About Me

Welcome! I’m Yuanqi Yao (姚元淇, CC Yao), a researcher at INSAIT, under the supervision of Prof. Luc Van Gool and Dr. Danda Paudel. My research focuses on Embodied AI, particularly Vision-Language-Action(VLA) foundation models. Welcome to discuss and collaborate!

Prior to this, I completed a long-term internship at the Shanghai AI Laboratory, where I was supervised by Dr. Dong Wang. I also earned both my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science at Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT).

News

• 2026.05: One paper is accepted by RSS 2026!
• 2026.03: One paper is accepted by CVPR 2026!
• 2025.06: One paper is accepted by IROS 2025!
• 2025.04: Our paper SpatialVLA is accepted by RSS 2025 Highlight (Project Page)!
• 2025.03: One paper is accepted by CVPR 2025!
• 2024.09: One paper is accepted by NeurIPS 2024!
• 2024.07: We placed 2^nd in ECCV 2024 AIM Depth Upsampling Challenge!
• 2024.07: One paper is accepted by ECCV 2024!

Internships

• 2023.11 - 2025.07, Embodied AI Intern, Shanghai AI Laboratory
• 2023.08 - 2023.11, Computer Vision Intern, Baidu VIS
• 2023.06 - 2023.08, Computer Vision Research Intern, Lenovo Research
• 2022.06 - 2022.10, Autonomous Driving Perception Intern, NIO

Honors and Awards

• 2^nd place at Multi-Agent Embodied Intelligence Challenge, Control Track (NeurIPS 2025 Workshop)
• 2^nd place at ECCV 2024 AIM, Depth Upsampling Challenge (ECCV 2024 Workshop)
• 1^st place at ICCV 2023 The ROAD++ Challenge, Agent Detection Track (ICCV 2023 Workshop)
• 2^nd place at ICCV 2023 The ROAD++ Challenge, Road event detection Track (ICCV 2023 Workshop)
• 3^rd place at ICRA 2023 The RoboDepth Challenge (ICRA 2023 Workshop)
• 1^st Scholarship for Postgraduate Students. 2023-2024.
• The People’s Scholarship in China. 2018-2020.
• National Second Prize (Top 1%), National University IoT Design Competition, Huawei Cup. 2019.

Selected Publications

RSS 2026

• AR-VLA: True Autoregressive Action Expert for Vision-Language-Action Models

  Yutong Hu, Jan-Nico Zaech, Nikolay Nikolov, Yuanqi Yao, Sombit Dey, Giuliano Albanese, Renaud Detry, Luc Van Gool, Danda Paudel

  RSS 2026 | paper | project page

CVPR 2026

• FM-Steer: Enhance Generalist Policies with Value-Guided Cascaded Denosing

  Haoming Song*, Delin Qu*, Yuanqi Yao, Qizhi Chen, Jiarui Li, Qi Lv, Yiwen Tang, Li Kang, Heng Zhou, Xianqiang Gao, Yuhang Tang, Xiaofan Li, Modi Shi, Guanghui Ren, Maoqing Yao, Bin Zhao, Dong Wang, Xuelong Li.

  CVPR 2026 | paper | project page

IROS 2025

• FUSE: Label-Free Image-Event Joint Monocular Depth Estimation via Frequency-Decoupled Alignment and Degradation-Robust Fusion

  Pihai Sun, Junjun Jiang, Yuanqi Yao, Youyu Chen, Wenbo Zhao, Kui Jiang, Xianming Liu.

  IROS 2025 | paper | project page

RSS 2025 Highlight

• SpatialVLA: Exploring Spatial Representations for Visual-Language-Action Models

  Delin Qu*, Haoming Song*, Qizhi Chen*, Yuanqi Yao, Xinyi Ye, Jiayuan Gu, Bin Zhao, Dong Wang, Xuelong Li.

  RSS 2025 Highlight | paper | project page

CVPR 2025

• Think Small, Act Big: Primitive Prompt Learning for Lifelong Robot Manipulation

  Yuanqi Yao, Siao Liu, Haoming Song, Yan Ding, Bin Zhao, Zhigang Wang, Dong Wang, Xuelong Li.

  CVPR 2025 | paper | project page

ECCV 2024

• Improving Domain Generalization in Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation via Stabilized Adversarial Training

  Yuanqi Yao, Gang Wu, Kui Jiang, Siao Liu, Jian Kuai, Xianming Liu, Junjun Jiang.

  ECCV 2024 | paper | project page

Meow & Woof