Yu Fang

I am a third year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, working with Prof. Mingyu Ding and Prof. Daniel Szafir. Before that, I obtained my master’s degree at ShanghaiTech University, advised by Prof. Dinggang Shen and Prof. Zhiming Cui. During my Ph.D., I worked as a research intern at Salesforce AI Research in Summer 2025, with Dr. Michael Ryoo and Dr. Juan Carlos Niebles.

I am broadly interested in embodied AI and robot learning. My long-term goal is to bridge the gap between simulation and the real world, and to develop agents with human-level perception, reasoning, and behavior. My current research focuses on: 1) VLA models for robotic manipulation, 2) synthetic data generation for sim-to-real applications, and 3) 3D/4D perception.