Marco Pavone ![](/sites/default/files/person/Pavone.jpeg) Marco Pavone is Director of Autonomous Vehicle Research at NVIDIA. His main research interests are in the development of methodologies for the analysis, design, and control of autonomous systems, with an emphasis on self-driving cars, autonomous aerospace vehicles, and future mobility systems. He is currently on partial leave from Stanford University, where he is an Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics. At Stanford, he is also the Director of the Autonomous Systems Laboratory and Co-Director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. He received a Ph.D. degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010. He is a recipient of a number of awards, including a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Barack Obama, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, a National Science Foundation Early Career (CAREER) Award, a NASA Early Career Faculty Award, and an Early-Career Spotlight Award from the Robotics Science and Systems Foundation. He was identified by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) as one of America's 20 most highly promising investigators under the age of 40. He is currently serving as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Control Systems Magazine. Research Area(s) [Autonomous Vehicles](/research-area/autonomous-vehicles) [Robotics](/research-area/robotics) Main Field of Interest [Autonomous Vehicles](/research-area/autonomous-vehicles) Google Scholar [https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=RhOpyXcAAAAJ&hl=en](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=RhOpyXcAAAAJ&hl=en) ### Publications ### 2025 [Beyond Behavior Cloning in Autonomous Driving: a Survey of Closed-Loop Training Techniques](/index.php/publication/2025-12_beyond-behavior-cloning-autonomous-driving-survey-closed-loop-training) [Peter Karkus](/index.php/person/peter-karkus), [Maximilian Igl](/index.php/person/maximilian-igl), [Yuxiao Chen](/index.php/person/yuxiao-chen), Kashyap Chitta, Jef Packer, [Bertrand Douillard](/index.php/person/bertrand-douillard), [Thomas Tian](/index.php/person/thomas-tian), Alexander Naumann, Guillermo Garcia-Cobo, Shuhan Tan, [Alperen Degirmenci](/index.php/person/alperen-degirmenci), Alexander Popov, Nikolai Smolyanskiy, Urs Muller, [Boris Ivanovic](/index.php/person/boris-ivanovic), [Marco Pavone](/index.php/person/marco-pavone) [Alpamayo 1: Bridging Reasoning and Action Prediction for Generalizable Autonomous Driving in the Long Tail](/publication/2025-10_alpamayo-r1) [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone), Many other contributors found on Page 33 [Sim2Val: Leveraging Correlation Across Test Platforms for Variance-Reduced Metric Estimation](/publication/2025-09_sim2val-leveraging-correlation-across-test-platforms-variance-reduced-metric) [Rachel Luo](/person/rachel-luo), [Heng Yang](/person/heng-yang), [Michael Watson](/person/michael-watson), [Apoorva Sharma](/person/apoorva-sharma), [Sushant Veer](/person/sushant-veer), Edward Schmerling, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) ### 2024 [Real-Time Anomaly Detection and Reactive Planning with Large Language Models](/publication/2024-07_real-time-anomaly-detection-and-reactive-planning-large-language-models) Rohan Sinha, Amine Elhafsi, Christopher Agia, Matthew Foutter, Edward Schmerling, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [RSS](https://roboticsconference.org/2024/program/papers/) ### 2023 [Learning for CasADi: Data-driven Models in Numerical Optimization](/publication/2023-12_learning-casadi-data-driven-models-numerical-optimization) Tim Salzmann, Jon Arrizabalaga, Joel Andersson, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone), Markus Ryll [Arxiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.05873) [PAC-Bayes Generalization Certificates for Learned Inductive Conformal Prediction](/publication/2023-12_pac-bayes-generalization-certificates-learned-inductive-conformal-prediction) [Apoorva Sharma](/person/apoorva-sharma), [Sushant Veer](/person/sushant-veer), Asher Hancock, Heng Yang, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone), Anirudha Majumdar [Arxiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04658) [Augmenting Lane Perception and Topology Understanding with Standard Definition Navigation Maps](/index.php/publication/2023-11_augmenting-lane-perception-and-topology-understanding-standard-definition) Katie Z Luo, [Xinshuo Weng](/index.php/person/xinshuo-weng), [Yan