Email: yunhaifcs.cornell.edu
Hello! I'm a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Cornell University🧸, working with Prof. Sanjiban Choudhury and Prof. Kuan Fang.
My research goal is to endow embodied agents with versatile skills by learning efficiently and continually in the physical world. Toward that end, my research is focused on scalable data-driven and model-based decision making for robotics, especially the following directions:
- World models / Model-based reinforcement learning for sample-efficient learning,
- Blended learning / planning / control for effective long-horizon task solving, and
- Grounding foundation models (LLMs/VLMs) to handle complex robotic tasks.
Before joining Cornell, I received my Master's degree from UC San Diego🌊, where I worked with Prof. Xiaolong Wang, and my Bachelor's degree from Nanjing University🐳.
Publications

Yunhai Feng, Jiaming Han, Zhuoran Yang, Xiangyu Yue, Sergey Levine, Jianlan Luo
arXiv Preprint, February 2025
arXiv Website Code Video BibTeX
@misc{feng2025reflective, title={Reflective Planning: Vision-Language Models for Multi-Stage Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation}, author={Yunhai Feng and Jiaming Han and Zhuoran Yang and Xiangyu Yue and Sergey Levine and Jianlan Luo}, year={2025}, eprint={2502.16707}, archivePrefix={arXiv}, primaryClass={cs.RO}, url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16707}, }

Shenli Yuan, Lin Shao, Yunhai Feng, Jiatong Sun, Teng Xue, Connor Yako, Jeannette Bohg, Kenneth Salisbury
IEEE Transactions on Robotics(T-RO), September 2024
@article{yuan2024design, author={Yuan, Shenli and Shao, Lin and Feng, Yunhai and Sun, Jiatong and Xue, Teng and Yako, Connor L. and Bohg, Jeannette and Salisbury, J. Kenneth}, journal={IEEE Transactions on Robotics}, title={Design and Control of Roller Grasper V3 for In-Hand Manipulation}, year={2024}, volume={40}, number={}, pages={4222-4234}, doi={10.1109/TRO.2024.3454388} }

Yunhai Feng*, Nicklas Hansen*, Ziyan Xiong*, Chandramouli Rajagopalan, Xiaolong Wang
Proceedings of the 7th Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), November 2023 ✨ Oral presentation
@inproceedings{feng2023finetuning, title={Finetuning Offline World Models in the Real World}, author={Feng, Yunhai and Hansen, Nicklas and Xiong, Ziyan and Rajagopalan, Chandramouli and Wang, Xiaolong}, booktitle={Proceedings of the 7th Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL)}, year={2023} }

Jun Lv, Yunhai Feng, Cheng Zhang, Shuang Zhao, Lin Shao*, Cewu Lu*
Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), July 2023 🏆 Best System Paper Award Finalist International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), October 2024
@inproceedings{lv2023sam, title={SAM-RL: Sensing-Aware Model-Based Reinforcement Learning via Differentiable Physics-Based Simulation and Rendering}, author={Lv, Jun and Feng, Yunhai and Zhang, Cheng and Zhao, Shuang and Shao, Lin and Lu, Cewu}, booktitle={Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS)}, year={2023} }

Ya Jing*, Xuelin Zhu*, Xingbin Liu*, Qie Sima, Taozheng Yang, Yunhai Feng, Tao Kong
Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), October 2023 CoRL 2022 Workshop on Pre-training for Robot Learning, December 2022
@inproceedings{jing2023explore author={Ya Jing, Xuelin Zhu, Xingbin Liu, Qie Sima, Taozheng Yang, Yunhai Feng, Tao Kong}, title={Exploring Visual Pre-training for Robot Manipulation: Datasets, Models and Methods}, booktitle={2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)}, year={2023} }
Teaching
- Teaching Assistant: Foundations of Robotics (2024 Fall), Cornell University
- Teaching Assistant: Problem Solving (III) (2021 Fall), Problem Solving (IV) (2022 Spring), Nanjing University
Service
- Conference reviewer: IROS'23, ICRA'24,'25
- Journal reviewer: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
Awards
- Best System Paper Award Finalist, RSS 2023
- Graduate Excellence Award, 2022
- Special Scholarship for Fundamental Subjects, 2021
- People's Scholarship, 2021
- National Elite Program Scholarship, 2019 & 2020