Welcome

About Me

I am a MSc student in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, supervised by Professor Evan Shelhamer. Prior to this, I completed a Joint Honours BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science at McGill University.

Research Interests

My research sits at the intersection of deep learning, computer vision, and robotics, with a focus on robustness and adaptation. A core challenge in deploying learned systems in the real world is distribution shift, i.e. the gap between the data a model is trained on and the conditions it encounters at test time. I am broadly interested in understanding and closing this gap.

Concretely, I’m interested in:

• Domain Adaptation for Vision: Developing methods that allow vision systems to adapt to new environments with little or no labelled target data. This includes both traditional domain adaptation settings and the more challenging continual or online adaptation regimes.

• Robust Control Policies for Robotics: Extending robustness questions into the control setting. Specifically, how do we train robot policies via imitation or reinforcement learning that remain reliable when the visual observation distribution shifts at deployment? Sim-to-real transfer and policy robustness to perceptual perturbations are of particular interest.

The common thread across these directions is the question: how do we build systems that know what they don’t know, and adapt gracefully when the world changes?

Background & Past Work

During my undergrad I explored two distinct threads:

• Robotics: I worked on imitation learning for long-horizon manipulation tasks, aiming to make robotic behaviour more capable and generalizable.
• AI & Society: I investigated the societal impacts of AI, specifically the effects of deepfakes on electoral integrity in U.S. elections.

Beyond the Lab

Apart from academia, I’m an avid skier and hiker. I also do a fair bit of running.

If it were up to me, I’d be out camping every single weekend. My creative outlet is photography, check out some of my work at alexstaubinphoto.com.