Hi there! I am a Senior Research Scientist at Nvidia GEAR Lab. I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science, advised by Prof. Kris Kitani. I earned my bachelor’s degree from University of Pennsylvania in 2019, where I worked with Prof. Kostas Daniilidis. My research has been supported by Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship and the Meta AI Mentorship Program.

My research interest lies at the intersection of robotics, vision, and learning. I am working on topcis including humanoid control, humnoid-object interaction, egocentric perception etc. Through my research, I want to create methods that effectively interpret spatial-temporal sensory input and build a representation of the 3D world to reason about the interactions between agents and the physical environment. On the application side, I am excited about humanoid robots and AR/VR.

• SONIC: Supersizing Motion Tracking for Natural Humanoid Whole-Body Control
• Zhengyi Luo†, Ye Yuan†, Tingwu Wang†, Chenran Li†, Fernando Castañeda†, Sirui Chen*, Zi-Ang Cao*, Jiefeng Li*, David Minor*, Qingwei Ben*, Jinhyung Park*, David Sami*, Zi Wang*, Xingye Da*, Runyu Ding, Cyrus Hogg, Lina Song, Edy Lim, Eugene Jeong, Tairan He, Haoru Xue, Wenli Xiao, Simon Yuen, Jan Kautz, Yan Chang, Umar Iqbal, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Yuke Zhu
• In Submission
• † Co-First Authors, * Core Contributors
• [Paper] [Project]

• VIRAL: Visual Sim-to-Real at Scale for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
• Tairan He*, Zi Wang*, Haoru Xue*, Qingwei Ben*, , Wenli Xiao, Ye Yuan, Xingye Da, Fernando Castañeda, Shankar Sastry, Changliu Liu, Guanya Shi, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Yuke Zhu
• CVPR 2026
• * Equal contribution
• [Paper] [Project]

• Opening the Sim-to-Real Door for Humanoid Pixel-to-Action Policy Transfer
• Haoru Xue*, Tairan He*, Zi Wang*, Qingwei Ben, Wenli Xiao, , Ye Yuan, Xingye Da, Fernando Castañeda, Guanya Shi, Shankar Sastry, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Yuke Zhu
• CVPR 2026
• * Equal contribution
• [Paper] [Project]

• BFM-Zero: A Promptable Behavioral Foundation Model for Humanoid Control Using Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning
• Yitang Li*, , Tonghe Zhang, Cunxi Dai, Anssi Kanervisto, Andrea Tirinzoni, Haoyang Weng, Kris Kitani, Mateusz Guzek, Ahmed Touati, Alessandro Lazaric, Matteo Pirotta, Guanya Shi
• ICLR 2026
• * Equal contribution
• [Paper] [Project]

• Self-Improving Vision-Language-Action Models with Data Generation via Residual RL
• Wenli Xiao*, Haotian Lin*, Andy Peng, Haoru Xue, Tairan He, Yuqi Xie, Fengyuan Hu, Jimmy Wu, , Linxi Fan, Guanya Shi, Yuke Zhu
• ICLR 2026
• * Equal contribution
• [Paper] [Project]

• HDMI: Learning Interactive Humanoid Whole-Body Control from Human Videos
• Haoyang Weng, Yitang Li, Nikhil Sobanbabu, Zihan Wang, , Tairan He, Deva Ramanan, Guanya Shi
• In Submission
• [Paper] [Project] [Code]

• Learning Universal Humanoid Control
• Zhengyi Luo
• PhD Thesis
• [Paper]

• MaskedManipulator: Versatile Whole-Body Control for Loco-Manipulation
• Chen Tessler, Yifeng Jiang, Erwin Coumans, , Gal Chechik, Xue Bin Peng
• SIGGRAPH Asia 2025
• [Paper] [Code]

• UniPhys: Unified Planner and Controller with Diffusion for Flexible Physics-Based Character Control
• Yan Wu, Korrawe Karunratanakul, , Siyu Tang
• ICCV 2025 (Highlight)
• [Paper] [Project] [Code]

