Jiafei Duan - MolmoAct2: Action Reasoning Models for Real-World Deployments

Talking Robotics #89 Speaker Jiafei Duan Title MolmoAct2: Action Reasoning Models for Real-World Deployments Speaker Bio Jiafei Duan is an incoming Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore, School of Computing. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he was advised by Professors Dieter Fox and Ranjay Krishna. His work lies at the intersection of robotics and computer vision, with a focus on robotics foundation models — particularly scalable data collection and generation, grounding vision–language models in robotic reasoning, and improving robust generalization in robot learning. His research has been featured in MIT Technology Review, GeekWire, VentureBeat, and Business Wire, and has appeared at top AI and robotics venues including ICLR, ICML, RSS, CoRL, ECCV, IJCAI, CoLM, and EMNLP. Among his honors are the Best Paper Award at Ubiquitous Robots 2023, the Best Paper Award at the CoRL RememberRL Workshop 2025, and a Spotlight Award at ICLR 2024. Speaker Links: Personal Website: https://duanjiafei.com Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?... Chapters 00:00 Presenter Introduction 01:41 Presentation 44:35 Q&A 01:05:10 End Talking Robotics is a series of virtual seminars about Robotics and its interaction with other relevant fields, such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Design Research, Human-Robot Interaction, among others. We aim to promote reflections, dialogues, and a place to network. Organized by Silvia Tulli, Riddhiman Laha, Nitin Ragothaman, and Niveditha Kalavakonda. Email: talkingrobotics at gmail dot com Web Page: https://talking-robotics.github.io Twitter: @talkingrobotics