Marco Pavone

· Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy and Associate Professor, by courtesy, of Electrical Engineering & of Computer Science

Stanford University · Aeronautics and Astronautics

Active 1965–2026

h-index67

Citations17.6k

Papers908520 last 5y

Funding$1.4M

Academic metrics are sourced from OpenAlex and public funding records; values may differ from Google Scholar.

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About

Marco Pavone is an Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy and holds courtesy appointments in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research focuses on autonomous systems, energy, and control, contributing to advancements in these fields through his academic and professional work.

Research topics

Computer Science
Business
Artificial Intelligence
Mathematics
Process management
Quantum mechanics
Systems engineering
Engineering
Physics
Risk analysis (engineering)

Selected publications

FreeNeRF: Improving Few-Shot Neural Rendering with Free Frequency Regularization
2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) · 2023 · 262 citations
Novel view synthesis with sparse inputs is a challenging problem for neural radiance fields (NeRF). Recent efforts alleviate this challenge by introducing external supervision, such as pre-trained models and extra depth signals, or by using non-trivial patch-based rendering. In this paper, we present Frequency regularized NeRF (FreeNeRF), a surprisingly simple baseline that outperforms previous methods with minimal modifications to plain NeRF. We analyze the key challenges in few-shot neural ren…
DOI
On the Co-Design of AV-Enabled Mobility Systems
2020 · 19 citations
Senior authorCorresponding
The design of autonomous vehicles (AVs) and the design of AV-enabled mobility systems are closely coupled. Indeed, knowledge about the intended service of AVs would impact their design and deployment process, whilst insights about their technological development could significantly affect transportation management decisions. This calls for tools to study such a coupling and co-design AVs and AV-enabled mobility systems in terms of different objectives. In this paper, we instantiate a framework t…
DOI
Benchmarking the operation of quantum heuristics and Ising machines: scoring parameter setting strategies on optimization applications
Quantum Machine Intelligence · 2025-09-05 · 3 citations
articleOpen access
We discuss guidelines for evaluating the performance of parameterized stochastic solvers for optimization problems, with particular attention to systems that employ novel hardware, such as digital quantum processors running variational algorithms, analog processors performing quantum annealing, or coherent Ising machines. We illustrate through an example a benchmarking procedure grounded in the statistical analysis of the expectation of a given performance metric measured in a test environment.…
Publisher OA PDF DOI
Benchmarking the Operation of Quantum Heuristics and Ising Machines: Scoring Parameter Setting Strategies on Optimization Applications
arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024 · 2 citations
We discuss guidelines for evaluating the performance of parameterized stochastic solvers for optimization problems, with particular attention to systems that employ novel hardware, such as digital quantum processors running variational algorithms, analog processors performing quantum annealing, or coherent Ising Machines. We illustrate through an example a benchmarking procedure grounded in the statistical analysis of the expectation of a given performance metric measured in a test environment.…
Publisher OA PDF DOI
Foundation models on the bridge: Semantic hazard detection and safety maneuvers for maritime autonomy with vision-language models
Ocean Engineering · 2026-05-18
articleOpen access
The draft IMO MASS Code requires autonomous and remotely supervised maritime vessels to detect departures from their operational design domain, enter a predefined fallback that notifies the operator, permit immediate human override, and avoid changing the voyage plan without approval. Meeting these obligations in the alert-to-takeover gap calls for a short-horizon, human-overridable fallback maneuver. Classical maritime autonomy stacks struggle when the correct action depends on meaning (e.g., d…
Publisher DOI

Recent grants

CPS: Medium: Collaborative Research: Optimization-Based Planning and Control for Assured Autonomy: Generalizing Insights From Autonomous Space Missions
NSF · $350k · 2019–2022
NRI: INT: COLLAB: Synergetic Drone Delivery Network in Metropolis
NSF · $287k · 2018–2022
CAREER: Driving the Future: Models and Control Methods to Coordinate Fleets of Self-Driving Vehicles in Future Transportation Networks
NSF · $500k · 2015–2021

Frequent coauthors

Edward Schmerling
127 shared
Boris Ivanovic
122 shared
Emilio Frazzoli
91 shared
Federico Rossi
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
71 shared
Riccardo Bonalli
71 shared
Karen Leung
66 shared
Thomas Lew
62 shared
Lucas Janson
Harvard University
49 shared

Awards & honors

Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers…
Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award
National Science Foundation Early Career (CAREER) Award
NASA Early Career Faculty Award
Early-Career Spotlight Award from the Robotics Science and S…

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