Portrait de Liam Paull

Liam Paull

Membre académique principal
paulll@mila.quebec
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeur adjoint, Université de Montréal, Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage profond
Robotique
Vision par ordinateur
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Biographie

Liam Paull est professeur adjoint à l'Université de Montréal et codirige le Laboratoire de robotique et d’IA intégrative de Montréal (REAL). Son laboratoire se concentre sur les problèmes de robotique, y compris la construction de représentations du monde (pour la localisation et la cartographie simultanées, par exemple), la modélisation de l'incertitude et la construction de meilleurs flux de travail pour enseigner de nouvelles tâches aux agents robotiques (notamment par la simulation ou la démonstration). Auparavant, Liam Paull a été chercheur au Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) du Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), où il a dirigé le projet de voiture autonome financé par le Toyota Research Institute (TRI). Il a également été chercheur postdoctoral au laboratoire de robotique marine du MIT, où il a travaillé sur la technique SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) pour les robots sous-marins. Il a obtenu son doctorat en 2013 à l'Université du Nouveau-Brunswick : il s’y est intéressé à la planification robuste et adaptative pour les véhicules sous-marins. Il est cofondateur et directeur de la Fondation Duckietown, dont l'objectif est de rendre accessibles à tous·tes les expériences d'apprentissage de la robotique.

Étudiants actuels

Publications

FlowMaps: Modeling Long-Term Multimodal Object Dynamics with Flow Matching
Francesco Argenziano
Miguel Saavedra-Ruiz
Sacha Morin
Charlie Gauthier
Daniele Nardi
Liam Paull
Joint spatial and temporal understanding of 3D scenes is a crucial requirement for robots deployed in everyday household environments. Such … (voir plus)agents must not only comprehend and navigate spatial layouts, but also reason about how these spaces evolve over time. In particular, humans interact with objects daily, causing them to change position throughout the environment and making it difficult for robots to reliably associate current observations with previously seen objects. However, these interactions are not random: human habits and routines induce spatio-temporally consistent patterns in object locations, which robotic agents can potentially learn and then exploit for downstream tasks such as navigation. To this end, we introduce FlowMaps, a latent flow matching model for estimating multimodal distributions over the future locations of dynamic objects in a continuous 3D space. By learning the implicit dependencies among objects and their temporal evolution, FlowMaps predicts likely changes in object locations conditioned on past human interactions, while supporting generalization across previously unseen environments that share similar object routines. To demonstrate the utility of this method, we deploy FlowMaps in a downstream dynamic Object Navigation task in both simulated and real-world environments. Across more than 600 episodes, FlowMaps outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, showing that modeling object dynamics through continuous, multimodal spatio-temporal distributions improves robotic search and navigation in changing household environments. Code and additional material is available at https://fra-tsuna.github.io/flowmaps/.
2026-06-17
arXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Scaling Self-Play for End-to-End Driving
Luke Rowe
Roger Girgis
Rodrigue De Schaetzen
Daphne Cornelisse
Alaap Grandhi
Felix Heide
Eugene Vinitsky
Christopher Pal
Liam Paull
End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on offline human-demonstration datasets that provide limited state coverage and o… (voir plus)ften no closed-loop feedback, making them prone to compounding errors when deployed in closed-loop and brittle to long-tail agent interactions. To overcome these limitations, we propose an alternative strategy for training end-to-end driving models: large-scale self-play directly from pixels in simulation. While prior self-play approaches have shown promising transfer to real-world driving, they typically assume vectorized Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) observations that are incompatible with end-to-end policies operating directly on sensor observations. To this end, we introduce Gigapixel, a high-throughput batched driving simulator with perspective rendering, enabling scalable self-play directly from pixel observations. Rather than targeting compute-costly photorealistic sensor simulation, Gigapixel renders a simplified bounding-box world that preserves essential scene structure while achieving throughput at 50k agent steps per second. Since direct pixel-space self-play RL is prohibitively sample-inefficient at end-to-end model scale, we propose self-play DAgger training: we train pixel-based policies in self-play via on-policy distillation from a privileged RL teacher. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we subsequently transfer the self-play trained policies to real-world sensor data through lightweight perception adaptation. Policies trained in Gigapixel and adapted to real-world sensor data achieve competitive performance on the HUGSIM and NAVSIM-v2 benchmarks without human trajectory supervision. Moreover, scaling self-play training yields proportional gains in policy performance, establishing self-play as a practical and scalable strategy for training end-to-end models.
