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Yunzhu Li

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University.

Before joining Columbia, I was an Assistant Professor at UIUC CS. I also spent time as a Postdoc at the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab (SVL), working with Fei-Fei Li and Jiajun Wu. I received my PhD from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, where I was advised by Antonio Torralba and Russ Tedrake, and I obtained my bachelor's degree from Peking University.

   /      /      /   yunzhu.li [at] columbia (dot) edu



Robotic Perception, Interaction, and Learning Lab (RoboPIL)


Recent Talks

Structured World Models and Tactile Sensing
[2026/03] Princeton Robotics Seminar
Foundation Models for Robotic Manipulation
[2025/04] NUS Robotics Seminar
Towards General Robotic Intelligence
[2025/03] Columbia AI Summit


Publications (show selected / show by date / show by topic)
Research Topics: Robotic Manipulation / Foundation Models for Embodied Agents / Physical Scene Understanding / Multi-Modal Perception

Yixuan Wang, Rhythm Syed, Fangyu Wu, Mengchao Zhang, Aykut Onol, Jose Barreiros, Hooshang Nayyeri, Tony Dear, Huan Zhang, and Yunzhu Li
Interactive World Simulator for Robot Policy Training and Evaluation
RSS 2026, [Project] [Paper] [Video] [Code] [TL;DR] [BibTex]
15 Hz action-conditioned video prediction for 10+ minutes on a single RTX 4090 GPU: [Interactive Demo]
Binghao Huang, and Yunzhu Li
FlexiTac: An Open-Source, Scalable Tactile Solution for Robotic Systems
arXiv 2026, [Project] [Video] [Hardware Guide] [Hardware Code] [Simulation in IsaacSim] [BibTex]
Kaifeng Zhang*, Shuo Sha*, Hanxiao Jiang, Matthew Loper, Hyunjong Song, Guangyan Cai, Zhuo Xu, Xiaochen Hu, Changxi Zheng, and Yunzhu Li
Real-to-Sim Robot Policy Evaluation with Gaussian Splatting Simulation of Soft-Body Interactions
ICRA 2026, [Project] [Paper] [Video] [Code] [BibTex]
Bo Ai, Stephen Tian, Haochen Shi, Yixuan Wang, Tobias Pfaff, Cheston Tan, Henrik I. Christensen, Hao Su, Jiajun Wu, and Yunzhu Li
A Review of Learning-Based Dynamics Models for Robotic Manipulation
Science Robotics 2025, 5-year Impact Factor: 32.9
[Paper] [BibTex]
Hanxiao Jiang, Hao-Yu Hsu, Kaifeng Zhang, Hsin-Ni Yu, Shenlong Wang, and Yunzhu Li
PhysTwin: Physics-Informed Reconstruction and Simulation of Deformable Objects from Videos
ICCV 2025, [Project] [Paper] [Code] [BibTex]
Abridged in ICRA 2025 Workshop on Representations and Manipulating Deformable Objects [Link]
Binghao Huang, Jie Xu, Iretiayo Akinola, Wei Yang, Balakumar Sundaralingam, Rowland O'Flaherty, Dieter Fox, Xiaolong Wang, Arsalan Mousavian, Yu-Wei Chao†, and Yunzhu Li†
VT-Refine: Learning Bimanual Assembly with Visuo-Tactile Feedback via Simulation Fine-Tuning
CoRL 2025, [Project] [Paper] [BibTex]
Best Paper Award at IROS 2025 Workshop on Advanced Haptic Tech for Healthcare Robots [Link]
Haonan Chen, Cheng Zhu, Shuijing Liu, Yunzhu Li, and Katherine Driggs-Campbell
Tool-as-Interface: Learning Robot Policies from Observing Human Tool Use
CoRL 2025, [Project] [Paper] [Code] [BibTex]
Best Paper Award at ICRA 2025 Workshop on Foundation Models and Neuro-Symbolic AI for Robotics [Link]
Best Presentation Award at CSL Student Conference 2025 [Link]
Featured in Video Friday on [IEEE Spectrum]
Yunzhu Li, and Yiyue Luo
Intelligent Textiles Are Looking Bright
Science 384, 29-30 (2024), [Paper] [Free to Read] [BibTex]
Wenlong Huang, Chen Wang*, Yunzhu Li*, Ruohan Zhang, and Li Fei-Fei
ReKep: Spatio-Temporal Reasoning of Relational Keypoint Constraints for Robotic Manipulation
CoRL 2024, [Project] [Video] [Paper] [Code] [BibTex]
Best Paper Award at CoRL 2024 Workshop on Learning Effective Abstractions for Planning (LEAP) [Link]
Binghao Huang, Yixuan Wang, Xinyi Yang, Yiyue Luo, and Yunzhu Li
3D-ViTac: Learning Fine-Grained Manipulation with Visuo-Tactile Sensing
CoRL 2024, [Project] [Video] [Hardware Guide] [Paper] [BibTex]
Covered by [Columbia Engineering] [Tech Xplore] [Newswire]
