Allen Z. Ren

Hi there! I'm currently at Physical Intelligence (π) building generalist robot policies, AI models that power any robot to perform any task in the real world.

I received PhD from Princeton, where I worked with Ani Majumdar on uncertainty quantification of robot learning. During PhD I also spent time at Google DeepMind, Toyota Research Institute, NVIDIA, and Stanford.

Before that I received BS in Mechanical Engineering and MSE in Robotics from Johns Hopkins. I built legged robots that self-right, and guitar that senses forces at fingertips.

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allenzren1 at gmail dot com

Princeton Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship

CoRL Best Student Paper Award

MIT Technology Review article "These robots know when to ask for help"

Quanta Magazine article "Machines Learn Better if We Teach Them the Basics"

Princeton News article "Machine learning guarantees robots' performance in unknown territory"

π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization

Physical Intelligence team
Under Review, 2025
Webpage • PDF • Code

Knowledge Insulating Vision-Language-Action Models: Train Fast, Run Fast, Generalize Better

Danny Driess, Jost Tobias Springenberg, Brian Ichter, Lili Yu, Adrian Li-Bell, Karl Pertsch, Allen Z. Ren, Homer Walke, Quan Vuong, Lucy Xiaoyang Shi, Sergey Levine
Under Review, 2025
Webpage • PDF • Code

Guiding Data Collection via Factored Scaling Curves

Lihan Zha, Apurva Badithela, Michael Zhang, Justin Lidard, Jeremy Bao, Emily Zhou, David Snyder, Allen Z. Ren, Dhruv Shah, Anirudha Majumdar
Under Review, 2025
Webpage • PDF • Code

Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization

Allen Z. Ren, Justin Lidard, Lars. L. Ankile, Anthony Simeonov, Pulkit Agrawal, Anirudha Majumdar, Benjamin Burchfiel, Hongkai Dai, Max Simchowitz
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
Webpage • PDF • Code

Run-time Observation Interventions Make Vision-Language-Action Models More Visually Robust

Asher J. Hancock, Allen Z. Ren, Anirudha Majumdar
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025
Webpage • PDF • Code

A Survey on Uncertainty Quantification of Large Language Models: Taxonomy, Open Research Challenges, and Future Directions

Ola Shorinwa, Zhiting Mei, Justin Lidard, Allen Z. Ren, and Anirudha Majumdar
ACM Computing Surveys, 2025
PDF

Thinking Forward and Backward: Effective Backward Planning with Large Language Models

Allen Z. Ren, Brian Ichter*, Anirudha Majumdar* *Equal advising
Under review, 2024
PDF

Explore until Confident: Efficient Exploration for Embodied Question Answering

Allen Z. Ren, Jaden Clark, Anushri Dixit, Masha Itkina, Anirudha Majumdar, Dorsa Sadigh
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2024
Webpage • PDF • Video • Code

Perceive With Confidence: Statistical Safety Assurances for Navigation with Learning-Based Perception

Anushri Dixit, Zhiting Mei, Meghan Booker, Mariko Storey-Matsutani, Allen Z. Ren, Anirudha Majumdar
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2024
Webpage • PDF • Video • Code

Learning to Learn Faster from Human Feedback with Language Model Predictive Control

Jacky Liang, Fei Xia, Wenhao Yu, Andy Zeng, Montserrat Gonzalez Arenas, Maria Attarian, Maria Bauza, Matthew Bennice, Alex Bewley, Adil Dostmohamed, Chuyuan Kelly Fu, Nimrod Gileadi, Marissa Giustina, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Leonard Hasenclever, Jan Humplik, Jasmine Hsu, Nikhil Joshi, Ben Jyenis, Chase Kew, Sean Kirmani, Tsang-Wei Edward Lee, Kuang-Huei Lee, Assaf Hurwitz Michaely, Joss Moore, Ken Oslund, Dushyant Rao, Allen Ren, Baruch Tabanpour, Quan Vuong, Ayzaan Wahid, Ted Xiao, Ying Xu, Vincent Zhuang, Peng Xu, Erik Frey, Ken Caluwaerts, Tingnan Zhang, Brian Ichter, Jonathan Tompson, Leila Takayama, Vincent Vanhoucke, Izhak Shafran, Maja Mataric, Dorsa Sadigh, Nicolas Heess, Kanishka Rao, Nik Stewart, Jie Tan, Carolina Parada
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2024
Webpage • PDF • Code

Learning a Universal Human Prior for Dexterous Manipulation from Human Preference