• Emergent Active Perception and Dexterity of Simulated Humanoids from Visual Reinforcement Learning
• , Chen Tessler*, Toru Lin, Ye Yuan, Tairan He, Wenli Xiao, Yunrong Guo, Gal Chechik, Kris Kitani, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Yuke Zhu
• 1st Workshop on Humanoid Agents, CVPR 2025 (Best Paper Award)
• * Equal contribution
• [Paper] [Project]

• ASAP: Aligning Simulation and Real-World Physics for Learning Agile Humanoid Whole-Body Skills
• Tairan He*, Jiawei Gao*, Wenli Xiao*, Yuanhang Zhang*, Zi Wang, Jiashun Wang, , Guanqi He, Nikhil Sobanbab, Chaoyi Pan, Zeji Yi, Guannan Qu, Kris Kitani, Jessica Hodgins, Linxi Fan, Yuke Zhu
• RSS 2025
• [Paper] [Project] [Code]

• ISMimic: Learning Basketball Interaction Skills from Demonstrations
• Yinhuai Wang*, Qihan Zhao*, Runyi Yu*, Ailing Zeng, Jing Lin, , Hok Wai Tsui, Jiwen Yu, Xiu Li, Qifeng Chen, Jian Zhang, Lei Zhang, Ping Tan
• CVPR 2025
• * Equal contribution
• [Paper] [Project] [Code]

• HOVER: Versatile Neural Whole-Body Controller for Humanoid Robots
• Tairan He*, Wenli Xiao*, Toru Lin, , Zhenjia Xu, Zhenyu Jiang, Jan Kautz, Changliu Liu, Guanya Shi, Xiaolong Wang, Linxi Fan, Yuke Zhu
• ICRA 2025
• * Equal contribution
• [Paper] [Project] [Code]

• CLoSD: Closing the Loop between Simulation and Diffusion for multi-task character control
• Guy Tevet, Sigal Raab, Setareh Cohan, Daniele Reda, , Xue Bin Peng, Amit H. Bermano, Michiel van de Panne
• ICLR 2025
• [Paper] [Project] [Code]

• SMPLOlympics: Sports Environments for Physically Simulated Humanoids
• , Jiashun Wang*, Kangni Liu*, Haotian Zhang, Chen Tessler, Jingbo Wang, Ye Yuan, Jinkun Cao, Zihui Lin, Fengyi Wang, Jessica Hodgins, Kris Kitani
• 1st Workshop on Humanoid Agents, CVPR 2025
• * Equal contribution
• [Paper] [Project] [Code]

• Harmony4d: A video dataset for in-the-wild close human interactions
• Rawal Khirodkar*, Jyun-Ting Song*, Jinkun Cao, , Kris Kitani
• NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks 2024
• [Paper] [Project] [Code]

• Grasping Diverse Objects with Simulated Humanoids
• , Jinkun Cao*, Sammy Christen, Alexander Winkler, Kris Kitani, Weipeng Xu
• NeurIPS 2024
• * Equal contribution
• [Paper] [Project]

• OmniH2O: Universal and Dexterous Human-to-Humanoid Whole-Body Teleoperation and Learning
• Tairan He*, , Xialin He*, Wenli Xiao, Chong Zhang, Weinan Zhang, Kris Kitani, Changliu Liu, Guanya Shi
• CORL 2024
• * Equal contribution
• [Paper] [Project]

• Learning Human-to-Humanoid Real-Time Whole-Body Teleoperation
• Tairan He*, , Wenli Xiao, Chong Zhang, Kris Kitani, Changliu Liu, Guanya Shi
• IROS 2024 (Oral Presentation)
• * Equal contribution
• [Paper] [Project]

• Real-Time Simulated Avatar from Head-Mounted Sensors
• , Jinkun Cao, Rawal Khirodkar, Alexander Winkler, Jing Huang, Kris Kitani, Weipeng Xu
• CVPR 2024 (Highlight — Top 11%)
• [Paper] [Project] [Code]

