Yifei Yao

Yifei Yao

Research Engineer in Robotics · Shanghai AI Laboratory

My research interests include reinforcement learning, embodied agents, and 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 previous work includes humanoid imitation and bipedal locomotion.

I am looking for PhD opportunities in robotics and embodied AI.

Selected Publications

All publications ↗
NeurIPS 2026AcceptedCo-first author

InfCoiL

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

A flow-matching planner and a multi-morphology controller learn together through closed-loop reinforcement learning for physical human-object interaction.

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

* Equal contribution (co-first authors).

ECCV 2026Co-first author

REAL

Exploratory, Communicative, and Deployable: Vision-Driven Embodied Agents for Open-World Mobile Manipulation

Vision-driven mobile manipulation through active exploration, visual grounding, and interactive intent disambiguation, with a shared interface for simulation and real robots.

Boyu Mi*, Mengchen Ma*, Yifei Yao*, Xing Gao, Junting Chen, Yangzi Li, Zihou Zhu, Guohao Li, Zhenfei Yin, Tai Wang, Yao Mu, Jiangmiao Pang, Hanqing Wang

* Equal contribution (co-first authors).

Web report2026Co-first author

EBench × GPT-6-Astra

How Far Does a Frontier Agent Get as an Embodied Policy?

Evaluating a frontier agent as an embodied policy through single-shot in-context learning, direct robot control, and analysis of manipulation precision, recovery, and task composition.

Yifei Yao*, Yude Zou*, Guanbo Jiao*, …, Xing Gao, Weinan Zhang, Chunhua Shen

* Equal contribution (co-first authors).

arXiv2025

GBC

GBC: Generalized Behavior-Cloning Framework for Whole-Body Humanoid Imitation

An open-source pathway from human motion to humanoid action: differentiable retargeting, DAgger-MMPPO, and an Isaac Lab training workflow.

Yifei Yao, Chengyuan Luo, Jiaheng Du, Wentao He, Jun-Guo Lu

IROS 2025

AnyBipe

AnyBipe: An Automated End-to-End Framework for Training and Deploying Bipedal Robots Powered by Large Language Models

Language-guided reward design, reinforcement learning, and sim-to-real evaluation in one end-to-end pipeline for bipedal robots.

Yifei Yao, Wentao He, Chenyu Gu, Jiaheng Du, Fuwei Tan, Zhen Zhu, Jun-Guo Lu

I also contributed to the InternW0 and InternW0-Δ technical reports.

News

  • 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.

  • REAL accepted to ECCV 2026. Explore the paper, benchmark, and open-source code.

  • GBC released with an end-to-end humanoid imitation pipeline and documentation.

Selected Honors

All honors ↗
  • 2026
    Outstanding Graduate (Master’s)Shanghai Jiao Tong University
  • 2021
    Outstanding Winner, Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM/ICM)COMAP
  • 2022
    National First Prize, RoboCup Robot World Cup China CompetitionIntelligent Vehicle Challenge · 2021 edition, awarded in June 2022