About Me

I am a 1st year PhD student at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS), Tsinghua University, under the supervision of Prof. Mengdi Xu.

Robotic Manipulation Vision-Language-Action Models World Models In-Context Learning

Ultimately, I aim to build adaptive physical agents — robots that perceive, reason, and adjust their behavior online to accomplish tasks in open-ended environments.

I’m always happy to chat about research and ideas. If you share an interest in robotics, embodied AI, or anything adjacent, or are looking for collaboration, please feel free to reach out — I’d love to connect.

Publications

2026

CATok: Rethinking Causal Action Tokenization with Condition Annealing in Flow Matching

Chenyu Zhang^*, Yuhang Cao^*, Daru Du, Yingxi Lu, Jing Shao, Ruoqu Chen, Jiajun Liu, Liu Cao, Yicheng Liu, Hang Zhao, Mengdi Xu^†

In Submission · Project Page

What Do VLAs Actually Learn through In-Context Failure Conditioning?

Jiajun Liu, Jieming Li, Zi Zhuang, Hang Yu, Qingli Chen, Liu Cao, Yingxi Lu, Ruoqu Chen, Yuhang Cao, Chenyu Zhang, Yankai Lin, Mengdi Xu

Published in CVPR 2026 Workshop on 3D-LLM/VLA

Kinematics-Aware Diffusion Policy with Consistent 3D Observation and Action Space for Whole-Arm Robotic Manipulation

Kangchen Lv, Mingrui Yu, Yongyi Jia, Chenyu Zhang, Xiang Li^†

Published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) · BibTeX

2025

HoVLE: Unleashing the Power of Monolithic Vision-Language Models with Holistic Vision-Language Embedding

Chenxin Tao^*, Shiqian Su^*, Xizhou Zhu^*, Chenyu Zhang, Zhe Chen, Jiawen Liu, Wenhai Wang, Lewei Lu, Gao Huang, Yu Qiao, Jifeng Dai^†

Published in IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) · BibTeX

2024

ToW3D: Consistency-aware Interactive Point-based Mesh Editing on GANs

Haixu Song, Fangfu Liu, Chenyu Zhang, Yueqi Duan^†

Published in IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) · BibTeX

Education

Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University

Ph.D. student, Computer Science

Field of Interest: Robotic Manipulation, VLA, World Model, MLLM · Advisor: Mengdi Xu

Sept 2025 — Present

Department of Automation, Tsinghua University

B.E. in Automation

GPA: 3.85 / 4.0

Sept 2021 — June 2025

Department of Statistics and Data Science, Tsinghua University

Minor in Statistics

GPA: 4.0 / 4.0

Sept 2021 — June 2025

Honors

Excellent GraduateTsinghua University June 2025
Outstanding GraduateDept. of Automation, Tsinghua University June 2025
Comprehensive Excellent ScholarshipLuo Yue-Hua Scholarship Nov 2024
Comprehensive Excellent ScholarshipSK Scholarship Nov 2023
Comprehensive Excellent ScholarshipTsinghua Scholarship Nov 2023
Academic Excellence ScholarshipDepartmental Scholarship Nov 2022

Experience

Apr 2026 — Present

Meituan

Research Intern in Robotic Foundation Models

Beijing / Shenzhen, China

Sept 2024 — June 2025

Department of Automation, Tsinghua University

Research Intern in Robotics

Mentor: Xiang Li · Beijing, China

May 2024 — June 2025

MARS LAB, Tsinghua University

Research Intern in Robotics

Mentor: Hang Zhao · Beijing, China

July 2024 — Nov 2024

Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Research Intern in Multimodal Models

Shanghai, China

July 2023 — Apr 2024

Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University

Research Intern in 3D Computer Vision

Mentor: Yueqi Duan · Beijing, China

Outreach

Led the Tsinghua University Wine Association (TUWA) as President since Feb 2026, overseeing a large community of 2,000+ members and managing events, promotion, and overall financial operations.
Won the National Championship in the Left Bank Bordeaux Cup China Regional Competition (Mar 2026, Blind Tasting); heading to France for the 2026 World Final in June.
Three-time consecutive Capital University Games Baseball Champion (2023–2025) as a starting player for Tsinghua Baseball Team.