Deepak Pathak
Co-founder and CEO of Skild AI; Raj Reddy Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University
- Co-founder and CEO, Skild AI1
- Raj Reddy Associate Professor, School of Computer Science (Robotics Institute; affiliated with the Machine Learning Department), Carnegie Mellon University1
Deepak Pathak is a co-founder and the CEO of Skild AI, which is developing a foundation model for robotics, and the Raj Reddy Associate Professor in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. Pathak's research sits at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning and robotics, with a focus on agents that learn from raw sensory data.1
Career
Pathak's site lists a PhD from UC Berkeley advised by Alyosha Efros and Trevor Darrell, a visiting postdoctoral appointment at UC Berkeley with Pieter Abbeel, and a year as a researcher at Meta AI Research. Pathak now holds the Raj Reddy chair at Carnegie Mellon, awarded in 2024, as a member of the Robotics Institute.1
As co-founder and CEO of Skild AI, Pathak leads work on a single robot "brain" meant to operate many robot bodies and tasks. Skild AI has introduced S1, a robotic foundation model built as an in-context learner that executes a task after being shown a video.13
Research
Pathak's group draws on psychology to build systems that learn using data as their own supervision. Early work on curiosity-driven exploration used prediction error as an intrinsic reward, and later work with students covered legged locomotion over difficult terrain using egocentric vision.145
Skild AI's technical writing on its general-purpose robot brain cites several of Pathak's papers, including work on zero-shot visual imitation and on learning robot affordances from human videos.2
Work
Curiosity-driven exploration by self-supervised prediction (external site: arxiv.org)
First author of a 2017 paper that uses an agent's error in predicting the consequences of its own actions as an intrinsic reward for exploration.4
LocoFormer (external site: arxiv.org)
Co-author of a 2025 paper on a generalist locomotion policy that adapts by accumulating experience in a long context, which Skild AI cites as its in-context learner for locomotion.63
Career timeline
May 15, 2017
First-authored the paper on curiosity-driven exploration by self-supervised prediction.4
Nov 14, 2022
Co-authored a paper on legged locomotion in challenging terrains using egocentric vision.5
2024
Was awarded the Raj Reddy Chair at Carnegie Mellon University.1
Jul 29, 2025
Skild AI published its account of building a general-purpose robotic brain.2
Sep 28, 2025
Co-authored the LocoFormer paper on generalist locomotion via long-context adaptation.6
Other documented roles
Roles the sources document but that are not confirmed as current.
- Researcher for one year, collaborating with Jitendra Malik, Meta AI Research1
Honors and recognition
Related people
More sourced profiles at the same organization, in the same field, or from the same school.
- Amnon ShashuaComputer vision
- Adam GleaveAlso from UC Berkeley
- Aravind SrinivasAlso from UC Berkeley
- Albert GuAlso from Carnegie Mellon
- Bob McGrewRobotics
- Alex SmolaAlso from UC Berkeley
- Byron BootsAlso from Carnegie Mellon
- Alexei A. EfrosAlso from UC Berkeley
- Chelsea FinnAlso from UC Berkeley
- Ali FarhadiAlso from Carnegie Mellon
- Dieter FoxRobotics
- Ali GhodsiAlso from UC Berkeley
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