Yanjiang Guo

Hi! I am a third-year PhD student majoring in computer science at IIIS, Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Jianyu Chen. Previously, I obtained my bachelor's degree from Dept. of EE, Tsinghua University in 2022. I have also spent time at Tencent, SenseTime, RobotEra and Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute as interns.

My research focuses on Embodied AI and Generative Models, with a particular emphasis on training robot foundation models capable of performing a wide range of tasks in our daily lifes. I believe that co-training with internet data and leveraging pre-trained generative models (e.g., VLM, video diffusion model, etc.) are crucial for developing effective generalist robot policies.

Email / Scholar / Twitter / Github

"Set your course by the stars, not by the lights of passing ships."

Honors and Awards:
[2024.07] RSS 2024 Best Paper Award Finalists.
[2022.06] Outstanding Graduates of Tsinghua University (Top 10%).
[2017.11] 34th Chinese Physics Olympiad (CPhO), Silver Medal.

Selected Publications

Papers related to Robotic Foundation Model training are highlighted.

	UP-VLA: A Unified Understanding and Prediction Model for Embodied Agent Jianke Zhang, Yanjiang Guo, Yucheng Hu, Xiaoyu Chen, Jianyu Chen Arxiv*, 2025 arXiv VLA Model. We incoperate both multi-modal understanding (MMU) and future prediction into VLA model, enhancing both high-level semantic knowledge and low-level visual dynamics.
	Video Prediction Policy: A Generalist Robot Policy with Predictive Visual Representations Yucheng Hu, Yanjiang Guo, Pengchao Wang, Xiaoyu Chen, Yen-Jen Wang, Jianke Zhang, Koushil Sreenath, Chaochao Lu, Jianyu Chen Arxiv, 2024 project page / arXiv / twitter / 量子位 Video Generation (or World Model) based Robotic Foundation Model We finetune a general-purpose video diffusion model into manipulation-focused video prediction model to guide policy learning.
	Improving Vision-Language-Action Model with Online Reinforcement Learning Yanjiang Guo, Jianke Zhang, Xiaoyu Chen, Xiang Ji, Yen-Jen Wang, Yucheng Hu, Jianyu Chen ICRA*, 2025 arXiv / twitter1 / twitter2 VLA Model. We make some initial exploration on leveraging online RL to improve the VLA model! We notice that online RL for VLA can be extremely unstable and thus we adopted a iterative approach.
	Prediction with Action: Visual Policy Learning via Joint Denoising Process Yanjiang Guo, Yucheng Hu, Jianke Zhang, Yen-Jen Wang, Xiaoyu Chen, Chaochao Lu#, Jianyu Chen# NeurIPS, 2024 project page / code / arXiv Video Generation (or World Model) based Robotic Foundation Model We jointly predict future images and robot actions in a unified DiT network, transfering physical knowledge from internet video data to robots.
	HiRT: Enhancing Robotic Control with Hierarchical Robot Transformers Jianke Zhang, Yanjiang Guo, Xiaoyu Chen, Yen-Jen Wang, Yucheng Hu, Chengming Shi, Jianyu Chen CoRL, 2024 arXiv / twitter / 机器之心 VLA Model We finetune pretrained VLM into VLA models with hierarchical transformers, keeping the generalization ability but also much higher control frequency.
	Advancing Humanoid Locomotion: Mastering Challenging Terrains with Denoising World Model Learning Xinyang Gu, Yen-Jen Wang, Xiang Zhu, Chengming Shi, Yanjiang Guo, Yichen Liu, Jianyu Chen RSS, 2024 (Best Paper Award Finalists) project page / code / arXiv / 机器之心 We train humanoid robot to master challenging terrains such as stairs, slopes, and snow grounds with zero-shot sim2real transfer.
	DoReMi: Grounding Language Model by Detecting and Recovering from Plan-Execution Misalignment Yanjiang Guo* , Yen-Jen Wang, Lihan Zha, Jianyu Chen IROS, 2024 project page / arXiv We leverage LLM to pefrom both planning and monitoring, with a fine-tuned VLM as detector.

Other Publications

Decentralized Motor Skill Learning for Complex Robotic Systems
Yanjiang Guo*, Zheyuan Jiang*, Yen-Jen Wang, Jingyue Gao, Jianyu Chen
RA-L, 2023 (with ICRA 2024)

Zero-shot policy transfer with disentangled task representation of meta-reinforcement learning
Zheng Wu, Yichen Xie, Wenzhao Lian, Changhao Wang, Yanjiang Guo, Jianyu Chen, Stefan Schaal, Masayoshi Tomizuka
ICRA, 2023

Reinforcement learning with Demonstrations from Mismatched Task under Sparse Reward
Yanjiang Guo, Jingyue Gao, Zheng Wu, Chengming Shi, Jianyu Chen
CoRL, 2022

Source code from Jon Barron.