Wang](/index.php/person/yan-wang), Shuang Wu, Jie Li, Kilian Q Weinberger, [Yue Wang](/index.php/person/yue-wang), [Marco Pavone](/index.php/person/marco-pavone) [Arxiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.04079v1) [Interpretable Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Vehicles via Counterfactual Responsibility](/index.php/publication/2023-10_interpretable-trajectory-prediction-autonomous-vehicles-counterfactual) Kai-Chieh Hsu, [Karen Leung](/index.php/person/karen-leung), [Yuxiao Chen](/index.php/person/yuxiao-chen), Jaime Fernandez Fisac, [Marco Pavone](/index.php/person/marco-pavone) [IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)](https://ieee-iros.org/) [Bayesian Reparameterization of Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning with Energy-based Models](/publication/2023-07_bayesian-reparameterization-reward-conditioned-reinforcement-learning-energy) Wenhao Ding, [Gerry Che](/person/gerry-che), Ding Zhao, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)](https://icml.cc/Conferences/2023) [Language Conditioned Traffic Generation](/publication/2023-07_language-conditioned-traffic-generation) Shuhan Tan, [Boris Ivanovic](/person/boris-ivanovic), [Xinshuo Weng](/person/xinshuo-weng), [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone), Philipp Krähenbühl [Arxiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07947) [Task-Aware Risk Estimation of Perception Failures for Autonomous Vehicles](/publication/2023-07_task-aware-risk-estimation-perception-failures-autonomous-vehicles) Pasquale Antonante, [Sushant Veer](/person/sushant-veer), [Karen Leung](/person/karen-leung), [Xinshuo Weng](/person/xinshuo-weng), Luca Carlone, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2023](https://roboticsconference.org/) [FreeNeRF: Improving Few-shot Neural Rendering with Free Frequency Regularization](/publication/2023-06_freenerf-improving-few-shot-neural-rendering-free-frequency-regularization) Jiawei Yang, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone), [Yue Wang](/person/yue-wang) [IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2023](https://cvpr2023.thecvf.com/) [Object Pose Estimation with Statistical Guarantees: Conformal Keypoint Detection and Geometric Uncertainty Propagation](/publication/2023-06_object-pose-estimation-statistical-guarantees-conformal-keypoint-detection-and) [Heng Yang](/person/heng-yang), [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2023](https://cvpr2023.thecvf.com/) Selected as a Highlight Paper [Refining Obstacle Perception Safety Zones via Maneuver-Based Decomposition](/publication/2023-06_refining-obstacle-perception-safety-zones-maneuver-based-decomposition) Sever Topan, [Yuxiao Chen](/person/yuxiao-chen), [Ed Schmerling](/person/ed-schmerling), [Karen Leung](/person/karen-leung), Jonas Nilsson, Michael Cox, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV)](https://2023.ieee-iv.org/) [Learning Autonomous Vehicle Safety Concepts from Demonstrations](/publication/2023-05_learning-autonomous-vehicle-safety-concepts-demonstrations) [Karen Leung](/person/karen-leung), [Sushant Veer](/person/sushant-veer), [Edward Schmerling](/person/ed-schmerling), [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [American Control Conference (ACC) 2023](https://acc2023.a2c2.org/) [Receding Horizon Planning with Rule Hierarchies for Autonomous Vehicles](/index.php/publication/2023-05_receding-horizon-planning-rule-hierarchies-autonomous-vehicles) [Sushant Veer](/index.php/person/sushant-veer), [Karen Leung](/index.php/person/karen-leung), Ryan Cosner, [Yuxiao Chen](/index.php/person/yuxiao-chen), [Marco Pavone](/index.php/person/marco-pavone) [IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023](https://www.icra2023.org/) [Expanding the Deployment Envelope of Behavior Prediction via Adaptive Meta-Learning](/publication/2023-05_expanding-deployment-envelope-behavior-prediction-adaptive-meta-learning) [Boris Ivanovic](/person/boris-ivanovic), James Harrison, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023](https://www.icra2023.org/) [Planning with Occluded Traffic Agents using Bi-Level Variational Occlusion Models](/publication/2023-05_planning-occluded-traffic-agents-using-bi-level-variational-occlusion-models) Filippos Christianos, [Peter Karkus](/person/peter-karkus), [Boris Ivanovic](/person/boris-ivanovic), Stefano V. Albrecht, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023](https://www.icra2023.org/) [BITS: Bi-level Imitation for Traffic