Portrait of Ruslan Rakhimov

Ruslan Rakhimov

Lead Researcher at T-Tech

I work on embodied AI: world models and vision-language-action policies for robots and virtual worlds.

About

My models learn from video and their own experience, not just from demonstrations. Before that, my research was in 3D computer vision and neural rendering.

I hold a Ph.D. in Computer Science, which I earned at Skoltech within Evgeny Burnaev's Applied AI Center. I received a Master's Degree in Data Science from Skoltech in 2020. Prior to that, I received my Bachelor's in Applied Mathematics and Physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) in 2018.

News

  • Jun 2026 Rank-Then-Act accepted to the ICML 2026 RLxF workshop.
  • May 2026 Qantara accepted to the ICML 2026 DEMO workshop.
  • Mar 2026 NE-Dreamer accepted to the ICLR 2026 World Models workshop.
  • Mar 2026 Started teaching World Models & Vision-Language-Action Models at Central University.
  • Dec 2025 VL-DAC accepted to AAMAS 2026.
  • Aug 2025 Coached the Kyrgyzstan national team at IOAI 2025.
  • Jun 2025 GSplatLoc accepted to IROS 2025 as an oral.
  • Jan 2025 Joined T-Tech.
  • Dec 2024 Presented the Slon robot with my team at AI Journey 2024.
  • Sep 2024 Defended my PhD.
  • Sep 2023 Joined Sber Robotics Center.
  • Aug 2023 Multi-NeuS accepted to IEEE Access.
  • Jul 2023 Gave three lectures on 3D computer vision at the AIRI Summer School.
  • Nov 2022 Received the Ilya Segalovich Scientific Award for Young Researchers from Yandex.

Selected Work

All publications
Rank-Then-Act overview 2026

Rank-Then-Act: Reward-Free Control from Frame-Order Progress

ICML Workshop (RLxF), 2026

Yuriy Maksyuta, George Bredis, Ruslan Rakhimov, Daniil Gavrilov

We train a VLM to rank shuffled frames by task progress, then reward a policy by the rank correlation between predicted progress and real time — a bounded, scale-free signal that needs no environment reward and transfers across tasks.

DEF result 2022

DEF: Deep Estimation of Sharp Geometric Features in 3D Shapes

SIGGRAPH, 2022

Albert Matveev, Ruslan Rakhimov, Alexey Artemov, Gleb Bobrovskikh, Vage Egiazarian, Emil Bogomolov, Daniele Panozzo, Denis Zorin, Evgeny Burnaev

Differently from existing data-driven methods for predicting sharp geometric features in sampled 3D shapes, which reduce this problem to feature classification, we propose to regress a scalar field representing the distance from point samples to the closest feature line on local patches.

Multi-sensor 3D dataset sample 2023

Multi-sensor large-scale dataset for multi-view 3D reconstruction

CVPR, 2023

Oleg Voynov, Gleb Bobrovskikh, Pavel Karpyshev, Andrei-Timotei Ardelean, Arseniy Bozhenko, Saveliy Galochkin, Ekaterina Karmanova, Pavel Kopanev, Yaroslav Labutin-Rymsho, Ruslan Rakhimov, Aleksandr Safin, Valerii Serpiva, Alexey Artemov, Evgeny Burnaev, Dzmitry Tsetserukou, Denis Zorin

A new multi-sensor dataset for 3D surface reconstruction that includes registered RGB and depth data from sensors of different resolutions and modalities under a large number of lighting conditions.

DensePose result 2021

Making DensePose fast and light

WACV, 2021

Ruslan Rakhimov, Emil Bogomolov, Alexandr Notchenko, Fung Mao, Alexey Artemov, Denis Zorin, Evgeny Burnaev

We target the problem of redesigning the DensePose R-CNN model's architecture so that the final network retains most of its accuracy but becomes more light-weight and fast.

2021

Latent Video Transformer

VISIGRAPP, 2021

Ruslan Rakhimov, Denis Volkhonskiy, Alexey Artemov, Denis Zorin, Evgeny Burnaev

We predict future video frames in latent space in an autoregressive manner.

Open Source

Patches merged upstream:

  • newton — GPU physics for robotics: making --num-frames terminate a headless GL run, and documenting the pyglet requirement behind it. PRs
  • mjlab — an Isaac Lab API powered by MuJoCo-Warp: setting the GL backend default before MuJoCo is imported. PRs
  • Thea — coding agents for the physical world: running the CLI preflight fixture on the caller's interpreter. PRs

Open and merged, everywhere else: every public pull request I've sent upstream.

Experience

T
Jan 2025 – Present T-Tech Lead Researcher, Embodied AI
S
Sep 2023 – Dec 2024 Sber Robotics Center Lead Research Engineer
Sk
Nov 2019 – Aug 2023 Skoltech Applied AI Center Research Engineer
H
Summer 2019 Huawei Research Intern

Education

Sk
2024 Skoltech Ph.D., Computer Science
Sk
2020 Skoltech M.Sc. with Honors, Data Science
M
2018 Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology B.Sc., Applied Mathematics and Physics