Embodied AI & Robotics · World Models · Reinforcement Learning · LLM Agents

Yifu Yuan (袁逸夫)

Final-year Ph.D. Student
Tianjin University
yuanyf (at) tju.edu.cn

Building embodied agents that reason, learn, and act.

About Me

I am a final-year PhD student at Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) Lab, Tianjin University (TJU), advised by Prof. Jianye Hao.

I interned at Netease Fuxi AI Lab (Fuxi) during 2023, where I worked with Dr. Yujing Hu. I then interned at Tencent JueWu Team, advised by Prof. Zhongwen Xu. I am currently interning with the Tencent Hunyuan Vision & Embodied Team, advised by Han Hu and Shuyang Gu.

I received my Bachelor's degree from Dalian University of Technology (DUT), advised by Prof. Guozhen Tan.

Research

Research Interests

My work connects perception, reasoning, learning, and action.

I am broadly interested in building embodied agents for decision making. To this end, my current research focuses on Embodied AI & Robotics, World Models, Reinforcement Learning, and LLM Agents. I hope to ride the wave of AI changing the world.

Updates

News

In motion

Selected demos

WarpSAC · Learning to Walk in 30 Minutes
ForceFlow
Embodied-R1.5
SemanticVLA
Embodied-R1
AhaRobot
Recognition

Awards

Publications

Selected publications

Filter papers by authorship or research direction.

Authors with equal contribution are marked by *.

