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UT Austin Robot Perception and Learning Lab

Research labAustin, TX, United States

Yuke Zhu's robot learning lab at UT Austin; released the VIOLA object-centric imitation policy.

Overview

The Robot Perception and Learning (RPL) Lab at the University of Texas at Austin works on robotics and embodied AI, including perception-action learning for general-purpose robot autonomy. In October 2022 it released VIOLA, an object-centric imitation learning policy that uses object proposals from a pre-trained vision model with a transformer policy.

Sources: rpl.cs.utexas.edu (19 Oct 2026) · arxiv.org (20 Oct 2022)

Type
Research lab
Headquarters
Austin, TX, United Statesarxiv.org, 20 Oct 2022

Key people

  • Yifeng ZhuLead author, VIOLAarxiv.org, 20 Oct 2022
  • Yuke ZhuSenior author, VIOLA; lab directorarxiv.org, 20 Oct 2022
  • Peter StoneCo-author, VIOLAarxiv.org, 20 Oct 2022

Funding history

Research lab · University research lab at UT Austin; no separate funding.

Ranking

#51 of 104 model companies · score 35.2 / 100 · updated 19 Oct 2026

  • Published benchmarks 35%0%
  • Open weights 20%100%
  • Adoption 20%43%
  • Released models 15%20%
  • Disclosed funding 10%n/a

Each bar shows an input from 0 to 100% before weighting. 1 of 1 listed models have open weights. Most-starred official repository: UT-Austin-RPL/VIOLA (123 stars, 19 Oct 2026).

How we rank model companies

The score (0–100) measures public, checkable evidence about a company's robot models. It does not measure private capability. A company that publishes no benchmark results and no weights can still have strong models. Every input is computed from the data on each company page, and every number there links to its source.

InputWeightHow it is measured
Published benchmarks35%For each scored benchmark, the company's best result divided by the best result any company has published, averaged over the benchmarks it reports. No published results scores 0. Results come only from the model's own paper, model card or the official benchmark leaderboard. Scored: LIBERO (4-suite average success, %); SimplerEnv Google Robot, visual matching (%); SimplerEnv Google Robot, variant aggregation (%); SimplerEnv WidowX / Bridge (%); CALVIN ABC→D (average length, 0–5); RoboArena (pairwise rating).
Open weights20%Share of the company's listed models whose weights the public can download.
Adoption20%GitHub stars on the company's most-starred official model repository, on a log scale relative to the most-starred repository in the list. Hugging Face downloads are shown on company pages but not scored, because gated repositories report zero.
Released models15%Number of publicly announced, named models, capped at 5.
Disclosed funding10%The sum of the funding rounds listed on the company's profile that were disclosed in USD, on a log scale from $10M to the largest sum in the list. Rounds reported only in other currencies are listed but not converted or counted. This input applies only to private startups and robot makers. For big-tech divisions, research labs and listed companies it is n/a, and its weight is shared across the other inputs in proportion.

Sources. arXiv papers and official model cards for benchmarks and parameters; official leaderboards (RoboArena); the GitHub and Hugging Face APIs for stars and downloads; company announcements and established press for funding. Missing values are shown as n/a, never estimated.

Updated 19 Oct 2026. Benchmark protocols differ between papers, for example in fine-tuning and number of trials, so small gaps between close scores are not meaningful.

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Open-weights models (1)

UT Austin Robot Perception and Learning Lab logo

VIOLA

Open weightsPolicy

Object-centric imitation learning policy that conditions a transformer on general object proposals from a pre-trained vision model; trained checkpoints are linked from the repository.

Released
20 Oct 2022
Parameters
n/a
License
MIT
Embodiments
single-arm
GitHub stars
123 as of 19 Oct 2026
HF downloads (all time)
n/a

No benchmark results on a shared public benchmark have been published for this model.