Yunzhu Li

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Yunzhu Li

Yunzhu Li

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University.

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

/ / / yunzhu.li [at] columbia (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.
- Structured World Models: Learning physics-inspired predictive models from and for robotic manipulation of deformable objects.
- Embodied Intelligence: Developing and integrating robotic foundation models for generalizable and long-horizon embodied interactions.
- 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 and Postdocs
- Recent Highlights:
  - Kaifeng Zhang and Binghao Huang received the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2026 [Link].
  - Yixuan Wang received the G-Research 2026 PhD Prize [Link].
Irving Fang
(Visiting from NYU)

Binghao Huang

Hanxiao Jiang
(w/ Shenlong Wang)

Hongyu Li
(Visiting from Brown)

Shivansh Patel
(w/ Svetlana Lazebnik)

Rhythm Syed
(w/ Tony Dear)

Fangyu Wu
(Postdoc)

Yixuan Wang

Zach Witzel

Kaifeng Zhang

Recent Talks

Structured World Models and Tactile Sensing
[2026/03] Princeton Robotics Seminar

Foundation Models for Robotic Manipulation
[2025/04] NUS Robotics Seminar

Towards General Robotic Intelligence
[2025/03] Columbia AI Summit

[2026/09] Invited Talk at ECCV 2026 Workshop on How to Build Effective World Models for Embodied AI
[2026/07] Invited Talk at RSS 2026 Workshop on Tactile Sensing for Robotic Foundation Models
[2026/06] Invited Talk at ICRA 2026 Workshop on Synthetic Data for Robot Learning
[2026/06] Invited Talk at CVPR 2026 Workshop on Bridging Vision, Language, and Action
[2026/06] Invited Talk at CVPR 2026 Workshop on Multi-Modal Reasoning for Agentic Intelligence
[2026/05] Guest Lecture at Tsinghua University
[2026/04] Invited Talks at Yale SMLM Workshop and Stevens Institute of Technology
[2026/03] Invited Talks at Princeton Robotics Seminar [Recording] and Johns Hopkins University LCSR Seminar
[2026/02] Invited Talks at Harvard Vision AI Seminar and Mila Robot Learning Seminar
[2026/01] Invited Talk at Shanghai Jiao Tong University
[2025/12] Invited Talk at OpenAI
[2025/11] Invited Talks at Brown University and Lehigh University
[2025/11] Guest Lecture at Physical Intelligence at UPenn
[2025/10] Invited Talk at IROS 2025 Workshop on Advanced Haptic Sensors and Devices for Healthcare Robots
[2025/10] Invited Talk at ICCV 2025 Workshop on Learning to See: Advancing Spatial Understanding for Embodied Intelligence
[2025/10] Invited Talk at ICCV 2025 Tutorial on Foundation Models Meet Embodied Agents
[2025/10] Invited Talk at Georgia Tech IRIM Robotics Seminar
[2025/09] Invited Talk at CoRL 2025 Workshop on Robotics World Modeling
[2025/09] Invited Talk at CoRL 2025 Workshop on Beyond Rigid Worlds: Representing and Interacting with Non-Rigid Objects
[2025/09] Invited Talk at Toyota Research Institute (TRI)'s ML Speaker Series

[Show more]

Publications (show selected / show by date / show by topic)
Research Topics: Robotic Manipulation / Foundation Models for Embodied Agents / Physical Scene Understanding / Multi-Modal Perception

Selected Honors

AAAI New Faculty Highlights, 2025 [Link]
Amazon Research Award, Fall 2024 [Link]
Teachers Ranked as Excellent at UIUC, Spring 2024 [Link]
Best Conference Paper Award, International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024 [Link]
Sony Faculty Innovation Award, 2023 [Link]
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]
Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award, EECS Dept., Peking Univ. (10 in 400)

Professional Service

Workshop Organizer

Learning to Simulate Robot Worlds at CoRL 2025
Structured World Models for Robotic Manipulation at RSS 2025
Foundation Models Meet Embodied Agents at CVPR 2025
Foundation Models and Neuro-Symbolic AI for Robotics at ICRA 2025
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

Foundation Models Meet Embodied Agents at AAAI 2025, NAACL 2025, ICCV 2025
Learning Representations via Graph-structured Networks at CVPR 2021
Multi-Modality Learning from Videos and Beyond at ICCV 2021

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