Hi there! I am a tenure-track assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). I was a postdoc at BAIR@UC Berkeley working with Masayoshi Tomizuka, a distinguished member of National Academy of Engineering. Prior to that, I was a visiting PhD at CSAIL@MIT with Josh Tenenbaum and received my doctorate from the University of Hong Kong advised by Ping Luo. I finished my undergraduate degrees at Renmin University of China.
My research interests lie at the intersection of robotics, embodied AI, and computer vision. I am actively seeking self-motivated students for PhD and intern positions. If you’re interested, please fill out this form before email me with your CV, thanks!
News
- [06/2025] 4 papers accepted at IROS 2025; 2 papers accepted by TPAMI.
- [05/2025] Our paper won the ICRA 2025 Best Paper Award in Automation.
- [04/2025] Honored to receive the Amazon Research Award.
- [04/2025] Invited to give guest lectures at Duke and TAMU.
- [04/2025] Our paper Physics-Aware Robotic Palletization with Online Masking Inference was nominated as a Finalist for both Best Paper Award in Automation and Best Conference Paper Award at ICRA 2025.
- [03/2025] Serving as Area Chairs for ICCV, NeurIPS, CVPR, etc.
- [03/2025] 3 papers accepted at CVPR 2025 with 1 Highlight.
- [01/2025] 3 papers accepted at ICRA 2025; 2 papers accepted at ICLR 2025 with 1 Oral.
Research Highlights
My long-term research goal is to build embodied agents that can reason about and interact effectively with the physical world.
- Robot Learning: embodied AI, robot manipulation, physical simulation, AI agent, self-driving
- Foundational Models: 3D vision, multimodal LLMs, commonsense reasoning, self-supervised learning
ICRA25: Manipulation via Scene Flow
IROS25: PhyGrasp
ICRA24: RT-X
NeurIPS23: EmbodiedGPT
CoRL24: Sparse Diffusion Policy
CVPR23: EC for Embodied Control
Preprint: Long-Horizon Tasks with LLM
Preprint: REMAC
CoRL22: Embodied Concept Learner
NeurIPS23 Dataset: Physion++
NeurIPS22: ComPhy Benchmark
- DexHandDiff: Interaction-aware Diffusion Planning for Adaptive Dexterous Manipulation
- Zhixuan Liang, Yao Mu, Yixiao Wang, Tianxing Chen, Wenqi Shao, Wei Zhan, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Ping Luo, Mingyu Ding
CVPR 2025 [paper] [project] [code]
- ReBot: Scaling Robot Learning with Real-to-Sim-to-Real Robotic Video Synthesis
- Yu Fang, Yue Yang, Xinghao Zhu, Kaiyuan Zheng, Gedas Bertasius, Daniel Szafir, Mingyu Ding
IROS 2025 [paper] [project] [code]
- Language-Driven Policy Distillation for Cooperative Driving in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
- Jiaqi Liu, Chengkai Xu, Peng Hang, Jian Sun, Wei Zhan, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Mingyu Ding
IROS 2025 [paper]
- Physics-Aware Robotic Palletization with Online Masking Inference
- Tianqi Zhang, Zheng Wu, Yuxin Chen, Yixiao Wang, Boyuan Liang, Scott Moura, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Mingyu Ding† (corresponding author), Wei Zhan
ICRA 2025 (Best Paper Award in Automation) [paper] [code]
- Sparse Diffusion Policy: A Sparse, Reusable, and Flexible Policy for Robot Learning
- Yixiao Wang, Yifei Zhang, Mingxiao Huo, Thomas Tian, Xiang Zhang, Yichen Xie, Chenfeng Xu, Pengliang Ji, Wei Zhan, Mingyu Ding† (corresponding author), Masayoshi Tomizuka
CoRL 2024 [paper] [project]
- Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models
- UniAdapter: Unified Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Cross-modal Modeling
- Haoyu Lu, Yuqi Huo, Guoxing Yang, Zhiwu Lu, Wei Zhan, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Mingyu Ding
ICLR 2024 [paper] [code]
- VDT: General-purpose Video Diffusion Transformers via Mask Modeling
- Haoyu Lu, Guoxing Yang, Nanyi Fei, Yuqi Huo, Zhiwu Lu, Ping Luo, Mingyu Ding
ICLR 2024 [paper] [project]
Selected Awards
- 2025 Amazon Research Award
- 2025 ICRA Best Paper Award in Automation (10/4,250)
- 2024 ICRA Best Paper Award (2/3,937)
- 2023 ME Rising Stars, UC Berkeley (30 worldwide/year)
- 2023 CVPR Doctoral Consortium (53 worldwide/year)
- 2022 WAIC Rising Stars (15 worldwide/year)
- 2021 Baidu Fellowship (10 worldwide/year)
- 2020 Microsoft Fellowship Nomination Award (15 in Asia/year)
- 2018 Best Student Paper Runner-up Award in 25th ICONIP (2/575)
PhD Students
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2025 FallSikai Li (B.S. in CS/ECE, UMich-SJTU)
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2025 FallJiaqi Liu (B.E. & M.E. in Transportation, Tongji Univ., ranked 1/163; co-advised with Huaxiu Yao)
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- Best Paper Award in Robot Manipulation and Locomotion at ICRA 2025
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2025 FallYunchao Yao (B.S. in CS, UCSD; M.S. in Robotics, CMU RI)
Teachings
Activities
- Session Chair for ICRA 25
- Area Chair for CVPR, NeurIPS, RSS, ICCV, ICLR, WACV, VALSE
- Associate Editor for IROS
- Guest Editor for Special Issues: Robotics - Embodied Intelligence; Pattern Recognition - Spatial Embodied Intelligence
- Conference Reviewer for ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, CVPR, RSS, CoRL, ICRA, IROS, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI, ACMMM, ACC, etc
- Journal Reviewer for TPAMI, TMLR, IJCV, RA-L, TIP, TCSVT, TMM, TITS, ACM CSUR, etc
