About Me

I am a Research Engineer in Robotics at Shanghai AI Laboratory. I am interested in how offline and agentic reinforcement learning can help embodied agents learn robotic manipulation.

I received my M.Sc. in Control Science and Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2026, where I was advised by Prof. Jun-Guo Lu. My recent work includes actor-free zero-shot RL and memory evolution for embodied agents, alongside embodied agent evaluation and world-action models. I also continue to work on humanoid control: ARIEL builds on my earlier GBC work with demonstration-conditioned execution memory.

I am currently studying how embodied agents learn from experience: transferring a frontier agent’s robot interaction experience to an open model through staged SFT and RL, from visual grounding to closed-loop manipulation.

I am looking for PhD opportunities in robotics and embodied AI. Please feel free to get in touch.

News

  • New work: ABI on actor-free zero-shot RL (manuscript in preparation), and SimplEvo on memory evolution for embodied agents (arXiv release pending).

  • Our EBench report is on arXiv, studying direct robot control and an agent harness with post-trained policies.

  • PICA-WAM is on arXiv: learning visual perturbation invariance for world action models.

  • Collaborative technical reports InternW0 and InternW0-Δ are available.

  • InfCoiL accepted to NeurIPS 2026 — coordinated planning and control for physical human-object interaction.

* Equal contribution (co-first authors).

NeurIPS 2026

InfCoiL: Coordinated Planner-Controller Learning for Closed-Loop Physics-Based Human-Object Interaction

Yude Zou*, Yifei Yao*, Yiwei Hao*, Hanqing Wang, Xing Gao

Accepted

Make generated motion executable. InfCoiL lets a flow-matching planner and a physics-based controller improve each other through shared rollout feedback, alternating their RL updates when progress plateaus.

Watch demos

Closed-loop table transport

Qualitative S=2 planner / C45k controller rollout from the project page. The goal ring turns green on stable arrival. Five-frame display smoothing and a final-pose hold are part of the source video; this clip is separate from the paper benchmark. Source

Replanning through tripod transport

A second object and transport task from the same qualitative release, with the same display smoothing and final-pose hold. Source

Ongoing Research

Research project 2026

Learning Embodied Agents from Experience

In progress

How can an open model learn to act from a frontier agent’s experience? I am studying the transfer of Astra’s robot interaction experience to Qwen3.8-27B through staged SFT and reinforcement learning, connecting visual grounding, short manipulation skills, and long-horizon tasks.

Research project 2026

ARIEL: An Agent-Ready Humanoid Behavior Model with In-Context Execution Memory

In development

ARIEL gives an agent a simple interface to whole-body control. Choose a demonstration, load it into memory, then recall the motion or steer its style with velocity and heading commands. The controller keeps executing between agent decisions.

Watch demos

Three motions, replayed from memory

Three independent simulation trials: disco, reaching overhead and a questioning gesture. Loaded demonstrations are replayed without motion references. Actions remain at original speed; the last two trials explicitly omit four seconds of waiting.

Keep a style while changing direction

A separate simulation trial: a preloaded walking style follows changing velocity and heading commands. One continuous 28-second segment at original speed.
Manuscript 2026

ABI: Actor-Free Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning with Behavior-Inductive Representations

Yifei Yao

First author; full author list to be finalized.

Manuscript in preparation

Given an existing policy, ABI trains only a reusable guide. The guide improves task execution at deployment while the policy stays frozen, with no parameter updates or task-specific policy post-training.

Watch demo

Same policy, with and without ABI

Manipulation, locomotion and navigation excerpts from the project video. Each pair uses the same starting state, random seed and frozen base policy. Selected simulation examples with edited playback speeds; on-screen scores describe these development episodes.