In just a month, our tactile sensor has been reproduced and adopted worldwide by both academia and industry: [Twitter Link]
Hanxiao Jiang, Binghao Huang, Ruihai Wu, Zhuoran Li, Shubham Garg, Hooshang Nayyeri, Shenlong Wang, and Yunzhu Li
RoboEXP: Action-Conditioned Scene Graph via Interactive Exploration for Robotic Manipulation
CoRL 2024, [Project] [Video] [Paper] [Code] [Colab] [BibTex]
Best Paper Nomination at ICRA 2024 Workshop on Vision-Language Models for Manipulation [Link]
Yixuan Wang*, Mingtong Zhang*, Zhuoran Li*, Tarik Kelestemur, Katherine Driggs-Campbell, Jiajun Wu, Li Fei-Fei, and Yunzhu Li
D3Fields: Dynamic 3D Descriptor Fields for Zero-Shot Generalizable Rearrangement
CoRL 2024, [Project] [Paper] [Code] [BibTex]
Oral Presentation
Kaifeng Zhang*, Baoyu Li*, Kris Hauser, and Yunzhu Li
AdaptiGraph: Material-Adaptive Graph-Based Neural Dynamics for Robotic Manipulation
RSS 2024, [Project] [Paper] [Code] [BibTex]
Best Abstract Award at ICRA 2024 Workshop on Representing and Manipulating Deformable Objects [Link]
Haochen Shi*, Huazhe Xu*, Samuel Clarke, Yunzhu Li, and Jiajun Wu
RoboCook: Long-Horizon Elasto-Plastic Object Manipulation with Diverse Tools
CoRL 2023, [Project & Video] [Paper] [Code] [BibTex]
Best Systems Paper Award
Wenlong Huang, Chen Wang, Ruohan Zhang, Yunzhu Li, Jiajun Wu, and Li Fei-Fei
VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Models
CoRL 2023, [Project] [Paper] [Video] [BibTex]
Oral Presentation
Haonan Chen, Yilong Niu*, Kaiwen Hong*, Shuijing Liu, Yixuan Wang, Yunzhu Li, and Katherine Driggs-Campbell
Predicting Object Interactions with Behavior Primitives: An Application in Stowing Tasks
CoRL 2023, [Project & Video] [Paper] [Code] [BibTex]
Finalist - Best Paper/Best Student Paper Awards
Yixuan Wang*, Yunzhu Li*, Katherine Driggs-Campbell, Li Fei-Fei, and Jiajun Wu
Dynamic-Resolution Model Learning for Object Pile Manipulation
RSS 2023, [Project] [Paper] [Code] [BibTex]
Best Paper Award at IROS 2023 Workshop on Learning Meets Model-based Methods [Link]
Yunzhu Li*, Shuang Li*, Vincent Sitzmann, Pulkit Agrawal, and Antonio Torralba
3D Neural Scene Representations for Visuomotor Control
CoRL 2021, [Project] [Paper] [Video] [OpenReview] [BibTex]
Oral Presentation
Abridged in RSS 2021 Workshop on Visual Learning and Reasoning for Robotics [Link]
Yiyue Luo, Yunzhu Li, Pratyusha Sharma, Wan Shou, Kui Wu, Michael Foshey, Beichen Li, Tomas Palacios, Antonio Torralba, and Wojciech Matusik
Learning Human-environment Interactions using Conformal Tactile Textiles
Nature Electronics 4, 193–201 (2021), 5-year Impact Factor: 42.0
[Project] [Paper] [Code] [BibTex]
Featured on the cover of the issue. Editorial comments [Link]
Covered by [Nature Electronics News & Views] [MIT CSAIL News] [Gizmodo] [Engadget]
Yunzhu Li*, Hao He*, Jiajun Wu, Dina Katabi, and Antonio Torralba
Learning Compositional Koopman Operators for Model-Based Control
ICLR 2020, [Project] [Paper] [Code] [BibTex] [Video] [Poster]
Spotlight Presentation
Abridged in NeurIPS 2019 Workshop on Graph Representation Learning [Link]
Subramanian Sundaram, Petr Kellnhofer, Yunzhu Li, Jun-Yan Zhu, Antonio Torralba, and Wojciech Matusik
Learning the Signatures of the Human Grasp Using a Scalable Tactile Glove
Nature 569, 698–702 (2019), 5-year Impact Factor: 55.0
[Project] [Paper] [Code] [BibTex], Collected by MIT Museum
Covered by [MIT News] [Nature News & Views] [Nature communities] [The Economist] [PBS NOVA] [BBC Radio] [NewScientist]
Yunzhu Li, Jiajun Wu, Russ Tedrake, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, and Antonio Torralba
Learning Particle Dynamics for Manipulating Rigid Bodies, Deformable Objects, and Fluids
ICLR 2019, [Project] [PDF] [Code] [BibTex] [Poster] [Video]
Covered by [MIT News] [Engadget] [NVIDIA Developer]
Yunzhu Li, Jiaming Song, and Stefano Ermon
InfoGAIL: Interpretable Imitation Learning from Visual Demonstrations
NIPS 2017, [PDF] [Code] [BibTex] [Poster] [Video]


Selected Honors



Professional Service