About

I’m a research scientist at Microsoft Research (MSR) in the Physically Embodied AI and Robotics group. My research interests span robotics, computer vision, machine learning, and human-robot interaction. I’m particularly interested in studying foundation models for robotics, human-in-the-loop robot learning, and reinforcement learning.

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Washington where I worked in the Human Centered Robotics Lab. I was advised by Maya Cakmak and I also work closely with Abhishek Gupta. During grad school, I received an Amazon Science fellowship, and I have worked closely with Amazon Robotics through the UW-Amazon Science Hub. I also spent a summer at the NVIDIA Seattle Robotics Lab led by Dieter Fox.

Before grad school, I was a software engineer at Amazon where I worked on computer vision for autonomous drone delivery. I also co-founded a YCombinator backed startup.

Publications

• FlowDAgger: Human-in-the-Loop Adaptation of Generative Robot Policies in Latent Space

  Michael Murray, Daphne Chen, Simran Bagaria, Dean Fortier, Tess Hellebrekers, Galen Mullins, Harshavardhan Gajarla, Oier Mees, Maya Cakmak, Andrey Kolobov.
  Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2026.
  paper website code

• Teaching Robots with Show and Tell: Using Foundation Models to Synthesize Robot Policies from Language and Visual Demonstrations

  Michael Murray, Abhishek Gupta, Maya Cakmak.
  Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2024.
  paper poster

• Diffusion-PbD: Generalizable Robot Programming by Demonstration with Diffusion Features

  Michael Murray, Entong Su, Maya Cakmak.
  IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024.
  paper website

• Learning to Grasp in Clutter with Interactive Visual Failure Prediction

  Michael Murray, Abhishek Gupta, Maya Cakmak.
  IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024.
  paper website code

• Towards Robustly Picking Unseen Objects From Densely Packed Shelves

  Markus Grotz, Soofiyan Atar, Yi Li, Paolo Torrado, Boling Yang, Nick Walker, Michael Murray, Maya Cakmak, Joshua R Smith.
  RSS Workshop on Perception and Manipulation Challenges for Warehouse Automation, 2023.
  paper website code

• Following Natural Language Instructions for Household Tasks with Landmark Guided Search and Reinforced Pose Adjustment

  Michael Murray, Maya Cakmak.
  IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2022.
  paper

• Learning Backchanneling Behaviors for a Social Robot via Data Augmentation from Human-Human Conversations

  Michael Murray, Nick Walker, Amal Nanavati, Patricia Alves-Oliveira, Nikita Filippov, Allison Sauppe, Bilge Mutlu, Maya Cakmak.
  Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2021.
  paper code poster

• Vision-and-Dialog Navigation

  Jesse Thomason, Michael Murray, Maya Cakmak, Luke Zettlemoyer.
  Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2019.
  paper code demo poster