Stone Tao 
CV / Google Scholar / GitHub / Twitter / Email
I am a 2nd-year PhD student at UC San Diego advised by professor Hao Su. I'm grateful to have my research be funded by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
My current research interests revolve around a general goal of building efficient, adaptable, and capable embodied AI. A big chunk of my direction is around scalable datasets/benchmarks for embodied AI by tackling the intersection of simulation and machine learning. To this end, my research revolves around reinforcement learning, simulation, few-shot learning, imitation learning, auto curriculum-learning, as well as high-quality robotics/game benchmarks. If you are interested in working with me / just want to chat about stuff feel free to reach out to my email / twitter!
On the side, I'm also interested in building and running high-quality open-source AI competitions for education and research. I co-founded the Lux AI Challenge and collaborate frequently with Kaggle to build and deliver these AI competitions.
Previously I was an undergraduate at UC San Diego, advised by Hao Su (on robotics and reinforcement learning) and Steven Dow (on AI x HCI). During my undergraduate I interned at QuantCo (machine learning) advised by Ben Thompson and LaunchDarkly (full-stack software engineering).
News
- Mar, 2025: ManiSkill3 is accepted as an Oral presentation at the ICLR Robot Learning Workshop.
- Jan, 2025: Two papers accepted to ICLR'25.
- Dec, 2024: Lux AI Season 3 has started! Compete for a $50,000 prize pool on Kaggle.
- May, 2024: ManiSkill3 Beta has been released! State-of-the-art fully open-source robotics simulation with the fastest parallel visual simulation, faster than most other simulators. 1000s of FPS for visual RL on just google colab! Comes with a ton of features for teleoperation, rendering, reinforcement learning and more.
- May, 2023: The NeurIPS edition of Lux AI Challenge Season 2 focusing on large-scale multi-agent RL was accepted to NeurIPS'23 as an Competition!
- March, 2023: Received the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!
- March, 2023: Incoming PhD at UC San Diego advised by Hao Su!
- February, 2023: Podcast with Kaggle on Lux AI Season 2 and Reinforcement Learning
- January, 2023: Lux AI Season 2 Started: Check it out!
Publications / Preprints

ManiSkill-HAB: A Benchmark for Low-Level Manipulation in Home Rearrangement Tasks
Arth Shukla, Stone Tao, Hao Su
ICLR 2025
arXiv / project page / code

Policy Decorator: Model-Agnostic Online Refinement for Large Policy Model
Xiu Yuan*, Tongzhou Mu*, Stone Tao, Yunhao Fang, Michael Zhang, Hao Su
ICLR 2025
arXiv / project page / code

ManiSkill3: GPU Parallelized Robotics Simulation and Rendering for Generalizable Embodied AI
Stone Tao, Fanbo Xiang, Arth Shukla, Yuzhe Qin, Xander Hinrichsen, Xiaodi Yuan, Chen Bao, Xinsong Lin, Yulin Liu, Tse-kai Chan, Yuan Gao, Xuanlin Li, Tongzhou Mu, Nan Xiao, Arnav Gurha, Zhiao Huang, Roberto Calandra, Rui Chen, Shan Luo, Hao Su
2025 ICLR Robot Learning Workshop, Oral Presentation
arXiv / project page / code

Lux AI Season 3: Lux AI Season 3: Multi-Agent Meta Learning at Scale
Stone Tao, Akarsh Kumar, Bovard Doerschuk-Tiberi, Isabelle Pan, Addison Howard, Hao Su
NeurIPS 2024 (Competitions Track)
/ project page / code

RFCL: Reverse Forward Curriculum Learning for Extreme Sample and Demonstration Efficiency in RL
Stone Tao, Arth Shukla, Tsekai Chen, Hao Su
ICLR 2024
arXiv / project page / code

MetaWriter: Exploring the Potential and Perils of AI Writing Support in Scientific Peer Review
Lu Sun, Stone Tao, Junjie Hu, Steven Dow
CSCW 2024

Lux AI Season 2 (NeurIPS Edition)
Stone Tao, Qimai Li, Yuhao Jiang, Jiaxin Chen, Xiaolong Zhu, Bovard Doerschuk-Tiberi, Isabelle Pan, Addison Howard
NeurIPS 2023 (Competitions Track)
/ project page / code

Abstract-to-Executable Trajectory Translation for One-Shot Task Generalization
Stone Tao, Xiaochen Li, Tongzhou Mu, Zhiao Huang, Yuzhe Qin, and Hao Su.
ICML 2023
arXiv / project page / code

ManiSkill2: A Unified Benchmark for Generalizable Manipulation Skills
Jiayuan Gu†, Fanbo Xiang†, Xuanlin Li*, Zhan Ling*, Xiqiang Liu*, Tongzhou Mu*, Yihe Tang*, Stone Tao*, Xinyue Wei*, Yunchao Yao*, Xiaodi Yuan, Pengwei Xie, Zhiao Huang, Rui Chen, Hao Su.
ICLR 2023
arXiv / project page / code

Emergent Collective Intelligence from Massive-Agent Cooperation and Competition
Hanmo Chen*, Stone Tao*, Jiaxin Chen, Weihan Shen, Xihui Li, Sikai Cheng, Xiaolong Zhu, Xiu Li
NeurIPS 2022 Deep RL Workshop

Maniskill: Generalizable manipulation skill benchmark with large-scale demonstrations
Tongzhou Mu*, Zhan Ling*, Fanbo Xiang*, Derek Cathera Yang*, Xuanlin Li*, Stone Tao, Zhiao Huang, Zhiwei Jia, and Hao Su.
NeurIPS 2021 (Datasets and Benchmark Track)
arXiv / project page / code
Presentations / Talks
Scaling Embodied AI via Simulation and Sim-integrated Robot Learning
Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University, Jan, 2025
Slides (pptx), PDF
ManiSkill3: Scalable Simulation+Rendering for Generalizable Embodied AI
ECHO AI Talk, October, 2024 / Recording
CVPR 2024 Embodied AI Workshop, June, 2024
Lux AI Season 2 and Reinforcement Learning
Kaggle Podcast, Feb, 2023 / Recording
AI Competition Design For Multi-Agent Environments / Games
Kaggle Podcast, Nov, 2022
Learning in Foundation Environments (LIFE), Oct, 2022
Slides
Pinned Projects
Awards
Awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for my proposal on sample efficient, scalable robotic learning and human robot interaction. Receiving $147,000 in funding over 3 years.
Received the annual award for demonstrated excellence in leadership inside and outside of UCSD
Awarded scholarship in 2021 and 2022 for demonstration of leadership at UCSD and outside of UCSD
MIT Battlecode 2021 | Finalist, 9th overall, Won the Adapative Strategy Award - Jan. 2021 | Bot Code | Post Mortem
MIT Battlecode 2020 | Finalist, 5th overall, top soloist - Jan. 2020 | Bot Code | Post Mortem
MIT Battlecode 2019 | Finalist, 9th overall, 4th out of high school teams - Jan. 2019 | Bot Code
Halite 3 | Placed 66th out of 4000+ students and professionals globally. Achieved admiral status by placing above Two Sigma's base bot. 5th placed high school student out of 500+ HS students. 1st place JavaScript bot. - Nov. 2018 to Jan. 2019