Lior Wolf is an Israeli computer scientist and full professor at the School of Computer Science and AI at Tel Aviv University, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of Mentee Robotics, the Israeli AI-first humanoid-robotics company he started in 2022 with Amnon Shashua and Shai Shalev-Shwartz. Wolf's research career spans more than two decades of work in computer vision and deep learning, with extensive contributions in unsupervised cross-domain image generation, generative models, voice and audio synthesis, and applications of machine learning across medical imaging and the physical sciences. He served as a research scientist and director at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) for over six years prior to founding Mentee, where he leads the company through the January 2026 Mobileye acquisition phase.
At a glance
- Education: PhD in computer science, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he was supervised by Amnon Shashua; postdoctoral fellowship in Tomaso Poggio's lab at the Center for Biological and Computational Learning, MIT (2003 to 2006).
- Current roles: Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mentee Robotics, December 2021 to present; Full Professor, School of Computer Science and AI, Tel Aviv University.
- Notable prior affiliations: Postdoctoral fellow, MIT CBCL (2003 to 2006); Research Scientist and Director, Facebook AI Research (2017 to 2021).
- Key research contributions: Co-author of "Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Generation" (ICLR 2017); voice and audio generation, face image synthesis, scene-graph-to-image generation, and parameterized-avatar creation research; ECCV 2000 best paper award, ICCV 2001 and ICCV 2019 honorable mentions, ICANN 2016 best paper, ERC starting grant.
- Google Scholar: Lior Wolf
- Faculty page: Tel Aviv University
- LinkedIn: liorwolf
Origins
Wolf trained in computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Amnon Shashua, the Sachs Professor of Computer Science at Hebrew University and the co-founder and chief executive of Mobileye. The doctoral relationship with Shashua established the long-running academic-and-entrepreneurial collaboration that would subsequently define Wolf's startup-founder career, with Shashua as the co-founder at Mentee Robotics two decades after the original supervisor-and-student relationship.
After completing his PhD, Wolf moved to the United States for a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Biological and Computational Learning at MIT, working with Tomaso Poggio, the computational-neuroscience-and-vision researcher whose lab has trained an extensive cohort of computer-vision research scientists across the early-2000s deep-learning generation. The CBCL postdoc ran from 2003 to 2006.
Wolf returned to Israel as a faculty member at Tel Aviv University, where he joined the School of Computer Science and AI and became a full professor. The academic appointment has continued in parallel with his subsequent industry and entrepreneurial activity.
Career
Wolf's research output through the 2010s placed him among the most-cited Israeli computer-vision researchers, with more than 260 published papers, over 2,200 highly influential citations, and an extensive record of work across computer vision, audio synthesis, generative models, and deep learning. The research portfolio spans object detection, bioinformatics, medical imaging, applications of AI in physics, voice generation, natural-language processing, video action recognition, and unsupervised cross-domain generation.
He joined Facebook AI Research (FAIR) in 2017, initially as a research scientist and subsequently as a director, where he led research programmes across generative models and computer vision over a six-year tenure to 2021. The FAIR period spanned the rise of generative adversarial networks and the early development of large-scale generative models in image and audio domains. He returned to a full-time Tel Aviv University role and continued his academic and applied-research output.
Wolf co-founded Mentee Robotics in 2022 with Amnon Shashua and Shai Shalev-Shwartz, taking the chief executive officer role from December 2021 onward as the company entered its founding phase. The strategic framing of Mentee at founding emphasised AI-foundation-model integration for embodied agents and the transfer of computer-vision-and-perception capability from the Mobileye autonomous-vehicle stack to humanoid robotics. The Menteebot bipedal humanoid platform was publicly unveiled in 2024, with demonstration material organised around natural-language-instruction following and computer-vision-driven scene understanding rather than around high-difficulty locomotion.
In January 2026 Mobileye acquired Mentee Robotics for approximately $900 million, with the strategic framing that the Mentee humanoid-robotics capability and Mobileye's autonomous-vehicle perception heritage would integrate into a combined mobile-and-humanoid-robotics product line. Wolf has continued in a senior leadership role through the acquisition transition.
Affiliations
- Hebrew University of Jerusalem: PhD student under Amnon Shashua.
- MIT Center for Biological and Computational Learning: Postdoctoral fellow, 2003 to 2006.
- Tel Aviv University: Faculty member; Full Professor, School of Computer Science and AI.
- Facebook AI Research (FAIR): Research Scientist and Director, approximately 2017 to 2021.
- Mentee Robotics: Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, December 2021 to present.
Notable contributions
- Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Generation (ICLR 2017). Co-author of the paper that introduced the Domain Transfer Network framework for translating images across domains without paired training data, a foundational contribution in the unsupervised image-to-image translation literature.
- Voice and audio synthesis research. Multi-paper contributions to neural voice generation and audio synthesis through the FAIR period, with applications across content-creation and assistive-technology domains.
- Scene-graph-to-image generation. Co-author of papers introducing methods that separate layout embedding and appearance embedding for higher visual quality in graph-conditioned image generation.
- Parameterized-avatar creation. Co-author of "Unsupervised Creation of Parameterized Avatars" research on mapping input images to graphical-engine-parameterized avatar representations.
- Mentee Robotics co-founding (2022). Co-founded the Israeli AI-first humanoid-robotics company and serves as chief executive through the Menteebot platform unveiling, subsequent product generations, and the January 2026 Mobileye acquisition.
- Recognition. ECCV 2000 best paper award; ICCV 2001 and ICCV 2019 honorable mentions; ICANN 2016 best paper award; ERC starting grant; over 260 published papers and 2,200 highly influential citations.
Open questions
- Mobileye-and-Mentee integration depth. The January 2026 Mobileye acquisition for approximately $900 million positions Mentee within Mobileye's broader autonomous-mobility product portfolio. Whether the integration produces a combined humanoid-and-vehicle perception stack with material commercial output, and the depth of Wolf's continuing operating role under Mobileye, are the central watchable questions.
- Menteebot AI-capability disclosures. The AI-foundation-model integration has been Mentee's headline differentiator. Whether Wolf and the Mentee team disclose detailed benchmarks, third-party capability comparisons, or open-weight components that substantiate the AI-first positioning would meaningfully clarify the company's competitive standing.
- Continued academic output alongside operating leadership. Wolf maintained an active Tel Aviv University faculty appointment through the FAIR period and the Mentee founding phase. Whether the academic publication cadence continues through the Mobileye-acquisition phase, or whether the operating role compresses the research output, will be informative for the broader pattern of Israeli academic-entrepreneur trajectories.
- Long-running Shashua relationship. Wolf's career has been anchored by the multi-decade collaboration with Amnon Shashua, from the Hebrew University PhD supervision through the Mentee co-founding and into the Mobileye-acquisition phase. Whether the relationship extends into AAI or other Shashua ventures is unclear.
Sources
- Lior Wolf Google Scholar profile. Publication record and citation counts across more than two decades of computer-vision and deep-learning research.
- Lior Wolf Tel Aviv University faculty page. Current academic appointment and contact information.
- Lior Wolf LinkedIn profile. Career-history reference covering the Facebook AI Research period and Mentee Robotics founding.
- Quantum X Labs Congratulates Prof. Lior Wolf on the Successful Acquisition of Mentee Robotics by Mobileye. January 2026 coverage of the Mobileye acquisition of Mentee Robotics.
- Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Generation. Wolf's most-cited ICLR 2017 paper on unsupervised image-to-image translation.
- Companion profile: Mentee Robotics for the broader lab context; Amnon Shashua for the long-running supervisor-and-co-founder relationship.
