Yuxin Chen

about.sh

$ whoami
> Yuxin Chen — Ph.D. @ UC Berkeley (MSC Lab · BAIR · HIC)
> building safe & agile embodied agents for the physical world
$ research --focus
> whole-body control · dexterous manipulation · human-robot interaction
$ research --tools
> reinforcement learning · generative models · optimization · control

Hi! I'm a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley and a member of BAIR. I'm fortunate to be advised by Prof. Masayoshi Tomizuka, an NAE member, in the MSC Lab.

Before Berkeley, I earned an M.S. in Robotics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where I worked with Prof. Ram Vasudevan, and a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering under Prof. Ella Atkins. I also hold a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

During my graduate studies, I've been fortunate to take on research intern roles at NVIDIA, the RAI Institute, and MERL, and to collaborate with Google DeepMind and Sony AI. Earlier, I worked as a software intern at Zoox and ZF.

📰 News

[Jun 2026]Our paper 3DWay was accepted to ECCV 2026!

[Apr 2026]One accepted paper (REAR) at ICML 2026!

[Mar 2026]Our paper (SAGA) was accepted to IEEE RA-L!

[Mar 2026]I joined NVIDIA as a research intern!

[Feb 2026]Gave a talk @ Georgia Tech LIDAR Group!

[Jan 2026]Two accepted papers (World-Model Predictive Control and Dexterous Manipulation) at ICRA 2026!

[Jan 2026]One accepted paper (Mean Flow Policy) at ICLR 2026 as Oral!

[Jan 2026]Gave a talk @ Shanghai Jiao Tong University MVIG!

[Dec 2025]Gave a talk @ Shenglanxueyuan Webinar!

[Aug 2025]Two accepted papers (Loco-Manipulation, Oral, and Human-in-the-loop) at CoRL 2025!

[May 2025]Our paper on Robotic Palletization won the ICRA 2025 Best Paper Award in Automation (10/4153)!

[Apr 2025]Finalist, 2025 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship!

[Mar 2025]I joined the RAI Institute (prev. Boston Dynamics AI Institute) as a research intern!

[Feb 2025]Gave a talk @ TwelveLabs Webinar!

[Jan 2025]Two accepted papers (FDPP and Robotic Palletization) at ICRA 2025!

[Sep 2024]One accepted paper (Continual Learning of VLM) at NeurIPS 2024!

[May 2024]One accepted paper (Multi-agent RL) at RLC 2024!

[Feb 2024]I joined MERL as a research intern!

[Dec 2023]One accepted abstract (Multi-agent RL) at AAMAS 2024!

[Oct 2023]Organized the Workshop on Scenario & Behavior Diversity in Simulation for AV Validation at IEEE IAVVC 2023!

[Aug 2022]I started my Ph.D. in the MSC Lab at UC Berkeley!

📚 Publications & Preprints

* denotes equal contribution · acceptance rates / award percentages shown

Preprint

CLIFT: Turning Gemini Robotics On-Device into Humanoid Specialists via Non-Invasive Closed-Loop Iterative Fine-Tuning

Yuxin Chen, Hari Srikanth, Nathan Jew, Menglin Wu, Pengcheng Wang, Junli Ren, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Peng Xu, Jinyu Xie, Thomas Tian

Preprint, 2026 · under review

Scholar

Preprint

Humanoid Navigation in Cluttered Environments with a Whole-Body Vision-Language-Action Model

Anqi Li*, Yuxin Chen*, Zhaobo Li, Zhuo Cao, Junli Ren, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Dhruv Shah

Preprint, 2026 · under review

Scholar

Preprint

TEXEDO: Test Time Scaling for Controller-Aware Language-Conditioned Humanoid Motion Generation

Jianuo Cao*, Yuxin Chen*, Yuzhen Song, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Chenran Li, Ran Tian

Preprint, 2026 · under review

arXiv Project Code Model Data

ECCV '26

3DWay: Generalizing Robot Manipulation via 3D Consistent Waypoints

Ziqin Huang, Yingyue Li, Chenyangguang Zhang, Ruida Zhang, Yuxin Chen, Gu Wang, Xingyu Liu, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Xiangyang Ji

ECCV, 2026 · 27.5%

Scholar

ICML '26

REAR: Test-time Preference Realignment through Reward Decomposition

Fuxiang Zhang, Pengcheng Wang, Chenran Li, Yi-Chen Li, Yuxin Chen, Lang Feng, Chenfeng Xu, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Bo An

ICML, 2026 · 26.6%

OpenReview ICML

ICLR '26

Mean Flow Policy with Instantaneous Velocity Constraints for One-step Action Generation

Guojian Zhan, Letian Tao, Pengcheng Wang, Yixiao Wang, Yiheng Li, Yuxin Chen, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Shengbo Eben Li

ICLR, 2026 · 28.2%

🎤 Oral · Top 1.18%

arXiv

Preprint

CLAW: Composable Language-annotated Whole-body Motion Generation

Jianuo Cao*, Yuxin Chen*, Masayoshi Tomizuka

Preprint, 2026

arXiv Code X

RA-L '26

SAGA: Open-World Mobile Manipulation via Structured Affordance Grounding

Kuan Fang*, Yuxin Chen*, Xinghao Zhu*, Farzad Niroui, Lingfeng Sun, Jiuguang Wang