LeWorldModel++: Repairing the Planning Interface of Latent World Models
Yifu Yuan (Corresponding Author), Xianze Yao, Yaoting Huang, Pengyi Li, Yi Ma, Hongyao Tang, Jianye HAO
arXiv
WarpSAC: Towards the Pinnacle of Scalable Off-policy RL by Rethinking Exploration and Exploitation
Zihao Wu, Hongyao Tang, Yi Ma, Huizhong Song, Pengyi Li, Yifu Yuan, Fei Ni, Jinyi Liu, Wei Wei, Jianrong Wang, Yan Zheng, Jianye Hao
arXiv, 2026
project page paper code
Hy-Embodied-VLM-1.0: Efficient Physical-World Agents
Tencent Hunyuan Embodied Team (Core contributor)
paper code
RoboPIN: Grounded Embodied Reasoning via Pinned Chain-of-Thought
Yaoting Huang*, Yifu Yuan* (Corresponding Author), Linqi Han, Chengwen Li, Shuoheng Zhang, Xianze Yao, Hongyao Tang, Yan Zheng, Jianye Hao
ACM MM2026
paper
ForceFlow: Learning to Feel and Act via Contact-Driven Flow Matching
Shuoheng Zhang*, Yifu Yuan* (Corresponding Author), Hongyao Tang, Yan Zheng, Qiaojun Yu, Pengyi Li, Guowei Huang, Helong Huang, Xingyue Quan, Jianye Hao
arXiv
paper code
Benchmarking Continual Agent Memory for Online Learning, Transfer, and Forgetting
Zihang Ma, Jinyi Liu, Hongyao Tang, Yi Ma, Ruitao Wang, Yifu Yuan, Yan Zheng, Jianye Hao
LLA@ICLR 2026
openreview
ActionCodec: What Makes for Good Action Tokenizers
Zibin Dong, Yicheng Liu, Shiduo Zhang, Baijun Ye, Yifu Yuan, Fei Ni, Jingjing Gong, Xipeng Qiu, Hang Zhao, Yinchuan Li, Jianye Hao
arXiv
paper code
Neuro-evolutionary Continual Reinforcement Learning
Pengyi Li, Hongyao Tang, Yifu Yuan, Yan Zheng, Xin Xu, Jianye Hao
ICML 2026
openreview code
SemanticVLA: Towards Semantic Reasoning over Action Memorization via Synergistic Explicit Trace and Latent Action Planning
Fei Ni, Zhuo Chen, Yifu Yuan, Zibin Dong, Xianze Yao, Shan Luo, Jianye Hao, Jiankang Deng, Stefanos Zafeiriou
CVPR 2026
paper code models datasets
Embodied-R1: Reinforced Embodied Reasoning for General Robotic Manipulation
Yifu Yuan, Haiqin Cui, Yaoting Huang, Yibin Chen, Fei Ni, Zibin Dong, Pengyi Li, YAN ZHENG, Jianye HAO
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026
project page paper dataset code model
From Seeing to Doing: Bridging Reasoning and Decision for Robotic Manipulation
Yifu Yuan, Haiqin Cui, Yibin Chen, Zibin Dong, Fei Ni, Longxin Kou, Jinyi Liu, Pengyi Li, Yan Zheng, Jianye HAO
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026
project page paper models & datasets code
AFE-Master: Enhancing LLM-Driven Autonomous Feature Engineering with Domain-Specific Language Parsing and Guided Local Search
Hebin Liang, Jianye HAO, Jinyi Liu, Yi Ma, Zilin Cao, Jing Liang, Kun Shao, Zhaocheng Du, Fei Ni, Yifu Yuan, YAN ZHENG
The Web Conference (WWW) Industry Track, 2026
paper
FACUL: Language-Based Interaction with AI Companions in Gaming
Wenya Wei, Qixian Zhou, Yifu Yuan, Ruochen Liu, Xuelei Zhang, Yan Jiang, Yongle Luo, Hailong Wang, Tianzhou Wang, Peipei Jin, Wangtong Liu, Elvis S Liu
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2026
Deployed in Game: Arena Breakout Infinite
paper homepage
COLA: Towards Efficient Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning with Conflict Objective Regularization in Latent Space
Pengyi Li, Hongyao Tang, Yifu Yuan, Jianye HAO, Zibin Dong, YAN ZHENG
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025
paper
Improving Reward Models with Proximal Policy Exploration for Preference-Based Reinforcement Learning
Yiwen Zhu, Jinyi Liu, Pengjie Gu, Yifu Yuan, Zhenxing Ge, Wenya Wei, Zhou Fang, Yujing Hu, Bo An
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025
paper
EmbodiedMAE: A Unified 3D Multi-Modal Representation for Robot Manipulation
Zibin Dong, Fei Ni, Yifu Yuan, Yinchuan Li, Jianye Hao
arXiv
paper
From Chaos to Order: The Atomic Reasoner Framework for Fine-grained Reasoning in Large Language Models
Jinyi Liu, Yan Zheng, Rong Cheng, Qiyu Wu, Wei Guo, Fei Ni, Hebin Liang, Yifu Yuan, Hangyu Mao, Fuzheng Zhang, Jianye Hao
arXiv
paper
MODULI: Unlocking Preference Generalization via Diffusion Models for Offline Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning
Yifu Yuan, Zhenrui Zheng, Zibin Dong, Jianye HAO
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025
paper code