2026-06-16
arXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
3D Scene Graphs: Open Challenges and Future Directions
Dennis Rotondi
Francesco Argenziano
Sebastian Koch
Nathan Hughes
Martin Buechner
Johanna Wald
Lukas Rosenberger Schmid
Daniele Nardi
Abhinav Valada
Liam Paull
Federico Tombari
Luca Carlone
Kai O. Arras
3D Scene Graphs (3DSGs) have emerged as a powerful representation for spatial AI by combining geometric grounding with semantic and relation… (voir plus)al abstractions of the environment. Their expressiveness has made them relevant to a broad range of problems in robotics and computer vision, including manipulation, navigation, task planning, scene understanding, and many others. However, the field remains fragmented: different communities adopt distinct formulations, construction pipelines, and evaluation protocols, making it difficult to compare methods, identify common assumptions, and assess remaining challenges for robust real-world deployment. This survey provides a unified and critical review of 3DSGs, with particular emphasis on open challenges and future directions. We first formalize 3DSGs under a common definition and analyze the principal modeling choices that characterize existing formulations, including node and edge attributes, hierarchical structure, dynamic scene representations, and affordance-aware extensions. We then review how 3DSGs are built from raw sensory observations, discussing the most common terminologies, conventions, and techniques. Finally, we examine downstream applications and evaluation strategies, from intrinsic graph quality to task-level performance. To support the community, we also provide a dedicated website that organizes and extends the surveyed content, accessible at https://3dscenegraphs.com/.
2026-06-14
arXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
PerceptTwin: Semantic Scene Reconstruction for Iterative LLM Planning and Verification
Charlie Gauthier
Sacha Morin
Liam Paull
Simulation environments are useful for both robot policy learning and planning verification and validation. Traditionally, the process of cr… (voir plus)eating a simulation was onerous. Creating a bespoke simulation environment for each individual environment that a robot would operate in was simply infeasible. In this work, we introduce PerceptTwin, a fully automatic pipeline that constructs interactive simulations directly from semantic scene representations produced by a robot's perception stack. PerceptTwin combines open-vocabulary object maps with 3D asset generation, affordance prediction, and commonsense condition checking. These interactive simulations can be used to validate and refine plans before they are executed on the robot hardware. Borrowing from the AI alignment literature, we also introduce an LLM judge that verifies plan correctness and alignment with human preferences. Experiments show that PerceptTwin feedback allows LLM planners to refine plans, enhance safety, and resist harmful black-box prompting attacks. In our suite of tasks, PerceptTwin improves plan success by an average of approximately 39% for GPT5, GPT5Mini, and GPT5Nano planners. Additionally, PerceptTwin also improves human plan verification by up to 18% on average for plans that fail due to unfilled skill preconditions. Our results demonstrate the potential of open-vocabulary scene simulation from robot perception as a foundation for safer, more reliable robot planning.