Zihan Ding, Yuanpei Chen, Allen Z. Ren, Shixiang Shane Gu, Hao Dong, Chi Jin
Under review, 2024
Webpage • PDF

How to Prompt Your Robot: A PromptBook for Manipulation Skills with Code as Policies

Montserrat Gonzalez Arenas, Ted Xiao, Sumeet Singh, Vidhi Jain, Allen Z. Ren, Quan Vuong, Jake Varley, Alexander Herzog, Isabel Leal, Sean Kirmani, Dorsa Sadigh, Vikas Sindhwani, Kanishka Rao, Jacky Liang, Andy Zeng
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024
PDF

Robots That Ask For Help: Uncertainty Alignment for Large Language Model Planners

Allen Z. Ren, Anushri Dixit, Alexandra Bodrova, Sumeet Singh, Stephen Tu, Noah Brown, Peng Xu, Leila Takayama, Fei Xia, Jake Varley, Zhenjia Xu, Dorsa Sadigh, Andy Zeng, Anirudha Majumdar
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2023
★ Oral Presentation, Best Student Paper Award, CoRL ★
Webpage • PDF • Video • Code • Demo • Princeton News • MIT Technology Review

AGIBOT, Astribot, Unitree

2024

Google DeepMind, Toyota Research Institute, CAAI Embodied AI Forum

2023

Google Brain Princeton, Google Research NYC, ByteDance Robotics, MLBoost Talk

2022

Toyota Research Institute

2025

Open-sourcing π0 model implementation in PyTorch, Github

Co-organizer, OOD Workshop, RSS

Co-organizer, RoboEval Workshop, RSS

2023

Co-organizer, OOD Workshop, CoRL

2020+

Co-organizer, Princeton Robotics Seminar

Webmaster, Robotics at Princeton

Reviewer, AIJ, T-RO, RA-L, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, L4DC, CoRL, ICRA, IROS, RSS

I am from Jiangsu, China. My Chinese name is 任至意. As much as I want to use my first name in Chinese, Zhiyi, I find it very difficult to pronounce for non-native speakers.

I enjoy watching and playing soccer, hitting the gym, and traveling/backpacking. I am also an aviation enthusiast and hold a private pilot license my story in Chinese. I was a member of the Princeton Flying Club during PhD.

Allen Z. Ren

π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization

Knowledge Insulating Vision-Language-Action Models: Train Fast, Run Fast, Generalize Better

Guiding Data Collection via Factored Scaling Curves

Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization

Run-time Observation Interventions Make Vision-Language-Action Models More Visually Robust

A Survey on Uncertainty Quantification of Large Language Models: Taxonomy, Open Research Challenges, and Future Directions

Thinking Forward and Backward: Effective Backward Planning with Large Language Models

Explore until Confident: Efficient Exploration for Embodied Question Answering

Perceive With Confidence: Statistical Safety Assurances for Navigation with Learning-Based Perception

Learning to Learn Faster from Human Feedback with Language Model Predictive Control

Learning a Universal Human Prior for Dexterous Manipulation from Human Preference

How to Prompt Your Robot: A PromptBook for Manipulation Skills with Code as Policies

Robots That Ask For Help: Uncertainty Alignment for Large Language Model Planners

AdaptSim: Task-Driven Simulation Adaptation for Sim-to-Real Transfer

Sim-to-Lab-to-Real: Safe Reinforcement Learning with Shielding and Generalization Guarantees

Leveraging Language for Accelerated Learning of Tool Manipulation

FlowDrone: Wind Estimation and Gust Rejection on UAVs Using Fast-Response Hot-Wire Flow Sensors

Failure Prediction with Statistical Guarantees for Vision-Based Robot Control

Distributionally Robust Policy Learning via Adversarial Environment Generation

Stronger Generalization Guarantees for Robot Learning by Combining Generative Models and Real-World Data

Generalization Guarantees for Imitation Learning

Multi-Contact Force-Sensing Guitar for Training and Therapy

Toward Robust Stair Climbing of the Quadruped using Proprioceptive Sensing

Dynamic Traversal of Large Gaps by Insects and Legged Robots Reveals a Template

Legged Robots Change Locomotor Modes To Traverse 3-D Obstacles With Varied Stiffness

I am from Jiangsu, China. My Chinese name is 任至意. As much as I want to use my first name in Chinese, Zhiyi, I find it very difficult to pronounce for non-native speakers.

I enjoy watching and playing soccer, hitting the gym, and traveling/backpacking. I am also an aviation enthusiast and hold a private pilot license my story in Chinese. I was a member of the Princeton Flying Club during PhD.

Flying up the Hudson River with N3054E on Dec 30, 2022.