Katherine Liu

I am a research scientist working at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and computer vision to equip embodied agents with greater understanding of the world. I'm particularly excited about building systems that generalize — from perception to decision making — across the open-ended complexity of the real world.

Most recently, this has meant building foundation models for robotics: At TRI, I co-led the development of VLA Foundry, a unified open-source framework for training VLAs at scale, and was a primary contributor to the Large Behavior Models project. I am especially interested in recipes for zero-shot generalization, multimodal VLAs, offline evaluation techniques.

I have a PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT, where I worked with the Robust Robotics Group at CSAIL advised by Dr. Nicholas Roy, where I spent a lot of time trying to make things fly fast and not hit things. Before that, I received my B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from UC San Diego.

Email: the.katherine.liu [at] gmail [dot] com