Alejandro Escontrela

selected publications

1. 

   Holosoma

   Amazon FAR, Pieter Abbeel, Juyue Chen, Rocky Duan,  Alejandro Escontrela, Manan Gandhi, Samuel Gundry, Xiaoyu Huang, Angjoo Kanazawa, Tomasz Lewicki, Jiaman Li, Karen Liu, Clay Rosenthal, Younggyo Seo, Carlo Sferrazza, Guanya Shi, Linda Shih, Jonathan Tseng, Zhen Wu, Lujie Yang, Brent Yi, and Yuanhang Zhang

   2025

   Bib Code

   @software{Amazon_FAR_and_Abbeel_Holosoma,
     author = {{Amazon FAR} and Abbeel, Pieter and Chen, Juyue and Duan, Rocky and Escontrela, Alejandro and Gandhi, Manan and Gundry, Samuel and Huang, Xiaoyu and Kanazawa, Angjoo and Lewicki, Tomasz and Li, Jiaman and Liu, Karen and Rosenthal, Clay and Seo, Younggyo and Sferrazza, Carlo and Shi, Guanya and Shih, Linda and Tseng, Jonathan and Wu, Zhen and Yang, Lujie and Yi, Brent and Zhang, Yuanhang},
     title = {{Holosoma}},
     year = {2025},
     url = {https://github.com/amazon-far/holosoma},
   }

2. 

   Neural USD: Scalable Scene Editing via Differentiable Universal Scene Description

   Alejandro Escontrela, Shrinu Kushagra, Sjoerd van Steenkiste, Yulia Rubanova, Aleksander Holynski, Kelsey Allen, Kevin Murphy, and Thomas Kipf

   CoRR 2025

   Bib PDF Website

   @article{Escontrela25arXiv_NeuralUSD,
     journal = {CoRR},
     author = {Escontrela, Alejandro and Kushagra, Shrinu and Steenkiste, Sjoerd van and Rubanova, Yulia and Holynski, Aleksander and Allen, Kelsey and Murphy, Kevin and Kipf, Thomas},
     keywords = {Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)},
     title = {Neural USD: Scalable Scene Editing via Differentiable Universal Scene Description},
     publisher = {arXiv},
     copyright = {Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International},
     year = {2025},
     eprint = {2510.23956},
     archiveprefix = {arXiv},
     primaryclass = {cs.CV},
   }

3. 

   GaussGym: An Open-Source Real-To-Sim Framework for Learning Locomotion from Pixels

   Alejandro Escontrela, Justin Kerr, Arthur Allshire, Jonas Frey, Rocky Duan, Carmelo Sferrazza, and Pieter Abbeel

   CoRR 2025

   Bib PDF Code Website

   @article{Escontrela25arXiv_GaussGym,
     journal = {CoRR},
     author = {Escontrela, Alejandro and Kerr, Justin and Allshire, Arthur and Frey, Jonas and Duan, Rocky and Sferrazza, Carmelo and Abbeel, Pieter},
     keywords = {Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI), Robotics (cs.RO)},
     title = {GaussGym: An Open-Source Real-To-Sim Framework for Learning Locomotion from Pixels},
     publisher = {arXiv},
     copyright = {Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International},
     year = {2025},
     eprint = {2510.15352},
     archiveprefix = {arXiv},
     primaryclass = {cs.RO},
   }

4. 

   Learning a Diffusion Model Policy from Rewards via Q-Score Matching

   Michael Psenka*,  Alejandro Escontrela*, Pieter Abbeel, and Yi Ma

   International Conference on Maching Learning 2024

   Bib PDF Code Website

   @article{Psenka24arXiv_QSM,
     journal = {International Conference on Maching Learning},
     author = {Psenka, Michael and Escontrela, Alejandro and Abbeel, Pieter and Ma, Yi},
     keywords = {Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)},
     title = {Learning a Diffusion Model Policy from Rewards via Q-Score Matching},
     publisher = {arXiv},
     copyright = {Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International},
     year = {2024},
     eprint = {2312.11752},
     archiveprefix = {arXiv},
     primaryclass = {cs.LG},
   }

5. 

   Video Prediction Models as Rewards for Reinforcement Learning

   Alejandro Escontrela*, Ademi Adeniji*, Wilson Yan*, Ajay Jain, Xue Bin Peng, Ken Goldberg, Youngwoon Lee, Danijar Hafner, and Pieter Abbeel

   Neural Information Processing Systems 2023

   Bib PDF Website

   @article{Escontrela23arXiv_VIPER,
     journal = {Neural Information Processing Systems},
     author = {Escontrela, Alejandro and Adeniji, Ademi and Yan, Wilson and Jain, Ajay and Peng, Xue Bin and Goldberg, Ken and Lee, Youngwoon and Hafner, Danijar and Abbeel, Pieter},
     keywords = {Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)},
     title = {Video Prediction Models as Rewards for Reinforcement Learning},
     publisher = {arXiv},
     copyright = {Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International},
     year = {2023},
     eprint = {2305.14343},
     archiveprefix = {arXiv},
     primaryclass = {cs.LG},
   }

6. 

