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URL: https://wenlixiao-cs.github.io/

⇱ Wenli Xiao | CMU Robotics PhD


Research

Co-Lead

AnyCar to Anywhere: Learning Universal Dynamics Model

CoRL 2024, X-Embodiment workshopICRA 2025

AnyCar is a generalist vehicle dynamics model for agile mobility. It can adapt to various cars, tasks, and envs via in-context adaptation, outperforming well-tuned generalist models up to 54%.

Wenli Xiao*, Haoru Xue*, Tony Tao, Dvij Kalaria, John Dolan, Guanya Shi

Co-Lead

HOVER: Versatile Neural Whole-Body Controller for Humanoid Robots

ICRA 2025

HOVER is a 1.5M-parameter neural network to control the body of a humanoid robot. It takes a lot of subconscious processing for us humans to walk, maintain balance, and maneuver our arms and legs into desired positions. We capture this 'subconsciousness' in HOVER, a single model that learns how to coordinate the motors of a humanoid robot to support locomotion and manipulation.

Tairan He*, Wenli Xiao*, Toru Lin, Zhengyi Luo, Zhengjia Xu, Zhenyu Jiang, Jan Kautz, Changliu Liu, Guanya Shi, Xiaolong Wang, Linxi 'Jim' Fan†, Yuke Zhu†

Co-Lead1 / 3

Self-Improving Vision-Language-Action Models with Data Generation via Residual RL

ICLR 2026

PLD (Probe, Learn, Distill) is a plug-and-play recipe for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) post-training. It is model agnostic, supporting both autoregressive and diffusion architectures, and can push success rates to 99%.

Wenli Xiao*, Haotian Lin*, Andy Peng, Haoru Xue, Tairan He, Yuqi Xie, Fengyuan Hu, Jimmy Wu, Zhengyi Luo, Linxi "Jim" Fan†, Guanya Shi, Yuke Zhu†

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Wenli Xiao

Robotics PhD Student at CMU School of Computer Science

I'm a PhD student at CMU Robotics, advised by Prof. Guanya Shi. My vision is to build scalable general intelligent robots in the real world. I am generally interested in dexterous manipulation and humanoid robots.

I'm a Research Scientist Intern at NVIDIA GEAR Lab, doing Foundation Model Post-training with Dr. Jim Fan and Prof. Yuke Zhu.

News

  • 2025 Oct
    Received CMU RI Presidential Fellowship!

Research Projects

Co-Lead

Authors

Wenli Xiao*, Haotian Lin*, Andy Peng, Haoru Xue, Tairan He, Yuqi Xie, Fengyuan Hu, Jimmy Wu, Zhengyi Luo, Linxi "Jim" Fan†, Guanya Shi, Yuke Zhu†

Self-Improving Vision-Language-Action Models with Data Generation via Residual RL

ICLR 2026
TL;DR: PLD (Probe, Learn, Distill) is a plug-and-play recipe for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) post-training. It is model agnostic, supporting both autoregressive and diffusion architectures, and can push success rates to 99%.
Co-Lead

Authors

Tairan He*, Wenli Xiao*, Toru Lin, Zhengyi Luo, Zhengjia Xu, Zhenyu Jiang, Jan Kautz, Changliu Liu, Guanya Shi, Xiaolong Wang, Linxi 'Jim' Fan†, Yuke Zhu†

HOVER: Versatile Neural Whole-Body Controller for Humanoid Robots

ICRA 2025
TL;DR: HOVER is a 1.5M-parameter neural network to control the body of a humanoid robot. It takes a lot of subconscious processing for us humans to walk, maintain balance, and maneuver our arms and legs into desired positions. We capture this 'subconsciousness' in HOVER, a single model that learns how to coordinate the motors of a humanoid robot to support locomotion and manipulation.
Co-Lead

Authors

Wenli Xiao*, Haoru Xue*, Tony Tao, Dvij Kalaria, John Dolan, Guanya Shi

AnyCar to Anywhere: Learning Universal Dynamics Model

CoRL 2024, X-Embodiment workshop
ICRA 2025
TL;DR: AnyCar is a generalist vehicle dynamics model for agile mobility. It can adapt to various cars, tasks, and envs via in-context adaptation, outperforming well-tuned generalist models up to 54%.

Background

Research Intern

NVIDIA GEAR Lab

2024 - Present

Advisor:

Dr. Jim Fan

Prof. Yuke Zhu

Research Intern

Carnegie Mellon Univ Robotics Institute Summer Scholar, RISS

June 2022 - Aug 2023

Advisor:

Prof. John Dolan

Yiwei Lyu

Research Intern

RISE Lab, UC Berkeley

March 2022 - May 2022

Advisor:

Prof. Joseph E. Gonzalez

Tianjun Zhang

Research Intern

NCEL Lab, Shenzhen AIRS

Aug 2020 - March 2022

Advisor:

Prof. Jianwei Huang

Prof. Bing Luo