Yunzhu Li

I am a Postdoctoral Scholar 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 my bachelor's degree from Peking University.

My research interests lie in robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. In particular, I am interested in enabling robots and embodied agents to better perceive and interact with the physical world.

/ / / liyunzhu [at] stanford (dot) edu

News

I will join the Department of Computer Science and be affiliated with the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2023. My group focuses on Robot Learning and aims at expanding robots' physical interaction capabilities through the following three lenses.
- Intuitive Physics (i.e., learning structured world models for robotic manipulation of objects with complicated properties).
- Embodied Intelligence with focuses on long-horizon planning, generalization to diverse environments, and sim-to-real transfer.
- Multi-Modal Perception for fine-grained and effective manipulation using vision, touch, audio, and language.
Prospective Students: I have PhD and Postdoc openings in my group at UIUC starting Fall 2023. I'm looking for technically strong and self-motivated students interested in advancing the frontiers of robot learning. Check out the following materials for an overview of my research.
- PhD Thesis Defense / Research Statement
For PhD applicants, please submit your application, select the Computer Science PhD program, and mention me as one of your Faculty of Interest.

I will serve as an Area Chair of CoRL 2023.
Our scalable tactile glove introduced in a Nature 2019 paper is collected by the MIT Museum. [Photo]
I have been chosen as the First Place Recipient of the Ernst A. Guillemin Master's Thesis Award in Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making at MIT.
Our paper on learning 3D representations using NeRF for visuomotor control is accepted to CoRL as Oral (Top 6.5%). [Project] [OpenReview]
Our Nature Electronics paper on learning human-environment interactions using conformal tactile textiles is featured on the cover of the issue!

Recent Talks

Learning Structured World Models From and For Physical Interactions
PhD Thesis Defense at MIT CSAIL
[2022/06] [Recording]

[2023/06] Invited Talk at CVPR 2023 Workshop on Precognition: Seeing through the Future
[2023/05] Invited Talk at ICRA 2023 Workshop on Representing and Manipulating Deformable Objects
[2022/12] Guest Lecture at NYU, Invited Talk at Shanghai AI Laboratory
[2022/10] Invited Talk at Stanford and UC Berkeley
[2022/07] Invited Talk at RSS 2022 Workshop on Implicit Representations for Robotic Manipulation [Recording] and ISEE AI
[2022/04] Invited Talk at Google Research
[2022/01] Invited Talk at TU Berlin

[Show more]

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

Education

2017.9 - 2022.8, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
2017.9 - 2020.5, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
2013.9 - 2017.7, Peking University
Bachelor of Science (Summa Cum Laude) in Computer Science

Experience

2017.9 - 2022.8, Research Assistant, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Advisors: Prof. Antonio Torralba, Prof. Russ Tedrake
2021.6 - 2021.8, Research Intern, NVIDIA Robotics Research Lab
Advisors: Prof. Dieter Fox, Prof. Animesh Garg, Dr. Karl Van Wyk, Dr. Yu-Wei Chao
2019.6 - 2019.9, Research Intern, NVIDIA Robotics Research Lab
Advisors: Prof. Dieter Fox, Prof. Animesh Garg, Prof. Animashree Anandkumar
2016.9 - 2017.2, Research Assistant, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Advisor: Prof. Stefano Ermon
2016.6 - 2016.9, Research Assistant, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Advisor: Prof. Sebastian Thrun
2015.3 - 2016.5, Research Assistant, Institute of Digital Media, Peking University
Advisors: Prof. Yizhou Wang, Prof. Tianfu Wu

Selected Honors

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)
Peking Univ. Merit Student Pacemaker (10 in 200)
Lixin-Tang Scholarship (4 in 400)

Professional Service

Workshop Organizer

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
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: TPAMI, IJCV, IEEE T-RO, IEEE RA-L, IEEE-TMI, IEEE T-ITS, IEEE Access, IEEE-ToH