Saurabh Gupta

Saurabh Gupta is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he is based at the Coordinated Science Lab (CSL 319). He previously served as a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research in Pittsburgh working with Prof. Abhinav Gupta.

His educational background includes a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley advised by Prof. Jitendra Malik, and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Delhi, India.

Gupta's research focuses on building intelligent agents that can interact with the physical world, with particular emphasis on computer vision, robotics, and machine learning. His work explores representations that enable physical interaction and learning from active engagement with environments. Key research directions include spatio-semantic and topological representations for visual navigation, skill discovery, learning from videos, and active visual learning.

His recent publications reveal a strong trend toward practical robotics applications with an emphasis on real-world deployment. The research spans multiple domains including humanoid robotics, egocentric vision, physical reasoning, and wireless sensing. Significant attention is given to bridging the sim-to-real gap and developing systems that work in practical environments rather than controlled laboratory settings.

As an educator, Gupta teaches advanced courses including Deep Learning for Computer Vision (CS 444/ECE 494), Computer Vision (ECE 549/CS 543), and Learning-Based Robotics (ECE 598 SG).

Gupta advises multiple PhD students including Arjun Gupta, Shaowei Liu, Aditya Prakash, Xiaoyu Zhang, Runpei Dong, and Xialin He, with former student Matthew Chang completing his PhD in 2024 on Robot Learning from Videos.

His research group operates within the Coordinated Science Laboratory at UIUC, collaborating with researchers across computer vision, robotics, and machine learning domains. The group maintains strong connections with industry research labs including Meta AI Research, where former students have pursued research scientist positions.