Simulation](/publication/2023-05_bits-bi-level-imitation-traffic-simulation) [Danfei Xu](/person/danfei-xu), [Yuxiao Chen](/person/yuxiao-chen), [Boris Ivanovic](/person/boris-ivanovic), [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023](https://www.icra2023.org/) [Tree-structured Policy Planning with Learned Behavior Models](/publication/2023-05_tree-structured-policy-planning-learned-behavior-models) [Yuxiao Chen](/person/yuxiao-chen), [Peter Karkus](/person/peter-karkus), [Boris Ivanovic](/person/boris-ivanovic), [Xinshuo Weng](/person/xinshuo-weng), [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023](https://www.icra2023.org/) [Guided Conditional Diffusion for Controllable Traffic Simulation](/publication/2023-05_guided-conditional-diffusion-controllable-traffic-simulation) Ziyuan Zhong, Davis Rempe, [Danfei Xu](/person/danfei-xu), [Yuxiao Chen](/person/yuxiao-chen), [Sushant Veer](/person/sushant-veer), [Gerry Che](/person/gerry-che), Baishakhi Ray, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023](https://www.icra2023.org/) [Semantic Anomaly Detection with Large Language Models](/publication/2023-05_semantic-anomaly-detection-large-language-models) Amine Elhafsi, Rohan Sinha, Christopher Agia, Edward Schmerling, Issa Nesnas, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [Arxiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11307) [Bayesian Reparameterization of Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning with Energy-based Models](/publication/2023-05_bayesian-reparameterization-reward-conditioned-reinforcement-learning-energy) Wenhao Ding, Tong Che, Ding Zhao, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [Arxiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11340) [Task-Aware Risk Estimation of Perception Failures for Autonomous Vehicles](/publication/2023-05_task-aware-risk-estimation-perception-failures-autonomous-vehicles) Pasquale Antonante, [Sushant Veer](/person/sushant-veer), [Karen Leung](/person/karen-leung), [Xinshuo Weng](/person/xinshuo-weng), Luca Carlone, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [Arxiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.01870) [Robust and Controllable Object-Centric Learning through Energy-based Models](/publication/2023-05_robust-and-controllable-object-centric-learning-through-energy-based-models) Ruixiang Zhang, [Gerry Che](/person/gerry-che), [Boris Ivanovic](/person/boris-ivanovic), Renhao Wang, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone), Yoshua Bengio, Liam Paull [International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2023](https://iclr.cc/Conferences/2023) [FreeNeRF: Improving Few-shot Neural Rendering with Free Frequency Regularization](/publication/2023-03_freenerf-improving-few-shot-neural-rendering-free-frequency-regularization) [Heng Yang](/person/heng-yang), [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [Arxiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12246) ### 2022 [Robust Trajectory Prediction against Adversarial Attacks](/publication/2022-12_robust-trajectory-prediction-against-adversarial-attacks) [Yulong Cao](/person/yulong-cao), [Danfei Xu](/person/danfei-xu), [Xinshuo Weng](/person/xinshuo-weng), Z. Morely Mao, Anima Anandkumar, [Chaowei Xiao](/person/chaowei-xiao), [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2022](https://corl2022.org/) Selected for Oral Presentation [Task-Relevant Failure Detection for Trajectory Predictors in Autonomous Vehicles](/index.php/publication/2022-12_task-relevant-failure-detection-trajectory-predictors-autonomous-vehicles) Alec Farid, [Sushant Veer](/index.php/person/sushant-veer), [Boris Ivanovic](/index.php/person/boris-ivanovic), [Karen Leung](/index.php/person/karen-leung), [Marco Pavone](/index.php/person/marco-pavone) [Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2022](https://corl2022.org/) [DiffStack: A Differentiable and Modular Control Stack for Autonomous Vehicles](/publication/2022-12_diffstack-differentiable-and-modular-control-stack-autonomous-vehicles) [Peter Karkus](/person/peter-karkus), [Boris Ivanovic](/person/boris-ivanovic), [Shie Mannor](/person/shie-mannor), [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2022](https://corl2022.org/) [ Heterogeneous-Agent Trajectory Forecasting Incorporating Class Uncertainty ](/index.php/publication/2022-10_heterogeneous-agent-trajectory-forecasting-incorporating-class-uncertainty) [Boris Ivanovic](/index.php/person/boris-ivanovic), Kuan-Hui Lee, Pavel Tokmakov, Blake Wulfe, Adrien Gaidon, [Marco