Hi there! I am a tenure-track assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley working with Masayoshi Tomizuka and a visiting scholar at MIT working with Joshua Tenenbaum. Before that, I received my PhD from the University of Hong Kong advised by Ping Luo, and my B.S. from Renmin University of China under the supervision of Zhiwu Lu.
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!
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, task planning, physical simulation, self-driving
- General-purpose Models: 3D vision, multimodal foundation models, commonsense reasoning, self-supervised learning
CoRL22: Embodied Concept Learner
NeurIPS23 Dataset: Physion++
NeurIPS23: EmbodiedGPT
ICML23: AdaptDiffuser
ICRA24: RT-X
ICLR24: Tree-Planner
Preprint: PhyGrasp
CoRL24: Sparse Diffusion Policy
Preprint: Manipulation via Scene Flow
Preprint: Long-Horizon Tasks with LLM
CVPR23: EC for Embodied Control
NeurIPS22: ComPhy Benchmark
NeurIPS21: Reasoning with DiffPhysics
CVPR24: SkillDiffuser
Preprint: RoboScript
ICML24: RoboCodeX
Preprint: LanguageMPC
(† Corresponding author)
- 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†, Masayoshi Tomizuka
CoRL 2024 [paper] [project]
- Human-oriented Representation Learning for Robotic Manipulation
- Mingxiao Huo, Mingyu Ding†, Chenfeng Xu, Thomas Tian, Xinghao Zhu, Yao Mu, Lingfeng Sun, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Wei Zhan
RSS 2024 [paper] [project]
- SkillDiffuser: Interpretable Hierarchical Planning via Skill Abstractions in Diffusion-Based Task Execution
- Zhixuan Liang, Yao Mu, Hengbo Ma, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Mingyu Ding†, Ping Luo
CVPR 2024 [paper] [project]
- Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models
- Open X-Embodiment Collaboration: Google, Mingyu Ding, et al.
ICRA 2024 (Best Paper Award) [paper] [code] [project]
- RoboCodeX: Multimodal Code Generation for Robotic Behavior Synthesis
- Yao Mu, Junting Chen, Qinglong Zhang, Shoufa Chen, Qiaojun Yu, Chongjian Ge, Runjian Chen, Zhixuan Liang, Mengkang Hu, Chaofan Tao, Peize Sun, Haibao Yu, Chao Yang, Wenqi Shao, Wenhai Wang, Jifeng Dai, Yu Qiao, Mingyu Ding†, Ping Luo
ICML 2024 [paper] [project]
- 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]
- EmbodiedGPT: Vision-Language Pre-Training via Embodied Chain of Thought
- Yao Mu, Qinglong Zhang, Mengkang Hu, Wenhai Wang, Mingyu Ding†, Jun Jin, Bin Wang, Jifeng Dai, Yu Qiao, Ping Luo
NeurIPS 2023 (Spotlight) [paper] [project]
- Towards Free Data Selection with General-Purpose Models
- Yichen Xie, Mingyu Ding†, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Wei Zhan
NeurIPS 2023 [paper] [code]
- Physion++: Evaluating Physical Scene Understanding that Requires Online Inference of Different Physical Properties
- Hsiao-Yu Tung*, Mingyu Ding*, Zhenfang Chen, Daniel M. Bear, Chuang Gan, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Daniel L. K. Yamins, Judith Fan, Kevin A. Smith
NeurIPS dataset track 2023 [paper] [project]
Selected Honors
- 2025 ICRA Best Paper Award in Automation
- 2024 ICRA Best Paper Award (2 out of 3,937)
- 2023 ME Rising Stars, UC Berkeley (30 awardees worldwide in 2023)
- 2023 CVPR Doctoral Consortium (53 awardees worldwide in 2023)
- 2022 WAIC Rising Stars (15 awardees globally each year)
- 2021 Baidu Fellowship (10 awardees globally each year)
- 2020 Microsoft Fellowship Nomination Award (15 nominations in Asia)
- 2018 Best Student Paper Runner-up Award in 25th International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP)
- Outstanding Graduate of Beijing
- National Scholarship
Activities
- Session Chair for ICRA 25
- Associate Editor for IROS 25
- Guest Editor for Robotics Special Issue: Embodied Intelligence
- Area Chair for ICCV, NeurIPS, RSS
- 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
