Yunzhu Li

Yunzhu Li

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with affiliations in both Electrical & Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory.

Before joining UIUC, I was a Postdoc at Stanford Vision and Learning Lab (SVL), working with Fei-Fei Li and Jiajun Wu. I received my PhD from Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, advised by Antonio Torralba and Russ Tedrake, and obtained my bachelor's degree from Peking University.

/ / / yunzhuli [at] illinois (dot) edu

Robotic Perception, Interaction, and Learning Lab (RoboPIL)

At RoboPIL, we work at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. Specifically, we focus on Robot Learning and aim to significantly expand robots' perception and physical interaction capabilities, particularly through the following three directions.
- Intuitive Physics: Learning structured world models for robotic manipulation of objects with diverse physical properties.
- Embodied Intelligence: Focusing on long-horizon planning, generalization to diverse environments, and sim-to-real transfer.
- Multi-Modal Perception: Harnessing vision, touch, audio, and language for fine-grained and effective manipulation.
Prospective Students: I'm looking for technically strong and self-motivated students passionate about advancing the frontiers of robot learning.
- PhD Applicants: Please submit your application to the CS PhD program, and mention me as one of your Faculty of Interest.
- Postdoc and Visiting Students: Please reach out to me directly via email, attaching your CV.

PhD Students

Binghao Huang
CS PhD

Hanxiao Jiang
CS PhD, with Shenlong Wang

Shivansh Patel
CS PhD

Yixuan Wang
ECE PhD

Ruihai Wu
Visiting PhD

Kaifeng Zhang
CS PhD
Master Students
- Baoyu Li (CS Master, with Kris Hauser)
- Keyi Shen (ECE Master, with Huan Zhang)
- Jiangwei Yu (CS Master)
- Mingtong Zhang (CS Master)

Recent Talks

Foundation Models for Robotic Manipulation
[2024/03] Invited Talk, CMU VASC Seminar

Learning Structured World Models From and For Physical Interactions
[2024/03] Guest Lecture, CMU 16-831: Intro to Robot Learning

[2024/07] Invited Talk at RSS 2024 Workshop on Structural Priors as Inductive Biases for Learning Robot Dynamics
[2024/07] Invited Talk at RSS 2024 Workshop on Koopman Operators in Robotics
[2024/05] Invited Talk at ICRA 2024 Workshop on A Future Roadmap for Sensorimotor Skill Learning for Robot Manipulation
[2024/05] Invited Talk at ICRA 2024 Workshop on Bimanual Manipulation: On Kitchen Challenges
[2024/03] Invited Talk at CMU Robotics Institute, VASC Seminar [Recording]
[2024/03] Guest Lecture for 16-831: Introduction to Robot Learning at CMU [Recording]
[2024/03] Invited Talk at AICE Spring Research Symposium
[2024/01] Invited Talk at Mila Robot Learning Seminar [Recording]

[Show more]

Publications (show selected / show by date / show by topic)
Research Topics: Robotic Manipulation / Physical Scene Understanding / Multi-Modal Perception / Imitation Learning

Selected Honors

Sony Faculty Innovation Award
Best Systems Paper Award, Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2023 [Link]
Finalist, Best Paper/Best Student Paper Awards, Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2023 [Link]
First Place Recipient, Ernst A. Guillemin Master's Thesis Award in Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making at MIT, 2021 [Link]
Adobe Research Fellowship, 2020 [Link]
Finalist, Facebook Fellowship, 2021 [Link]
Finalist, NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship, 2019, 2020, 2021 [Link]
Outstanding Reviewer, ICCV 2021 (Top 5%) [Link]
Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award, EECS Dept., Peking Univ. (10 in 400)

Professional Service

Workshop Organizer

How Far Are We From AGI? at ICLR 2024
Implicit Representations for Robotic Manipulation at RSS 2022
Multi-Agent Interaction and Relational Reasoning at ICCV 2021
Deformable Object Simulation in Robotics at RSS 2021
Vision Meets Cognition at CVPR 2019

Tutorial Organizer

Learning Representations via Graph-structured Networks at CVPR 2021
Multi-Modality Learning from Videos and Beyond at ICCV 2021

Area Chair: CoRL, CVPR
Senior Program Committee Member: AAAI
Conference Reviewer: ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, ICCV, CVPR, ECCV, ICRA, IROS, RSS, CoRL, Humanoids
Program Committee Member: AAAI, UAI
Journal Reviewer: Science, Nature Communications, TPAMI, IJCV, IEEE T-RO, IEEE RA-L, IEEE-TMI, IEEE T-ITS, IEEE Access, IEEE-ToH