2026-06-01
arXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Predictive Spatio-Temporal Scene Graphs for Semi-Static Scenes
Miguel Saavedra-Ruiz
Charlie Gauthier
Kumaraditya Gupta
Shima Shahfar
Kirsty Ellis
Steven Parkison
Liam Paull
We have seen tremendous recent progress in our ability to build "spatio-semantic" representations that enable robots to perform complex reas… (voir plus)oning across geometry and semantics. However, the vast majority of these methods lack any ability to perform reasoning across time. This is a desirable property in situations where a robot repeatedly observes an environment where instances may change in between observations, but in a structured way. Consider as an example a home environment where the location of a mug typically moves from the cupboard to a countertop to the sink and then back to the cupboard on a daily basis. We should be able to learn this cyclic behavior and use it to predict the state of the mug in the future. In this work, we propose a method that is able to perform this type of tempo-spatio-semantic reasoning. Underpinning the method is a filter, Perpetua
2026-04-29
arXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Constrained Group Relative Policy Optimization
Roger Girgis
Rodrigue De Schaetzen
Luke Rowe
Azalee Robitaille
Christopher Pal
Liam Paull
2026-02-04
arXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
SHAPO: Sharpness-Aware Policy Optimization for Safe Exploration
Kaustubh Mani
Yann Pequignot
Vincent Mai
Liam Paull
Safe exploration is a prerequisite for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents in safety-critical domains. In this paper, we approach s… (voir plus)afe exploration through the lens of epistemic uncertainty, where the actor’s sensitivity to parameter perturbations serves as a practical proxy for regions of high uncertainty. We propose Sharpness-Aware Policy Optimization (SHAPO), a sharpness-aware policy update rule that evaluates gradients at perturbed parameters, making policy updates pessimistic with respect to the actor’s epistemic uncertainty. Analytically we show that this adjustment implicitly reweighs policy gradients, amplifying the influence of rare unsafe actions while tempering contributions from already safe ones, thereby biasing learning toward conservative behavior in under-explored regions. Across several continuous-control tasks, our method consistently improves both safety and task performance over existing baselines, significantly expanding their Pareto frontiers.
2025-12-31
International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (Poster))
openreview.net
openreview.net
Perpetua: Multi-Hypothesis Persistence Modeling for Semi-Static Environments
Miguel Saavedra-Ruiz
Samer B. Nashed
Charlie Gauthier
Liam Paull
Many robotic systems require extended deployments in complex, dynamic environments. In such deployments, parts of the environment may change… (voir plus) between subsequent robot observations. Most robotic mapping or environment modeling algorithms are incapable of representing dynamic features in a way that enables predicting their future state. Instead, they opt to filter certain state observations, either by removing them or some form of weighted averaging. This paper introduces Perpetua, a method for modeling the dynamics of semi-static features. Perpetua is able to: incorporate prior knowledge about the dynamics of the feature if it exists, track multiple hypotheses, and adapt over time to enable predicting of future feature states. Specifically, we chain together mixtures of"persistence"and"emergence"filters to model the probability that features will disappear or reappear in a formal Bayesian framework. The approach is an efficient, scalable, general, and robust method for estimating the states of features in an environment, both in the present as well as at arbitrary future times. Through experiments on simulated and real-world data, we find that Perpetua yields better accuracy than similar approaches while also being online adaptable and robust to missing observations.
2025-10-18
2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Object-Centric Agentic Robot Policies
Sacha Morin
Kumaraditya Gupta
Mahtab Sandhu
Charlie Gauthier
Francesco Argenziano
Kirsty Ellis
Liam Paull
Executing open-ended natural language queries in previously unseen environments is a core problem in robotics. While recent advances in imit… (voir plus)ation learning and vision-language modeling have enabled promising end-to-end policies, these models struggle when faced with complex instructions and new scenes. Their short input context also limits their ability to solve tasks over larger spatial horizons. In this work, we introduce OCARP, a modular agentic robot policy that executes user queries by using a library of tools on a dynamic inventory of objects. The agent builds the inventory by grounding query-relevant objects using a rich 3D map representation that includes open-vocabulary descriptors and 3D affordances. By combining the flexible reasoning abilities of an agent with a general spatial representation, OCARP can execute complex open-vocabulary queries in a zero-shot manner. We showcase how OCARP can be deployed in both tabletop and mobile settings due to the underlying scalable map representation.