   Barkour: Benchmarking Animal-level Agility with Quadruped Robots

   Ken Caluwaerts*, Atil Iscen*, J. Chase Kew*, Wenhao Yu*, Tingnan Zhang*, Daniel Freeman, Kuang-Huei Lee, Lisa Lee, Stefano Saliceti, Vincent Zhuang, Nathan Batchelor, Steven Bohez, Federico Casarini, Jose Enrique Chen, Omar Cortes, Erwin Coumans, Adil Dostmohamed, Gabriel Dulac-Arnold,  Alejandro Escontrela, …

   International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems 2024

   Bib PDF Website

   @article{Caluwaerts23arXiv_barkour,
     journal = {International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems},
     title = {Barkour: Benchmarking Animal-level Agility with Quadruped Robots},
     author = {Caluwaerts, Ken and Iscen, Atil and Kew, J. Chase and Yu, Wenhao and Zhang, Tingnan and Freeman, Daniel and Lee, Kuang-Huei and Lee, Lisa and Saliceti, Stefano and Zhuang, Vincent and Batchelor, Nathan and Bohez, Steven and Casarini, Federico and Chen, Jose Enrique and Cortes, Omar and Coumans, Erwin and Dostmohamed, Adil and Dulac-Arnold, Gabriel and Escontrela, Alejandro and Frey, Erik and Hafner, Roland and Jain, Deepali and Jyenis, Bauyrjan and Kuang, Yuheng and Lee, Edward and Luu, Linda and Nachum, Ofir and Oslund, Ken and Powell, Jason and Reyes, Diego and Romano, Francesco and Sadeghi, Feresteh and Sloat, Ron and Tabanpour, Baruch and Zheng, Daniel and Neunert, Michael and Hadsell, Raia and Heess, Nicolas and Nori, Francesco and Seto, Jeff and Parada, Carolina and Sindhwani, Vikas and Vanhoucke, Vincent and Tan, Jie},
     year = {2024},
     eprint = {2305.14654},
     archiveprefix = {arXiv},
     primaryclass = {cs.RO},
   }

7. 

   Adversarial Motion Priors Make Good Substitutes for Complex Reward Functions

   Alejandro Escontrela, Xue Bin Peng, Wenhao Yu, Tingnan Zhang, Atil Iscen, Ken Goldberg, and Pieter Abbeel

   International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems 2022

   Best Paper Award finalist,

   (0.6%)

   Bib PDF Code Website

   @article{Escontrela22arXiv_AMP_in_real,
     journal = {International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems},
     doi = {10.48550/ARXIV.2203.15103},
     author = {Escontrela, Alejandro and Peng, Xue Bin and Yu, Wenhao and Zhang, Tingnan and Iscen, Atil and Goldberg, Ken and Abbeel, Pieter},
     keywords = {Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI), Robotics (cs.RO), FOS: Computer and information sciences, FOS: Computer and information sciences},
     title = {Adversarial Motion Priors Make Good Substitutes for Complex Reward Functions},
     publisher = {arXiv},
     year = {2022},
     copyright = {Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International},
   }

8. 

   Daydreamer: World Models for Physical Robot Learning

   Philipp Wu*,  Alejandro Escontrela*, Danijar Hafner*, Ken Goldberg, and Pieter Abbeel

   Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 2022

   Bib PDF Code Website

   @article{Wu22CoRL_DayDreamer,
     title = {Daydreamer: World Models for Physical Robot Learning},
     author = {Wu, Philipp and Escontrela, Alejandro and Hafner, Danijar and Goldberg, Ken and Abbeel, Pieter},
     journal = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
     year = {2022},
   }

9. 

   Visual-locomotion: Learning to walk on complex terrains with vision

   Wenhao Yu, Deepali Jain,  Alejandro Escontrela, Atil Iscen, Peng Xu, Erwin Coumans, Sehoon Ha, Jie Tan, and Tingnan Zhang

   Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 2021

   Bib PDF

   @article{Yu21CoRL_VisualLocomotion,
     title = {Visual-locomotion: Learning to walk on complex terrains with vision},
     author = {Yu, Wenhao and Jain, Deepali and Escontrela, Alejandro and Iscen, Atil and Xu, Peng and Coumans, Erwin and Ha, Sehoon and Tan, Jie and Zhang, Tingnan},
     journal = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
     year = {2021},
     url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=NDYbXf-DvwZ},
   }

10. 

    Autonomously Untangling Long Cables

    Vainavi Viswanath*, Kaushik Shivakumar*, Justin Kerr*, Brijen Thananjeyan, Ellen Novoseller, Jeffrey Ichnowski,  Alejandro Escontrela, Michael Laskey, Joseph E. Gonzalez, and Ken Goldberg

    Robotics Proceedings 2022

    Best Systems Paper Award,

    (1.6%)

    Bib PDF Website

    @article{Viswanath22RSS_SGTM,
      title = {Autonomously Untangling Long Cables},
      author = {Viswanath, Vainavi and Shivakumar, Kaushik and Kerr, Justin and Thananjeyan, Brijen and Novoseller, Ellen and Ichnowski, Jeffrey and Escontrela, Alejandro and Laskey, Michael and Gonzalez, Joseph E. and Goldberg, Ken},
      journal = {Robotics Proceedings},
      year = {2022},
      url = {https://roboticsconference.org/2022/program/papers/034/},
    }