Hi there! I am a tenure-track assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), leading the Intelligent Dexterous Embodied AI Lab at UNC (IDEAL@UNC). I was a postdoc at BAIR@UC Berkeley and was a visiting PhD at CSAIL@MIT. I received my doctorate from the University of Hong Kong and finished my undergraduate degrees at Renmin University of China.
My research interests lie at the intersection of robotics, embodied AI, and computer vision. My long-term research goal is to build intelligent robots capable of interacting with the physical world as naturally and dexterously as humans.
- Robot Learning: Dexterous Manipulation, Humanoid Loco-Manipulation, VLAs, Real2Sim2Real, Latent Actions
- Foundational Models: Embodied Agents, World Models, Multimodal LLMs, Physical Reasoning, 3D Vision
Current as Touch
DexVerse
RSS26: OHRA
TMech26: DexH2R
CoorDex
ICRA25: Palletization
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
PhD Students
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2026 FallZixian Liu (B.S. in CS, Tsinghua Univ., Yao Class)
- Golden in 2020 Chinese Physics Olympiad Final
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- Best Paper Award in Automation at ICRA 2025
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2025 FallSikai Li (B.S. in ECE, UMich-SJTU)
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2025 FallJiaqi Liu (B.S. in Transportation Engineering, 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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2024 FallYu Fang (M.S. in CS, ShanghaiTech; co-advised with Daniel Szafir)
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2024 FallChenyang Ma (M.S. in EE, Ohio State; co-advised with Daniel Szafir)
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
- 2022 WAIC Rising Stars
- 2021 Baidu Fellowship
- 2018 Best Student Paper Runner-up Award in 25th ICONIP (2/575)
Teachings
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Spring 2026COMP 790-192 Embodied and Agentic AI, UNC
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Spring 2026 Guest Lecture: Multimodal Computer Vision, TAMU
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Spring 2025 Guest Lecture: ME555 Robotic Manipulation, Duke
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Spring 2025 Guest Lecture: CSCE753 Computer Vision and Robot Perception, TAMU
Activities
- Area Chair for RSS, CoRL, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR; Session Chair for ICRA, CVPR, ICLR
- Associate Editor for IROS; Editorial Board for Robotics, Mechatronics and Intelligent Machines
- Guest Editor for Robotics - Embodied Intelligence; Pattern Recognition - Spatial Embodied Intelligence