Speaker: Xinyu Zhang

Bio

Location : Room 402, 4th floor, 1 Spring Street, Downtown New Brunswick

Committee: 

Professor Abdeslam Boularias

Professor Kostas Bekris

Professor Chengzhi Mao

Professor Ruoshi Liu (external)

Event Type: PhD Defense

Abstract: A fundamental challenge in scaling robotic manipulation is reconciling broad generalization across diverse tasks with precise dexterity for fine-grained control. To resolve this tension, my dissertation instantiates a dual-system architecture where a deliberative System-1 predicts high-level action primitives through world modeling, and a reactive System-0 translates them into low-level motor commands. I advance this vision through the complementary contributions across my PhD publications, spanning efficient visual world models that learn latent dynamics directly from offline videos, a scalable data generation paradigm that synthesizes natural hand-object interactions from multi-modal sensing gloves to supply the rich data needed for dexterous robot learning, and a policy architecture that frames robot actions as language tokens to bridge high-level planning with low-level execution. Together, these contributions build towards a unified framework of robust generalization and dexterity across diverse manipulation tasks.

Organization: 

Contact  Professor Abdeslam Boularias

Zoom Link: https://rutgers.zoom.us/j/9331476253?pwd=ckZKVDVOWkY3Tm9DZzBCNTA1b3hhQT09