Yunhai Feng

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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🐳.

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Publications

ReflectVLM
Reflective Planning: Vision-Language Models for Multi-Stage Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

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}, 
}

RGV3
Design and Control of Roller Grasper V3 for In-Hand Manipulation

Shenli Yuan, Lin Shao, Yunhai Feng, Jiatong Sun, Teng Xue, Connor Yako, Jeannette Bohg, Kenneth Salisbury

IEEE Transactions on Robotics(T-RO), September 2024

Xplore Website Video BibTeX

@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}
}

owmcorl
Finetuning Offline World Models in the Real World

Yunhai Feng*, Nicklas Hansen*, Ziyan Xiong*, Chandramouli Rajagopalan, Xiaolong Wang

Proceedings of the 7th Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), November 2023
Oral presentation

arXiv Website Code BibTeX

@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}
}

SAM-RL
SAM-RL: Sensing-Aware Model-based Reinforcement Learning via Differentiable Physics-based Simulation and Rendering

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

arXiv Website Video BibTeX

@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}
}

ViPRoM
Exploring Visual Pre-training for Robot Manipulation: Datasets, Models and Methods

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

arXiv Website Video BibTeX

@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

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