Victoria Dean

Carnegie Mellon University, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Victoria Dean is a leading roboticist whose work bridges the gap between simulation and real-world deployment. Her primary research areas include robot learning, manipulation, and multi-modal perception. Dean’s most impactful contribution is the "Train Offline, Test Online" benchmark (2023, 16 citations), which directly tackles three critical bottlenecks in robotics: the high cost of hardware, the lack of standardized platforms, and the scarcity of internet-scale training data. This benchmark provides a reproducible framework for evaluating policies on a real robot after offline training, enabling broader participation and more generalizable findings. In parallel, Dean has advanced multi-modal learning with "Hearing Touch" (2024, 9 citations), demonstrating that audio-visual pretraining can significantly improve contact-rich manipulation tasks—a novel approach that moves beyond vision-only representations. Demonstrating a commitment to responsible innovation, she also co-authored "Teaching Ethics by Teaching Ethics Pedagogy" (2022, 13 citations), which redesigned an Ethics and Robotics course to embed ethical reasoning into the computer science curriculum. With over 38 citations on her core works, Dean is shaping both the technical and ethical foundations of modern robotics.