I’m a final-year PhD student advised by David Fridovich-Keil at UT Austin.

I’m currently working on:

  • Fast sim-to-real adaptation of world models for humanoid loco-manipulation tasks
  • Tactile sensing for contact-rich humanoid tasks
  • RL fine-tuning of LLMs that keep humans in the loop of automated scientific discovery, supported by the Cosmos Institute

I have expertise in robotics world models and fast sim-to-real adaptation , active learning and information gathering under uncertainty , game-theoretic planning for multi-agent systems , and satellite navigation systems .

I also enjoy writing on Substack, meditating, exercising, and reading.

Papers

[1]Under review
Fernando Palafox, David Fridovich-Keil
arXiv
[2]RSS 2026
Jacob Levy, Tyler Westenbroek, Kevin Huang, Fernando Palafox, Patrick Yin, Shayegan Omidshafiei, Dong-Ki Kim, Abhishek Gupta, David Fridovich-Keil
arXivwebsite
[3]Under review
Fernando Palafox, Jingqi Li, Jesse Milzman, David Fridovich-Keil
arXiv
[4]JMLMC 2026
Nguyen Ly, Caroline Tatsuoka, Jai Nagaraj, Jacob Levy, Fernando Palafox, David Fridovich-Keil, Hannah Lu
arXiv
[5]TMLR 2025
Tianyu Qiu, Eric Ouano, Fernando Palafox, Christian Ellis, David Fridovich-Keil
arXiv
[6]AAMAS 2025
Fernando Palafox, Jesse Milzman, Dong Ho Lee, Ryan Park, David Fridovich-Keil
arXivcode
[7]AAS/AIAA 2024
Fernando Palafox, Yue Yu, David Fridovich-Keil
arXivcode
[8]CDC 2023
Jingqi Li, Chih-Yuan Chiu, Lasse Peters, Fernando Palafox, Mustafa Karabag, Javier Alonso-Mora, Somayeh Sojoudi, Claire Tomlin, David Fridovich-Keil
arXivcode
[9]ION ITM 2022
Joan Bernabeu, Fernando Palafox, Yafeng Li, Dennis M. Akos
paper
[10]ION GNSS+ 2021
Fernando Palafox, Lyndsay Ruane, Scott Palo, Dennis Akos
paper

Technical Blogposts

Nov 2023

Working through Andrej Karpathy's intro to generative pre-trained transformers.