Karim El-Refai

I am a fourth year undergraduate student at UC Berkeley advised by Professor Ken Goldberg. I am interested in building perception systems for language-guided robot interaction and manipulation. I am also the head teaching assistant for EECS C106A/B, UC Berkeley's Introduction to Robotics and Advanced Robotics course, serving over 300 students!

Email / Google Scholar / LinkedIn / Resume

Research

	POGS: Persistent Object Gaussian Splat for Tracking Human and Robot Manipulation of Irregularly Shaped Objects Justin Yu, Kush Hari, Karim El-Refai, Arnav Dalal, Justin Kerr, Chung Min Kim, Richard Cheng, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Ken Goldberg Equal contribution ICRA 2025 (Under Review) Website (WIP) POGS is a system that embeds semantics, self- supervised visual features, and object grouping features into a compact representation which enables online and persistent object tracking and manipulation by dynamically updating the POGS as objects move, without the need for scene recapture or retraining and only using a single stereo camera for tracking.
	LEGS: Incrementally Building Room-Scale Language-Embedded Gaussian Splats with a Mobile Robot Justin Yu, Kush Hari, Kishore Srinivas, Karim El-Refai, Adam Rashid, Chung Min Kim, Justin Kerr, Richard Cheng, Ashwin Balakrishna, Thomas Kollar, Ken Goldberg Equal contribution IROS 2024 (Oral Presentation) arXiv / Website LEGS provides detailed 3D scene representation that encodes both appearance and semantics in a unified representation while being able to be trained online as a robot traverses its environment to enable localization of open-vocabulary object queries.
	SWAG: Storytelling With Action Guidance Zeeshan Patel, Karim El-Refai, Jonathan Pei, Tianle Li Equal contribution EMNLP Findings 2024 arXiv SWAG is a novel approach to storytelling with LLMs which reduces story writing to a search problem through a two-model feedback loop. SWAG can substantially outperform previous end-to-end story generation techniques when evaluated by GPT-4 and through human evaluation, and our SWAG pipeline using only open-source models surpasses GPT-3.5- Turbo.
	Automating Deformable Gasket Assembly Simeon Adebola, Tara Sadjadpour, Karim El-Refai, Will Panitch, Zehan Ma, Roy Lin, Tianshuang Qiu, Shreya Ganti, Charlotte Le, Jaimyn Drake, Ken Goldberg CASE* 2024 *Equal contribution arXiv
	Twincode: An Instrumented Platform for Pair Programming Research Karim El-Refai, Daewon Kwon, David Brincau, Asli Akalin, Armando Fox, Pablo Fernández Montes, Amador Durán Toro SIGCSE 2023 (Demo) ACM

Source code taken from Jon Barron's site.