PhD student · Indiana University · SMART Lab

Mohamed Abouagour.
Robot learning & embodied AI: LLM/VLM planning for real robots.

Evolution had a few billion years to figure out perception, reasoning, language, and the rest of it. I’d like to skip the line. My research puts large language and vision models in the closed loop of real robots: planning, replanning when the world changes underneath them, and grounding instructions in what the robot actually sees.

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Fig. 1. A spherical harmonic function rendered live with a Spherical Hermite Map: 4 texture taps, bicubic Hermite reconstruction, analytic normals.
01 / research

Selected research

01 2026

Audit Before You Commit: belief failures in one-shot manipulation

First author (with B.-C. Min) · Under review · 2026

Offline audits that locate belief-state failures in probe-then-commit manipulation pipelines, before the robot commits to an irreversible action.

  • Robot manipulation
  • Belief-space reasoning
  • Active identification
  • Tactile insertion
02 2026

MIND: instruction-conditioned incremental grounding

First author (with J. Nam, W. Jo, B.-C. Min) · Under review · 2026

LM-compiled dependencies keep cached semantic judgments valid as scenes change, so robots re-evaluate only what the change actually touches. Demonstrated on a Unitree G1 humanoid.

  • Embodied AI
  • Instruction grounding
  • LLM agents
  • ProcTHOR
  • Unitree G1
03 2025

ResPlan: 17K-plan vector–graph dataset

First author · Preprint · arXiv:2508.14006

A large-scale vector–graph corpus of 17,000 residential floor plans with rooms, walls, doors, windows, and the room-connectivity graph.

  • Computer vision
  • Dataset
  • Vector graphics
  • Graph learning
  • Visual parsing
04 2025

GFLAN: graph-conditioned generative layouts

First author · Preprint · arXiv:2512.16275

A graph-conditioned generative model for functional 2D layouts that satisfies user-supplied topological constraints by construction.

  • Computer vision
  • Generative models
  • Graph neural networks
  • Layout synthesis
  • Structured prediction
05 2026

PRISM: differentiable analysis-by-synthesis

First author (with A. Shah, E. Garyfallidis) · MICCAI 2026 · arXiv:2604.00250

Couples a physics-based forward model with gradient-based optimisation to recover latent fibre structure from noisy diffusion-MRI measurements.

  • Inverse problems
  • Analysis-by-synthesis
  • Differentiable rendering
  • Diffusion MRI
  • Optimisation
06 2026

Spherical Hermite Maps

First author (with E. Garyfallidis) · Preprint · arXiv:2602.20063

A derivative-augmented cubemap that reconstructs any function on S² with bicubic-quality from a 2×2 texel footprint, with analytic surface normals.

  • Spherical representations
  • Real-time rendering
  • WebGPU / WGSL
  • Hermite interpolation
  • Spherical CNNs
07 2022 –

FURY · WebGPU scientific visualisation

Core contributor & maintainer · FURY · Python Software Foundation

Core contributor and maintainer of FURY v2, with 54+ merged PRs across the WebGPU rendering core, actor primitives, and animation system.

  • Open-source research software
  • WebGPU
  • WGSL
  • Python
  • Scientific visualisation
08 2024 –

DIPY · GPU primitives for diffusion MRI

Contributor · DIPY

Contributor: Skyline ODF visualisation in DIPY Horizon (Spherical Hermite Maps) and compute-shader streamtube generation for tractography.

  • WGSL
  • Compute shaders
  • Diffusion MRI
  • Tractography
  • Open source
02 / dataset

ResPlan: interactive viewer

The viewer renders straight from the same .pkl released with the dataset. Toggle the typed edges (via_door, via_window, direct, adjacency) to inspect the connectivity graph that conditions GFLAN.

loading…

syn-001 · 5 rooms · 10.0 × 7.0 m

livingkitchenbedroombathhall
living kitchen bedroom bath hall door front door window
03 / teaching

Teaching, mentoring & open-source

  • Co-Instructor Spring 2025 & Spring 2026
    DSCI-D 321 · Data Representation (undergraduate)
    Indiana University, Luddy School

    Co-designed the curriculum; taught 100+ students time-series, Fourier, audio representations, graph theory, and the NumPy / data-engineering stack.

  • Teaching Assistant Fall 2025
    Intelligent Systems I (undergraduate)
    Indiana University, Luddy School

    Led labs and office hours on search, probabilistic reasoning, and ML fundamentals.

  • Mentor · Google Summer of Code 2024
    FURY · LLM-assisted developer tooling
    Python Software Foundation

    Mentored a contributor on integrating LLM-powered assistants with Discord, GitHub, and X for an open-source visualisation project.

  • Contributor · Google Summer of Code 2022
    FURY · keyframe animation system
    Python Software Foundation

    Built play/pause/rewind, SLERP rotation, linear and non-linear interpolation, hierarchical transforms, and motion paths.

Selected awards

  • 2025, 2026 Luddy Summer Research Fellowship · Indiana University
04 / about

Short bio

I am a PhD student in Intelligent Systems Engineering at Indiana University’s Luddy School, working in the SMART Lab with Prof. Byung-Cheol Min (previously the Garyfallidis Research Group, 2024–2026). My research is robot learning and embodied AI: LLM/VLM-based planning and closed-loop replanning, belief auditing for one-shot manipulation (Audit Before You Commit), instruction-conditioned grounding (MIND, demoed on a Unitree G1 humanoid), and generative environments for embodied agents (ResPlan, GFLAN). Earlier work includes differentiable analysis-by-synthesis (PRISM, MICCAI 2026) and real-time spherical primitives (Spherical Hermite Maps).

I co-instruct DSCI-D 321 (Data Representation), TA Intelligent Systems I, and mentor for Google Summer of Code (2024 mentor, 2022 contributor). I am a core maintainer of FURY v2 (54+ merged PRs) and a contributor to DIPY, where I shipped the Skyline ODF renderer and a compute-shader streamtube generator for tractography. I hold a BEng in Electrical Engineering (Computer Engineering & Automatic Control) from Tanta University, Egypt.

  • Program PhD, Intelligent Systems Engineering (Aug 2024 – present)
  • Advisor Byung-Cheol Min · SMART Lab
  • Research LLM/VLM planning & replanning · manipulation under uncertainty
  • Sim & robots ProcTHOR · Habitat 3.0 · Isaac Sim · Unitree G1
  • Rendering Spherical Hermite Maps · WGSL · WebGPU
  • Stack PyTorch · Python · TypeScript · CUDA · WGSL
  • Mentoring GSoC 2024 (FURY) · GSoC 2022 contributor
06 / contact

Get in touch

Seeking a Summer 2027 research internship in robot learning and embodied AI, and always open to collaborations and research conversations. The fastest line is email.