Pavone](/index.php/person/marco-pavone) [IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2022](https://iros2022.org/) [AdvDO: Realistic Adversarial Attacks for Trajectory Prediction](/publication/2022-10_advdo-realistic-adversarial-attacks-trajectory-prediction) [Yulong Cao](/person/yulong-cao), [Chaowei Xiao](/person/chaowei-xiao), Anima Anandkumar, [Danfei Xu](/person/danfei-xu), [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2022](https://eccv2022.ecva.net/) [Robust and Controllable Object-Centric Learning through Energy-based Models](/publication/2022-10_robust-and-controllable-object-centric-learning-through-energy-based-models) Ruixiang Zhang, Tong Che, [Boris Ivanovic](/person/boris-ivanovic), Renhao Wang, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone), Yoshua Bengio, Liam Paull [Arxiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.05519) [Whose Track Is It Anyway? Improving Robustness to Tracking Errors with Affinity-Based Prediction](/publication/2022-06_whose-track-it-anyway-improving-robustness-tracking-errors-affinity-based) [Xinshuo Weng](/person/xinshuo-weng), [Boris Ivanovic](/person/boris-ivanovic), Kris Kitani, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2022](https://cvpr2022.thecvf.com/) [ScePT: Scene-consistent, Policy-based Trajectory Predictions for Planning](/index.php/publication/2022-06_scept-scene-consistent-policy-based-trajectory-predictions-planning) [Yuxiao Chen](/index.php/person/yuxiao-chen), [Boris Ivanovic](/index.php/person/boris-ivanovic), [Marco Pavone](/index.php/person/marco-pavone) [IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2022](https://cvpr2022.thecvf.com/) [Injecting Planning-Awareness into Prediction and Detection Evaluation](/publication/2022-06_injecting-planning-awareness-prediction-and-detection-evaluation) [Boris Ivanovic](/person/boris-ivanovic), [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV) 2022](https://iv2022.com/) [MTP: Multi-Hypothesis Tracking and Prediction for Reduced Error Propagation](/publication/2022-06_mtp-multi-hypothesis-tracking-and-prediction-reduced-error-propagation) [Xinshuo Weng](/person/xinshuo-weng), [Boris Ivanovic](/person/boris-ivanovic), [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV) 2022](https://iv2022.com/) [Interaction-Dynamics-Aware Perception Zones for Obstacle Detection Safety Evaluation](/publication/2022-06_interaction-dynamics-aware-perception-zones-obstacle-detection-safety) Sever Topan, [Karen Leung](/person/karen-leung), [Yuxiao Chen](/person/yuxiao-chen), Pritish Tupekar, [Edward Schmerling](/person/ed-schmerling), Jonas Nilsson, Michael Cox, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV) 2022](https://iv2022.com/) [Propagating State Uncertainty Through Trajectory Forecasting](/publication/2022-05_propagating-state-uncertainty-through-trajectory-forecasting) [Boris Ivanovic](/person/boris-ivanovic), Yifeng Lin, Shubham Shrivastava, Punarjay Chakravarty, [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2022](https://www.icra2022.org/) ### 2021 [MTP: Multi-Hypothesis Tracking and Prediction for Reduced Error Propagation](/index.php/publication/2021-10_mtp-multi-hypothesis-tracking-and-prediction-reduced-error-propagation) Xinshuo Weng, [Boris Ivanovic](/index.php/person/boris-ivanovic), [Marco Pavone](/index.php/person/marco-pavone) [CVPR](https://cvpr2021.thecvf.com/) [Sample-Efficient Safety Assurances using Conformal Prediction](/index.php/publication/2021-09_sample-efficient-safety-assurances-using-conformal-prediction) Rachel Luo, Shengjia Zhao, Jonathan Kuck, [Boris Ivanovic](/index.php/person/boris-ivanovic), Silvio Savarese, Edward Schmerling, [Marco Pavone](/index.php/person/marco-pavone) [Arxiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.14082) [Verification and Synthesis of Robust Control Barrier Functions: Multilevel Polynomial Optimization and Semidefinite Relaxation](/publication/_verification-and-synthesis-robust-control-barrier-functions-multilevel-polynomial) Shucheng Kang, [Yuxiao Chen](/person/yuxiao-chen), [Heng Yang](/person/heng-yang), [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)](https://cdc2023.ieeecss.org/) [Multi-Predictor Fusion: Combining Learning-based and Rule-based Trajectory Predictors](/publication/_multi-predictor-fusion-combining-learning-based-and-rule-based-trajectory-predictors) [Sushant Veer](/person/sushant-veer), [Apoorva Sharma](/person/apoorva-sharma), [Marco Pavone](/person/marco-pavone) [Arxiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.01408)