2025-09-22
NeurIPS.cc/2025/Workshop/SpaVLE (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
OpenLex3D: A Tiered Evaluation Benchmark for Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Representations
Christina Kassab
Sacha Morin
Martin Büchner
Matias Mattamala
Kumaraditya Gupta
Abhinav Valada
Liam Paull
Maurice Fallon
3D scene understanding has been transformed by open-vocabulary language models that enable interaction via natural language. However, at pre… (voir plus)sent the evaluation of these representations is limited to datasets with closed-set semantics that do not capture the richness of language. This work presents OpenLex3D, a dedicated benchmark for evaluating 3D open-vocabulary scene representations. OpenLex3D provides entirely new label annotations for scenes from Replica, ScanNet++, and HM3D, which capture real-world linguistic variability by introducing synonymical object categories and additional nuanced descriptions. Our label sets provide 13 times more labels per scene than the original datasets. By introducing an open-set 3D semantic segmentation task and an object retrieval task, we evaluate various existing 3D open-vocabulary methods on OpenLex3D, showcasing failure cases, and avenues for improvement. Our experiments provide insights on feature precision, segmentation, and downstream capabilities. The benchmark is publicly available at: https://openlex3d.github.io/.
2025-09-17
NeurIPS.cc/2025/Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Scenario Dreamer: Vectorized Latent Diffusion for Generating Driving Simulation Environments
Luke Rowe
Roger Girgis
Anthony Gosselin
Liam Paull
Christopher Pal
Felix Heide
We introduce Scenario Dreamer, a fully data-driven generative simulator for autonomous vehicle planning that generates both the initial traf… (voir plus)fic scene - comprising a lane graph and agent bounding boxes - and closed-loop agent behaviours. Existing methods for generating driving simulation environments encode the initial traffic scene as a rasterized image and, as such, require parameter-heavy networks that perform unnecessary computation due to many empty pixels in the rasterized scene. Moreover, we find that existing methods that employ rule-based agent behaviours lack diversity and realism. Scenario Dreamer instead employs a novel vectorized latent diffusion model for initial scene generation that directly operates on the vectorized scene elements and an autoregressive Transformer for data-driven agent behaviour simulation. Scenario Dreamer additionally supports scene extrapolation via diffusion inpainting, enabling the generation of unbounded simulation environments. Extensive experiments show that Scenario Dreamer outperforms existing generative simulators in realism and efficiency: the vectorized scene-generation base model achieves superior generation quality with around 2x fewer parameters, 6x lower generation latency, and 10x fewer GPU training hours compared to the strongest baseline. We confirm its practical utility by showing that reinforcement learning planning agents are more challenged in Scenario Dreamer environments than traditional non-generative simulation environments, especially on long and adversarial driving environments.
2025-06-12
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (Accept)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Poutine: Vision-Language-Trajectory Pre-Training and Reinforcement Learning Post-Training Enable Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Luke Rowe
Rodrigue De Schaetzen
Roger Girgis
Christopher Pal
Liam Paull
We present Poutine, a 3B-parameter vision-language model (VLM) tailored for end-to-end autonomous driving in long-tail driving scenarios. Po… (voir plus)utine is trained in two stages. To obtain strong base driving capabilities, we train Poutine-Base in a self-supervised vision-language-trajectory (VLT) next-token prediction fashion on 83 hours of CoVLA nominal driving and 11 hours of Waymo long-tail driving. Accompanying language annotations are auto-generated with a 72B-parameter VLM. Poutine is obtained by fine-tuning Poutine-Base with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) using less than 500 preference-labeled frames from the Waymo validation set. We show that both VLT pretraining and RL fine-tuning are critical to attain strong driving performance in the long-tail. Poutine-Base achieves a rater-feedback score (RFS) of 8.12 on the validation set, nearly matching Waymo's expert ground-truth RFS. The final Poutine model achieves an RFS of 7.99 on the official Waymo test set, placing 1st in the 2025 Waymo Vision-Based End-to-End Driving Challenge by a significant margin. These results highlight the promise of scalable VLT pre-training and lightweight RL fine-tuning to enable robust and generalizable autonomy.
2025-06-11
ArXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org