Ted Staley
I am a senior AI engineer at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), where I work in AI and robotics. My work has spanned many areas, primarily reinforcement learning, model pretraining, and imitation learning. I am interested in understanding approaches to robotics that are general and scalable, and leverage data sources that have low barriers to collection. Some of my projects result in publications, which you can find on my Google Scholar.
In addition to my RL and robotics work, I spent several years working in LLMs. I designed the data processing and pretraining routines for APL's first in-house LLMs: multibillion parameter models trained on trillions of tokens. Concurrently I taught ChatGPT from Scratch at the Johns Hopkins Engineering for Professionals (EP) Program, a graduate course offering a deep breakdown of building LLMs in PyTorch.
I stood up this website to collect my thoughts and notes on AI and robotics, and to track my publicly released projects and publications. I am also maintaining repositories of my relevant code implementations on my github.
You can reach me at ewmstaley@gmail.com
All Recent Posts:
An 8x8 Touch Sensor
Reconstructing FlexiTac, Part Two
May 25, 2026
Thoughts on Hand Capture
And Reconstructing FlexiTac, Part One
May 23, 2026
On Shuffling Tokens
Preparing Trillion-Token Datasets
May 12, 2026
LLMs, MatSci, NeurIPS 2025
Coupling GPT with Materials Synthesis Simulation
March 12, 2026
GAIL with Pixels Only
Rewarding for Visual Fidelity
May 16, 2025
GAIL
Rewarding for Fidelity
April 29, 2025
MuJoCo Cronenbergs
(Mis)Adventures in Style Transfer, Part 2
February 10, 2025
MuJoCo CycleGAN
(Mis)Adventures in Style Transfer, Part 1
January 27, 2025
Flowing with Fewer Steps
Shortcut Models Notes and Review
December 12, 2024
Going with the Flow
Notes on Flow Matching (Policies)
December 9, 2024
Modeling the World
RSSM & TSSM Notes and Experiments
December 1, 2024
Diffusion Policy Part 3
Playing CarRacing-v3 with Diffusion
November 1, 2024
Older Posts:
Diffusion Policy Part 2
Diffusion Policy Part 1
Orange Basque Cheesecake
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)
Soft Actor-Critic (SAC)
Darwinian Objectives
Scones