IEEE RA-L, 2026

arXiv Project X

ICRA '26

Reimagination with Test-time Observation Interventions: Distractor-Robust World Model Predictions for Visual Model Predictive Control

Yuxin Chen*, Jianglan Wei*, Chenfeng Xu, Boyi Li, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Andrea Bajcsy, Ran Tian

ICRA, 2026 · 38.0%

🎤 Oral · RSS-WS🏅 Best Paper Finalist · RSS-WS

arXiv Project

ICRA '26

DexCtrl: Towards Sim-to-Real Dexterity with Adaptive Controller Learning

Shuqi Zhao, Ke Yang, Yuxin Chen, Chenran Li, Yichen Xie, Xiang Zhang, Changhao Wang, Masayoshi Tomizuka

ICRA, 2026 · 38.0%

arXiv

Preprint

Rethinking Image-to-3D Generation with Sparse Queries: Efficiency, Capacity, and Input-View Bias

Zhiyuan Xu, Jiuming Liu, Yuxin Chen, Kurt Keutzer, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Chenfeng Xu, Chensheng Peng

Preprint, 2025 · under review

Scholar

CoRL '25

Versatile Loco-Manipulation through Flexible Interlimb Coordination

Xinghao Zhu*, Yuxin Chen*, Lingfeng Sun*, Farzad Niroui, Simon Le Cleac'h, Jiuguang Wang, Kuan Fang

CoRL, 2025 · 35.8%

🎤 Oral · Top 5.69%

arXiv Project X

CoRL '25

MEReQ: Max-Ent Residual-Q Inverse RL for Sample-Efficient Alignment from Intervention

Yuxin Chen*, Chen Tang*, Jianglan Wei, Chenran Li, Ran Tian, Xiang Zhang, Wei Zhan, Peter Stone, Masayoshi Tomizuka

CoRL, 2025 · 35.8%

arXiv Project Code Video

ICRA '25

FDPP: Fine-tune Diffusion Policy with Human Preference

Yuxin Chen, Devesh K. Jha, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Diego Romeres

ICRA, 2025 · 38.7%

🎤 Oral · ICRA-WS

arXiv

ICRA '25

Physics-Aware Robotic Palletization with Online Masking Inference

Tianqi Zhang, Zheng Wu, Yuxin Chen, Yixiao Wang, Boyuan Liang, Scott Moura, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Mingyu Ding, Wei Zhan

ICRA, 2025 · 38.7%

🏆 Best Paper in Automation · 10/4153

arXiv Code

T-MECH '25

DexH2R: Task-oriented Dexterous Manipulation from Human to Robots

Shuqi Zhao*, Xinghao Zhu*, Yuxin Chen, Chenran Li, Xiang Zhang, Mingyu Ding, Masayoshi Tomizuka

IEEE/ASME T-MECH, 2025

arXiv

Mechatronics2025

Testing Human-Hand Segmentation on In-Distribution and Out-of-Distribution Data in Human–Robot Interactions Using a Deep Ensemble Model

Reza Jalayer, Yuxin Chen, Masoud Jalayer, Carlotta Orsenigo, Masayoshi Tomizuka

Mechatronics, 2025

arXiv

NeurIPS '24

Advancing Cross-domain Discriminability in Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models

Yuxin Chen*, Yicheng Xu*, Jiahao Nie, Yusong Wang, Huiping Zhuang, Manabu Okumura

NeurIPS, 2024 · 25.8%

arXiv Code

RLC '24

Quantifying Interaction Level Between Agents Helps Cost-efficient Generalization in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Yuxin Chen, Chen Tang, Ran Tian, Chenran Li, Jinning Li, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Wei Zhan

RLC, 2024 · 40%

Paper Code

RA-L '22

These Maps are Made for Walking: Real-Time Terrain Property Estimation for Mobile Robots

Parker Ewen, Adam Li, Yuxin Chen, Steven Hong, Ram Vasudevan

IEEE RA-L, 2022

arXiv Project Code Video

ICRA '21

Generating Continuous Motion and Force Plans in Real-Time for Legged Mobile Manipulation

Parker Ewen, Jean-Pierre Sleiman, Yuxin Chen, Wei-Chun Lu, Marco Hutter, Ram Vasudevan

ICRA, 2021 · 43.6%

arXiv Video

AIAA '21

Nailed It: Autonomous Roofing with a Nailgun-Equipped Octocopter

Matthew M. Romano, Yuxin Chen, Owen Marshall, Ella Atkins

AIAA AVIATION, 2021

arXiv Video

🧭 Background

🎓 Education💼 Experience

Now 2025 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016

2022 — Present

UC Berkeley Berkeley, CA

Ph.D., Mechanical Eng. (Control)

2018 — 2022

Univ. of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI

M.S. Robotics · B.S. Aerospace

2016 — 2020

Shanghai Jiao Tong U. Shanghai, China

B.S. Mechanical Engineering

Mar 2026 — Present

NVIDIA Santa Clara, CA

Research Intern · VLA & world models

Mar — Aug 2025

RAI Institute Cambridge, MA

Research Intern · mobile manipulation

May — Aug 2024

MERL Cambridge, MA

Research Intern · generative manip.

May — Aug 2021

Zoox Foster City, CA

SWE Intern · motion planning