• PACER+: On-Demand Pedestrian Animation Controller in Driving Scenarios
• Jingbo Wang*, , Ye Yuan, Yixuan Li, Bo Dai
• CVPR 2024
• * Equal contribution
• [Paper]

• Ego-Exo4D: Understanding Skilled Human Activity from First- and Third-Person Perspectives
• K Grauman et al.
• CVPR 2024 (Oral — Top 3%)
• [Paper] [Project]

• PhysHOI: Physics-Based Imitation of Dynamic Human-Object Interaction
• Yinhuai Wang, Jing Lin, Ailing Zeng, , Jian Zhang, Lei Zhang
• In Submission
• [Paper] [Project]

• Universal Humanoid Motion Representations for Physics-Based Control
• , Jinkun Cao, Josh Merel, Alexander Winkler, Jing Huang, Kris Kitani, Weipeng Xu
• ICLR 2024 (Spotlight — Top 5%)
• [Paper] [Project] [Code]

• Perpetual Humanoid Control for Real-time Simulated Avatars
• , Jinkun Cao, Alexander Winkler, Kris Kitani, Weipeng Xu
• ICCV 2023
• [Video] [Paper] [Project] [Code]

• Learning Human Dynamics in Autonomous Driving Scenarios
• Jingbo Wang, Ye Yuan, , Kevin Xie, Dahua Lin, Umar Iqbal, Sanja Fidler, Sameh Khamis
• ICCV 2023
• [Paper]

• Trace and Pace: Controllable Pedestrian Animation via Guided Trajectory Diffusion
• Davis Rempe*, , Xue Bin Peng, Ye Yuan, Kris Kitani, Karsten Kreis, Sanja Fidler, Or Litany
• CVPR 2023
• * Equal contribution
• [Video] [Paper] [Project]

• Embodied Scene-aware Human Pose Estimation
• , Shun Iwase*, Ye Yuan, Kris M. Kitani
• NeurIPS 2022
• * Equal contribution
• [Video] [Paper] [Project] [Code]

• From Universal Humanoid Control to Automatic Physically Valid Character Creation
• , Ye Yuan, Kris M. Kitani
• ArXiv
• [Paper] [Project] [Code]

• Transform2Act: Learning a Transform-and-Control Policy for Efficient Agent Design
• Ye Yuan, Yuda Song, , Wen Sun, Kris M. Kitani
• ICLR 2022 (Oral Presentation — Top 1.6%)
• [Paper] [Project] [Code]

• Dynamics-Regulated Kinematic Policy for Egocentric Pose Estimation
• , Ryo hachiuma, Ye Yuan, Kris M. Kitani
• ICCVW (CV4ARVR) 2021, NeurIPS 2021
• [Video] [Paper] [Project] [Code]

• 3D Human Motion Estimation via Motion Compression and Refinement
• , S. Alireza Golestaneh, Kris M. Kitani
• ACCV 2020
• Oral Presentation
• [Video] [Paper] [Project] [Code]

• Learning Shape Representations for Clothing Variations in Person Re-Identification
• Yu-Jhe Li, , Xinshuo Weng, Kris M. Kitani
• arXiv, 2020
• [Paper]

• Cross-Domain 3D Equivariant Image Embeddings
• Carlos Esteves, Avneesh Sud, , Kostas Daniilidis, Ameesh Makadia
• ICML 2019
• [Paper]

• Cloud Chaser: Real Time Deep Learning Computer Vision on Low Computing Power Devices
• , Austin Small, Liam Dugan, Stephen Lane
• ICMV 2018
• [Paper] [Project] [Code]

• The rural–urban stress divide: Obtaining geographical insights through Twitter
• Kokil Jaidka, Sharath Chandra Guntuku, Jane H Lee, , Anneke Buffone, Lyle H Ungar
• Computers in Human Behavior, 2020: 106544
• [Paper] [Project]