Short Bio

I lead the Embodied AI Department at Midea Group’s AI Innovation Center. Before that, I received my B.S. from University of Toronto. I was fortunate to work with Prof. Wenqiang Zhang, Dr. Xiangyu Zhang, and IEEE Fellow Prof. Jian Tang during my internships and full-time positions.

My goal is to build generalist robots. My research interests lie at the intersection of robot learning, vision-language model, and model compression. I believe in end-to-end model. I’m always up for exploring potential collaborations and/or engaging in insightful research conversations, feel free to get in touch!

News

[May. 2025] CoA-VLA is accepted to ICCV 2025!.
[May. 2025] DiffusionVLA is accepted to ICML 2025! Our proposed reasoning prediction technique is used by π_0.5, who cited our latest DexVLA paper.
• [Feb. 2025] We release DexVLA, a new framework that can complete laundry folding using only 15 hours of data.
• [Feb. 2025] TinyVLA is accepted to IEEE RAL.
• [Jan. 2025] Two of our papers, TinyVLA & ScaleDP, have been cited by Physical Intelligence (π₀ & FAST).
• [Jan. 2025] Our work, LLava-Phi , have been cited by Deepseek (Janus-Series, including Janus, Janus-Flow, and Janus-Pro).
• [Jan. 2025] Two papers on diffusion policy (ScaleDP & Discrete Policy) are accepted to ICRA 2025.
• [Dec. 2024] We introduce a new CoT-like method Chain-of-Affordance, check out our project page chain-of-affordance.github.io.
• [Dec. 2024] Our paper Mipha, exploring the training strategy of multimodal small language model, is accepted to AAAI 2025.
• [Sep. 2024] Three papers are accepted to NeurIPS 2024.

Publications [Google Scholar][ResearchGate]

1. Preprint

   ChatVLA-2 - Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Embodied Reasoning from Pretrained Knowledge

   Zhongyi Zhou, Yichen Zhu* (co-first author & corresponding author), Junjie Wen, Chaomin Shen, Yi Xu

   Preprint, 2025

   PDF Project Page


2. Generated Video

   WorldEval - World Model as Real-World Robot Policies Evaluator

   Yaxuan Li, Yichen Zhu* (co-first author & corresponding author), Junjie Wen, Chaomin Shen, Yi Xu

   Preprint, 2025

   PDF Project Page


3. Preprint

   PointVLA - Injecting the 3D World into Vision-Language-Action Models

   Chengmeng Li, Yichen Zhu* (co-first author & corresponding author), Yaxin Peng, Yan Peng, Feifei Feng

   Preprint, 2025

   PDF Project Page


4. Preprint

   ChatVLA - Unified Multimodal Understanding and Robot Control with Vision-Language-Action Model

   Zhongyi Zhou, Yichen Zhu* (co-first author & corresponding author), Minjie Zhu, Junjie Wen, Ning Liu, Zhiyuan Xu, Weibin Meng, Ran Cheng, Yaxin Peng, Chaomin Shen, Feifei Feng

   Preprint, 2025

   PDF Project Page


5. Preprint

   ObjectVLA - End-to-End Open-World Object Manipulation without Demonstration

   Minjie Zhu, Yichen Zhu* (co-first author & corresponding author), Jinming Li, Zhongyi Zhou, Junjie Wen, Xiaoyu Liu, Chaomin Shen, Yaxin Peng, Feifei Feng

   Preprint, 2025

   PDF Project Page


6. Preprint

   DexVLA - Vision-Language Model with Plug-In Diffusion Expert for Visuomotor Policy Learning

   Junjie Wen*, Yichen Zhu* (co-first author & corresponding author), Jinming Li, Yaxin Peng, Chaomin Shen, Feifei Feng

   Preprint, 2025

   PDF Project Page


7. ICCV

   CoA-VLA - Improving Vision-Language-Action Models via Chain-of-Affordance

   Jinming Li*, Yichen Zhu* (co-first author & corresponding author), Zhibin Tang, Junjie Wen, Minjie Zhu, Xiaoyu Liu, Chengmeng Li, Ran Cheng, Yaxin Peng, Feifei Feng

   Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025

   PDF Project Page


8. ICML

   Diffusion-VLA - Scaling Robot Foundation Models via Unified Diffusion and Autoregression

   Junjie Wen*, Yichen Zhu* (co-first author & corresponding author), Minjie Zhu*, Zhibin Tang, Jinming Li, Zhongyi Zhou, Chengmeng Li, Xiaoyu Liu, Yaxin Peng, Chaomin Shen, Feifei Feng

   International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025

   PDF Project Page


9. IEEE RAL

   TinyVLA - Towards Fast, Data-Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation

   Junjie Wen*, Yichen Zhu* (co-first author & corresponding author), Jinming Li, Minjie Zhu, Kun Wu, Zhiyuan Xu, Ran Cheng, Chaomin Shen, Yaxin Peng, Feifei Feng, Jian Tang

   IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2025

   PDF Project Page


10. ICRA

    Scaling Diffusion Policy in Transformer to 1 Billion Parameters for Robotic Manipulation

    Minjie Zhu*, Yichen Zhu* (co-first author & corresponding author), Jinming Li, Junjie Wen, Zhiyuan Xu, Ning Liu, Ran Cheng, Chaomin Shen, Yaxin Peng, Feifei Feng, Jian Tang

    IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025

    PDF Project Page


11. ICRA

    Discrete Policy - Learning Disentangled Action Space for Multi-Task Robotic Manipulation