R*: Efficient Reward Design via Reward Structure Evolution and Parameter Alignment Optimization with Large Language Models
Pengyi Li, Jianye HAO, Hongyao Tang, Yifu Yuan, Jinbin Qiao, Zibin Dong, Yan Zheng
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025
paper openreview
Entropy-based Activation Function Optimization: A Method on Searching Better Activation Functions
Haoyuan Sun, Zihao Wu, Bo Xia, Pu Chang, Zibin Dong, Yifu Yuan, Yongzhe Chang, Xueqian Wang
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
paper
SheetAgent: Towards a Generalist Agent for Spreadsheet Reasoning and Manipulation via Large Language Models
Yibin Chen*, Yifu Yuan*, Zeyu Zhang, Yan Zheng, Jinyi Liu, Fei Ni, Jianye HAO
The ACM Web Conference (WWW), 2025, Oral Presentation (Top5%)
IJCAI2024 Automates Workshop
project page paper code benchmark
War of Thoughts: Competition Stimulates Stronger Reasoning in Large Language Models
Yibin Chen, Jinyi Liu, Yan Zheng, Yifu Yuan, Jianye Hao
Findings of ACL 2025
paper
MENTOR: Guiding Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback and Dynamic Distance Constraint
Xinglin Zhou*, Yifu Yuan*, Shaofu Yang, Jianye Hao
IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence (JCR Q1)
paper code
ED2: Environment Dynamics Decomposition World Models for Continuous Control
Yifu Yuan, Hongyao Tang, Cong Wang, Yan Zheng, Jianye Hao
Visual Intelligence
Cover Article
paper code
DiffuserLite: Towards Real-time Diffusion Planning
Zibin Dong, Jianye Hao, Yifu Yuan, Fei Ni, Yitian Wang, Pengyi Li, Yan Zheng
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024
project page / paper code
PERIA: Perceive, Reason, Imagine, Act via Holistic Language and Vision Planning for Manipulation
Fei Ni, Jianye HAO, Shiguang Wu, Longxin Kou, Yifu Yuan, Zibin Dong, Jinyi Liu, MingZhi Li, YAN ZHENG, Yuzheng Zhuang
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024
project page paper
KISA: A Unified Keyframe Identifier and Skill Annotator for Long-Horizon Robotics Demonstrations
Longxin Kou, Fei Ni, YAN ZHENG, Jinyi Liu, Yifu Yuan, Zibin Dong, Jianye HAO
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024
project page paper
Enhancing Robotic Manipulation with AI Feedback from Multimodal Large Language Models(CriticGPT)
Yifu Yuan*, Jinyi Liu*, Jianye HAO, Fei Ni, Lingzhi Fu, Yibin Chen, Yan Zheng
AAAI2024 RL+LLMs Workshop
paper
Uni-RLHF: Universal Platform and Benchmark Suite for Reinforcement Learning with Diverse Human Feedback
Yifu Yuan, Jianye Hao, Yi Ma, Zibin Dong, Hebin Liang, Jinyi Liu, Zhixin Feng, Kai Zhao, Yan Zheng
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024
project page paper benchmark & dataset platform
AlignDiff: Aligning Diverse Human Preferences via Behavior-Customisable Diffusion Model
Zibin Dong*, Yifu Yuan*, Jianye Hao, Fei Ni, Yao Mu, Yan Zheng, Yujing Hu, Tangjie Lv, Changjie Fan, Zhipeng Hu
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024
NeurIPS Diffusion Workshop, 2023
project page paper project page
MetaDiffuser: Diffusion Model as Conditional Planner for Offline Meta-RL
Fei Ni, Jianye Hao, Yao Mu, Yifu Yuan, Yan Zheng, Bin Wang, Zhixuan Liang
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023
project page / paper
EUCLID: Towards Efficient Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning with Multi-choice Dynamics Model
Yifu Yuan, Jianye Hao, Fei Ni, Yao Mu, Yan Zheng, Yujing Hu, Jinyi Liu, Yingfeng Chen, Changjie Fan
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023
NeurIPS DeepRL workshop, 2022
project page pretrained model paper code
Open source

Projects

EmbodiedEvalKit

page code
Embodied-R1.5

page code paper
Embodied-R1

page code paper
AhaRobot

page code paper
CleanDiffuser

page code paper
Uni-RLHF-Platform

page code paper
Background

Internship experience

Education

Invited Talks

Academic Service

Conference Reviewer: ICML 2024–2026 · NeurIPS 2024–2026 · ICLR 2024–2026 · CVPR 2025–2026 · ICCV 2025 · IROS 2025–2026
Journal Reviewer: IEEE TNNLS · IEEE TPAMI
Reviewer Recognition: ICML 2026 Gold Reviewer
Community Service: RLCN Community Committee Member

Contact

I'm very welcome to any kind of collaboration or discussion. Feel free to contact me via email at
yuanyf [at] tju.edu.cn.