Regarding phd admissions

I want to do a PhD in RL, ML (mostly theoretics part), I'm a mech engg undergrad. Don't want to do a master's. But I wanted to understand how important is GPA when it comes to getting a PhD admit, I know it is really important, but can one not get into if has a really bad GPA, say 6/10. And can research papers overcome this gap that's caused due to GPA? Say if one has 1 first author method paper in applied ml in medical. And another robotics paper through neurosymbolic AI and some more experience with policies on robots, and decent ML, RL course projects background etc