Yuanqi Yao

Doctoral Student
Website: ceciliayao.github.io
Email: [email protected]

About me:

Hi, I’m Yuanqi Yao, a Ph.D. student at INSAIT – starting in Sep 2025, under the supervision of Prof. Luc Van Gool and Dr. Danda Paudel. My research focuses on Embodied AI, particularly robotic manipulation and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. Welcome to discuss and collaborate!

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

Education:

Harbin Institute of Technology, September 2022 –  September 2025| MSc in Computer Science
Harbin Institute of Technology, September 2018- June 2022 | B.Sc. in Computer Science

Publications:

“Think Small, Act Big: Primitive Prompt Learning for Lifelong Robot Manipulation”. CVPR 2025. 
“Hume: Introducing System-2 Thinking in Visual-Language-Action Model”. arXiv 2025.
“SpatialVLA: Exploring Spatial Representations for Visual-Language-Action Models”. RSS 2025.  
“FUSE: Label-Free Image-Event Joint Monocular Depth Estimation via Frequency-Decoupled Alignment and Degradation-Robust Fusion”. IROS 2025.
“Improving Domain Generalization in Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation via Stabilized Adversarial Training”. ECCV 2024.

Relevant Experience: 

Embodied AI Intern, Shanghai AI Laboratory, Nov 2023 – Aug 2025
Computer Vision Intern, Baidu,  Aug 2023 – Nov 2023
Computer Vision Intern , Lenovo Research, Jun 2023 – Aug 2023  
Autonomous Driving Intern, NIO, Jun 2022 – Oct 2022

Awards and Honours

2nd place at AIM 2024 ECCV Depth Upsampling Challenge (ECCV 2024 Workshop)  
1st place at ICCV 2023 The ROAD++ Challenge, Spatiotemporal Agent Detection Track (ICCV 2023 Workshop)  
2nd place at ICCV 2023 The ROAD++ Challenge, Spatiotemporal Road Event Detection Track (ICCV 2023 Workshop)  
3rd place at ICRA 2023 The RoboDepth Challenge, Self-supervised Depth Estimation Track (ICRA 2023 Workshop)  
1st 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