Denis Yarats
Co-founder and CTO of Perplexity; first author of DrQ-v2 for reinforcement learning from pixels
- Co-founder and CTO, Perplexity126
Denis Yarats is a co-founder and the CTO of Perplexity, according to a November 2024 AWS Startups article that Yarats co-wrote and the speaker page for the April 2026 HumanX conference. The AWS article says Yarats worked as an AI research scientist at Facebook AI Research before co-founding Perplexity. Papers from that period that list Yarats at New York University and Facebook AI Research include DrQ and DrQ-v2, off-policy methods that use data augmentation to learn continuous control directly from pixels, and DrQ-v2's original PyTorch implementation is published under the MIT license in the facebookresearch GitHub organization. With Perplexity colleagues, Yarats is a co-author of DRACO (2026), a benchmark of deep research tasks graded for accuracy, completeness and objectivity.125346
Work
DrQ-v2 (external site: github.com)Open-source code
First author of "Mastering Visual Continuous Control: Improved Data-Augmented Reinforcement Learning" (2021), which lists Yarats at NYU and FAIR; the MIT-licensed facebookresearch/drqv2 repository is the original PyTorch implementation and credits Yarats, Rob Fergus, Alessandro Lazaric and Lerrel Pinto.34
DrQ (external site: arxiv.org)Published research
Co-author, with Ilya Kostrikov and Rob Fergus, of "Image Augmentation Is All You Need: Regularizing Deep Reinforcement Learning from Pixels" (2020), which lists Yarats at New York University and Facebook AI Research.5
DRACO benchmark (external site: arxiv.org)Published research
Co-author, listed with Perplexity, of "DRACO: a Cross-Domain Benchmark for Deep Research Accuracy, Completeness, and Objectivity" (2026), whose tasks are drawn from de-identified Perplexity Deep Research requests.6
Other documented roles
Roles the sources document but that are not confirmed as current.
- AI Research Scientist, Meta (Facebook AI Research)12
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