Justin Fu

Career

Fu completed a PhD in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley from 2016 to 2021, advised by Sergey Levine. During the PhD, Fu was a student researcher at Google and a research intern at DeepMind, working on inverse reinforcement learning.¹²

Fu joined Waymo as a research scientist in August 2021. Fu's CV lists work on reinforcement-learning fine-tuning of driving foundation models and on combining such models with search and optimization for reliability.²

Research

Fu's research covers reinforcement learning, natural language processing and robotics. Fu was first author of D4RL (2020), datasets for deep data-driven reinforcement learning, and co-organized the NeurIPS 2021 Workshop on Offline Reinforcement Learning.¹²⁴

At Waymo, Fu was lead developer of Waymax, released in 2023 as an open-source simulator for planning and behavior problems in autonomous driving. The Waymax paper lists Cole Gulino, Fu, Wenjie Luo and George Tucker as equal-contribution first authors.²³⁵

Work and contributions

• Waymax Open-source code

  Lead developer of Waymax and an equal-contribution first author of its 2023 paper, which presents an accelerated, data-driven simulator for large-scale autonomous driving research.²³⁵

• D4RL Open data

  First author of D4RL (2020), a set of datasets and benchmarks for offline, data-driven reinforcement learning.⁴

Timeline

1. Aug 2016Began a PhD in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley, advised by Sergey Levine.²
2. Jun 2018Began work as a student researcher and research intern at Google.²
3. Sep 2019Started a research internship at DeepMind on multi-agent inverse reinforcement learning.²
4. Apr 2020Posted D4RL, datasets for deep data-driven reinforcement learning, as first author.⁴
5. Aug 2021Joined Waymo as a research scientist.²
6. Oct 2023Posted the Waymax simulator paper as an equal-contribution first author.³²

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Research intern (2019–2020), DeepMind²
• Student researcher and research intern (2018–2019), Google²

Where they work

• Waymo 4 people in the wiki

Related people

• Dmitri DolgovAlso at Waymo
• Tekedra MawakanaAlso at Waymo
• Satish JeyachandranAlso at Waymo
• Bob McGrewRobotics · Reinforcement learning
• Tuomas HaarnojaReinforcement learning · Robotics
• Sergey LevineRobotics · Reinforcement learning
• Misha DenilRobotics · Reinforcement learning
• Jonathan HurstRobotics · Reinforcement learning
• Deepak PathakRobotics · Reinforcement learning
• Vikash KumarRobotics · Reinforcement learning