We are IDEAL@UNC, a robot learning research lab. We are interested in building intelligent robots capable of interacting with the physical world as naturally and dexterously as humans.

Members

PhD Students

• 2025 FallSikai Li (B.S. in CS/ECE, UMich-SJTU)
• 2025 FallJiaqi Liu (B.E. & M.E. in Transportation, Tongji Univ., ranked 1/163; co-advised with Huaxiu Yao)
• 2025 FallZhenyu Wei (B.E. in CS, SJTU)
  • Best Paper Award in Robot Manipulation and Locomotion at ICRA 2025
• 2025 FallYunchao Yao (B.S. in CS, UCSD; M.S. in Robotics, CMU RI)
• 2024 FallYu Fang (M.S. in CS, ShanghaiTech; co-advised with Daniel Szafir)
  • Nature Communications

Interns

• Dong Jing
• Ruogu Li
• Chenyang Ma
• Mulang Shi

Recent Publications [Full List]

• Mixture of Horizons in Action Chunking
  • Dong Jing, Gang Wang, Jiaqi Liu, Weiliang Tang, Zelong Sun, Yunchao Yao, Zhenyu Wei, Yunhui Liu, Zhiwu Lu, Mingyu Ding
    arXiv [paper] [project] [code]
• 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]
• 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
  • Open X-Embodiment Collaboration: Sergey Levine et al.
    ICRA 2024 (Best Paper Award) [paper] [code] [project]
• 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]

Awards

• 2024 ICRA Best Paper Award
• 2025 ICRA Best Paper Award in Automation
• 2025 ICRA Best Paper Award on Robot Manipulation and Locomotion

Openings

I am actively seeking self-motivated students for PhD and intern positions. Research topics include, but are not limited to: Dexterous / Loco-Manipulation, Sim2Real, VLMs/VLAs, RL, 3D Vision, Video/World Models, Mechanical Design, Control, Diffusion Models, etc. High-quality first-author publications in related areas are a plus.

If you’re interested, please fill out this form and email me with your CV, thanks!

Meanwhile, we highly recommend you to submit your applications through the UNC Graduate Admissions portal by December 15 and list me as faculty interest.

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