Yu Zhang

Preferred name: Franklin Zhang
Email: franklin.yuzhang AT gmail.com
Google Scholar & GitHub & Twitter
I am a PhD student at Hong Kong University, focusing on the intersection of robotics and computer vision, advised by Prof. Yanchao Yang, coadvised by Prof. Yi Ma. My primary interest lies in developing algorithms for generalizable robotic manipulation by leveraging robotics foundation models and task-oriented perception.
Previously, I'm an undergraduate at ShanghaiTech University. In my junior year, I spent an exchange year at UC Berkeley, where I had the privilege of joining BAIR and collaborating with Toru Lin under Jitendra Malik. Additionally, I completed a summer research internship at UT Austin advised by Prof. Yuke Zhu.

Publications (*indicates equal technical contribution)

ReasonGen-R1
ReasonGen-R1: CoT for Autoregressive Image generation models through SFT and RL
Yu Zhang*, Yunqi Li*, Yifan Yang, Rui Wang, Yuqing Yang, Qi Dai, Jianmin Bao, Dongdong Chen, Chong Luo, Lili Qiu
Arxiv Preprint
[Paper] [Website]
SCIZOR: A Self-Supervised Approach to Data Curation for Large-Scale Imitation Learning
Yu Zhang*, Yuqi Xie*, Huihan Liu†, Rutav Shah†, Michael Wan, Linxi “Jim” Fan, Yuke Zhu
Arxiv Preprint
[Paper] [Website]
Multi-Task Interactive Robot Fleet Learning with Visual World Models
Huihan Liu, Yu Zhang, Vaarij Betala, Evan Zhang, James Liu, Crystal Ding , Yuke Zhu
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2024
[Paper] [Website]
Learning Visuotactile Skills with Two Multifingered Hands
Toru Lin, Yu Zhang*, Qiyang Li*, Haozhi Qi*, Brent Yi, Sergey Levine , Jitendra Malik
International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA) 2025
[Paper] [Website] [Twitter]