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 am currently doing a research internship at NVIDIA GEAR Lab, working with Dr. Jim Fan and Prof. Yuke Zhu, where I am leveraging industrial-level resources for scaling up robot foundation model learning.
News
- 2025 OctReceived 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 Zhuâ€
Self-Improving Vision-Language-Action Models with Data Generation via Residual RL
Under Review
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 Zhuâ€
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%.
