Ainaz Eftekhar

I am a PhD student at the University of Washington in Computer Science and Engineering supervised by Prof. Ali Farhadi and Prof. Ranjay Krishna (RAIVN Lab). I'm also a graduate student researcher with PRIOR team at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2).

In the summers of 2023 and 2024, I was a research intern with at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), where I worked closely with Kuo-Hao Zeng and Kiana Ehsani.

Previously, I received my Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology. During the final year of my bachelor's program, I was a visiting student at EPFL where I worked in VILAB under the supervision of Prof. Amir Zamir.

My research interests lie in the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, embodied-AI, and Robotics.

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News
  • 08/2024: Accepted for UW + Amazon Science Hub Fellowship (1 year of funding)
  • 06/2024: Starting my internship with the PRIOR team at Allen Institute for AI (AI2)
  • 01/2024: "Selective Visual Representations Improve Convergence and Generalization for Embodied-AI" has been accepted as ICLR 2024 [Spotlight, 5%]
  • 06/2023: Starting my internship with the PRIOR team at Allen Institute for AI (AI2)
Publications & Preprints
Convergent Functions, Divergent Forms
Ainaz Eftekhar*, Hyeonseong Jeon*, Aaron Walsman, Kuo-Hao Zeng, Ali Farhadi, Ranjay Krishna
ArXiv 2025 (in submission)
project page / arXiv / code

LOKILOKI Logo (Locally Optimized Kinematic Instantiations) is a compute-efficient co-design framework that discovers diverse, high-performing robot morphologies (divergent forms) using shared control policies (convergent functions).

Point Arena: Probing Multimodal Grounding Through Language-Guided Pointing
Long Cheng*, Jiafei Duan*, Yi Ru Wang, Haoquan Fang, Boyang Li, Yushan Huang, Elvis Wang, Ainaz Eftekhar, Jason Lee, Wentao Yuan, Rose Hendrix, Noah A. Smith, Fei Xia, Dieter Fox, Ranjay Krishna,
ArXiv 2025 (in submission)
project page / arXiv / code

PointArena is a comprehensive platform for evaluating multimodal pointing across diverse reasoning scenarios.

The One RING Logo : a Robotic Indoor Navigation Generalist
Ainaz Eftekhar, Rose Hendrix, Luca Weihs, Jiafe Duan, Ege Caglar, Jordi Salvador, Alvaro Herrasti, Winson Han, Eli VanderBilt, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Ali Farhadi, Ranjay Krishna Kiana Ehsani*, Kuo-Hao Zeng*
Arxiv 2025 (in submission)
project page / arXiv / code [coming soon]

RING is an embodiment-agnostic policy, trained solely in simulation with diverse randomly initialized embodiments at scale. RING generalizes to diverse real-world embodiments despite being trained exclusively in simulation without access to the real robot configurations.

Selective Visual Representations Improve Convergence and Generalization for Embodied-AI
Ainaz Eftekhar*, Kuo-Hao Zeng*, Jiafei Duan, Ali Farhadi, Ani Kembhavi, Ranjay Krishna
ICLR, 2024 [Spotlight]
project page / arXiv / code

Inspired by selective attention in humans—the process through which people filter their perception based on their experiences, knowledge, and the task at hand—we introduce a parameter-efficient approach to filter visual stimuli for Embodied-AI.

Omnidata: A Scalable Pipeline for Making Multi-Task Mid-Level Vision Datasets from 3D Scans
Ainaz Eftekhar*, Alexander Sax*, Roman Bachmann, Jitendra Malik, Amir Zamir
ICCV, 2021
project page / arXiv / code

A pipeline to resample comprehensive 3D scans from the real-world into static multi-task vision datasets.

Puzzle-AE: Novelty Detection in Images Through Solving Puzzles
Mohammadreza Salehi, Ainaz Eftekhar* Niousha Sadjadi, Mohammad Hossein Rohban, Hamid R. Rabiee
arXiv , 2020
arXiv / code

A self-supervised approach to Anomaly Detection.

Honors & Awards
  • 2024: UW + Amazon Science Hub Fellowship (1 year of funding)
  • 2021: EPFL Summer Research Fellowship: Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne
  • 2020: Top 5% Academic Ranking: Sharif University of Technology
  • 2016-2015: Bronze Medal: Iranian National Math Olympiad
  • 2013: Gold Medal in the 9th International Mathematics Contest: IMC (Singapore) [certificate]

Design and source code from Jon Barron's website.