    Kun Wu*, Yichen Zhu* (co-first author), Jinming Li, Junjie Wen, Ning Liu, Zhiyuan Xu, Qirui Qiu, Jian Tang

    IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025

    PDF


12. AAAI

    Mipha - A Comprehensive Overhaul of Multimodal Assistant with Small Language Models

    Minjie Zhu*, Yichen Zhu* (co-first author & corresponding author), Ning Liu, Xin Liu, Zhiyuan Xu, Chaomin Shen, Yaxin Peng

    Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2025

    PDF


13. NeurIPS

    Any2Policy - Learning Visuomotor Policy with Any-Modality

    Yichen Zhu, Zhicai Ou, Feifei Feng, Jian Tang

    Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024

    PDF


14. NeurIPS

    An Efficient Diffusion Transformer Framework Inspired by Human-like Sketching

    Xinwang Chen*, Ning Liu*, Yichen Zhu, Feifei Feng, Jian Tang

    Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024


15. NeurIPS

    A General Retrieval-Augmented Graph Learning Framework

    Xinke Jiang, Rihong Qiu, Yongxin Xu, Wentao Zhang, Yichen Zhu, Ruizhe Zhang, Yuchen Fang, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang

    Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024


16. ECCV

    Mm-safetybench - A Benchmark for Safety Evaluation of Multimodal Large Language Models

    Xin Liu*, Yichen Zhu* (co-first author), Jindong Gu, Yunshi Lan, Chao Yang, Yu Qiao

    European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024

    PDF Project Page BibTex


17. CVPR

    Retrieval-Augmented Embodied Agents

    Yichen Zhu, Zhicai Ou, Feifei Feng, Jian Tang

    IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024

    PDF BibTex


18. ICRA

    Language-Conditioned Robotic Manipulation with Fast and Slow Thinking

    Minjie Zhu*, Yichen Zhu* (co-first author), Jinming Li, Junjie Wen, Zhiyuan Xu, Zhengping Che, Chaomin Shen, Yaxin Peng, Dong Liu, Feifei Feng, Jian Tang

    IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024

    PDF Project Page BibTex


19. ICRA

    Object-Centric Instruction Augmentation for Robotic Manipulation

    Junjie Wen*, Yichen Zhu* (co-first author), Minjie Zhu, Jinming Li, Zhiyuan Xu, Zhengping Che, Chaomin Shen, Yaxin Peng, Dong Liu, Feifei Feng, Jian Tang

    IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024

    PDF Project Page BibTex


20. ACM MM@EMCLR

    Llava-phi - Efficient Multi-modal Assistant with Small Language Model

    Yichen Zhu, Minjie Zhu, Ning Liu, Zhicai Ou, Feifei Feng, Jian Tang

    ACM Multimedia - Efficient Multimedia Computing under Limited Resources, 2024

    PDF Project Page BibTex


21. IJCAI

    Safety of Multimodal Large Language Models on Images and Texts

    Xin Liu, Yichen Zhu, Jindong Gu, Yunshi Lan, Chao Yang, Yu Qiao

    International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2024

    PDF


22. AAAI

    Exploring Gradient Explosion in Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning - A Probabilistic Perspective

    Wanying Wang*, Yichen Zhu* (co-first author), Yirui Zhou, Chaomin Shen, Zhiyuan Xu, Jian Tang, Yaxin Peng

    Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Oral, 2024

    PDF BibTex


23. AAAI

    Early Pruning with Self-Distillation for Effcient Model Compression

    Dong Chen, Ning Liu, Yichen Zhu, Zhengping Che, Rui Ma, Fachao Zhang, Xiaofeng Mou, Yi Chang, Jian Tang

    Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2024

    PDF


24. CVPR

    ScaleKD - Distilling Scale-aware Knowledge in Small Object Detector

    Yichen Zhu, Qiqi Zhou, Zhicai Ou, Feifei Feng, Jian Tang

    IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023

    PDF Project Page BibTex


25. ECCV

    Label-Guided Auxiliary Training Improves 3D Object Detector

    Yaomin Huang*, Xinmei Liu*, Yichen Zhu, Zhiyuan Xu, Chaomin Shen, Zhengping Che, Guixu Zhang, Yaxin Peng, Feifei Feng, Jian Tang

    European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022

    PDF


26. NeurIPS

    Teach Less, Learn More - On the Undistillable Classes in Knowledge Distillation

    Yichen Zhu, Ning Liu, Zhiyuan Xu, Xin Liu, Weibin Meng, Louis Wang, Zhicai Ou, Jian Tang

    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Spotlight, 2022

    PDF BibTex


27. ICCV

    Student Customized Knowledge Distillation - Bridging the Gap Between Student and Teacher

    Yichen Zhu, Yi Wang

    Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Oral, 2021

    PDF BibTex



Services

• I was a reviewer/PC committee for CVPR 2020-2024, ECCV 2022-2024, ICCV 2021-2025, NeurIPS 2022-2025, ICLR 2022-2024, AAAI 2022-2025, CoRL 2024/2025, ICRA 2024/2025, ACL 2024/2025, EMNLP 2024, NAACL 2024, AISTATS 2024, BMVC 2024, ECML/PKDD 2024, ACCV 2024
• I was a reviewer of IEEE TPAMI, TNNLS, TMLR, RAL, Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Information Fusion
• I was a Session Chair of ECML/PKDD 2024