language Action Policies via Multi-Object PickingDavid Emukpere, Romain Deffayet, Jean-Michel Renders
I work on robot learning, with a focus on reinforcement learning and imitation learning for robotics. I care about approaches that enable flexible physical intelligence in the real world, emphasizing robustness, reliability, and generalization. My research spans self-supervised and visual RL, RL fine-tuning of pretrained multimodal policies, and the training and evaluation of generalist robotics policies.
Beyond my research, I’m usually training for long-distance races, from 5Ks to marathons. I’ve been a Manchester United fan since childhood, a passion that carries into both tactical analysis and getting on the pitch whenever possible. I also enjoy spending time playing the piano. These pursuits deepen my interest in how intelligence takes shape in the physical world. I’m particularly drawn to the adaptive motor skills of athletes and musicians, where coordination, reactivity, and improvisation come together. At the same time, I read widely across cognitive science, philosophy, scientific history, and fiction.
Under review • 2026
Robust Skills, Brittle Grounding: Diagnosing Restricted Generalization in Vision-Language Action Policies via Multi-Object PickingDavid Emukpere, Romain Deffayet, Jean-Michel Renders
Under review • 2026
Unsupervised Mode Discovery for Fine-tuning Multimodal Generative PoliciesAlberta Longhini, David Emukpere, Jean-Michel Renders, Seungsu Kim
IROS • 2025
Disentangled Object-Centric Image Representation for RoboticsDavid Emukpere, Romain Deffayet, Bingbing Wu, Romain Brégier, Michael Niemaz, Jean-Luc Meunier, Denys Proux, Jean-Michel Renders, Seungsu Kim
ICRA • 2024
SLIM: Skill Learning with Multiple CriticsDavid Emukpere, Bingbing Wu, Julien Perez, Jean-Michel Renders
Best way to reach me is email.