Yunzhu Li

Yunzhu Li

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

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 Graduate 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

Yixuan Wang ECE PhD

Kaifeng Zhang CS PhD

Master Students
- Baoyu Li (CS Master, with Kris Hauser)
- Mingtong Zhang (CS Master)

Former Mentees
- Yancheng Cai (was Visiting Student at Stanford, now PhD at Cambridge)
- Yiming Dou (was Visiting Student at Stanford, now PhD at UMich)
- Hao Li (was Master at Stanford, now PhD at Stanford)
- Toru Lin (was Undergrad at MIT, now PhD at UC Berkeley)
- Ziang Liu (was Master at Stanford, now PhD at Cornell)
- Haochen Shi (was Master at Stanford, now PhD at Stanford)
- Haotian Xue (was Visiting Student at MIT, now PhD at Georgia Tech)
- Qiang Zhang (was Visiting Student at MIT, now PhD at Princeton)

[2023/06] CVPR-23 Precognition Workshop

[2022/06] PhD Thesis Defense at MIT CSAIL

[2023/11] Invited Talk at Tsinghua University, Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS)
[2023/10] Invited Talk at IROS 2023 Workshop on Causality for Robotics
[2023/08] Invited Talk at Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory
[2023/07] Invited Talk at Peking University
[2023/06] Invited Talk at CVPR 2023 Workshop on Precognition: Seeing through the Future [Recording]
[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
[2022/06] PhD Thesis Defense at MIT CSAIL [Recording]
[2022/04] Invited Talk at Google Research
[2022/01] Invited Talk at TU Berlin

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

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

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)

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