Yu Fang

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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 S. 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 and world models for robotic manipulation, 2) synthetic data generation for sim-to-real applications, and 3) 3D/4D perception.

Publications

When Vision Overrides Language: Evaluating and Mitigating Counterfactual Failures in VLAs

Yu Fang, Yuchun Feng, Dong Jing, Jiaqi Liu, Yue Yang, Zhenyu Wei, Daniel Szafir, Mingyu Ding.
arXiv, 2026.
[project page] [paper]

LiLo-VLA: Compositional Long-Horizon Manipulation via Linked Object-Centric Policies

Yue Yang, Shuo Cheng, Yu Fang, Homanga Bharadhwaj, Mingyu Ding, Gedas Bertasius, Daniel Szafir.
arXiv, 2026.
[project page]

Robotic VLA Benefits from Joint Learning with Motion Image Diffusion

Yu Fang, Kanchana Ranasinghe, Le Xue, Honglu Zhou, Juntao Tan, Ran Xu, Shelby Heinecke, Caiming Xiong, Silvio Savarese, Daniel Szafir, Mingyu Ding, Michael S. Ryoo, Juan Carlos Niebles.
arXiv, 2025.
[project page] [paper]

Future Optical Flow Prediction Improves Robot Control & Video Generation

Kanchana Ranasinghe, Honglu Zhou, Yu Fang, Luyu Yang, Le Xue, Ran Xu, Caiming Xiong, Silvio Savarese, Michael S Ryoo, Juan Carlos Niebles.
arXiv, 2026.
[project page] [paper] [code]

ReBot: Scaling Robot Learning with Real-to-Sim-to-Real Robotic Video Synthesis

Yu Fang, Yue Yang, Xinghao Zhu, Kaiyuan Zheng, Gedas Bertasius, Daniel Szafir, Mingyu Ding.
IROS 2025
[project page] [paper] [code]

SNAF: Sparse-view CBCT Reconstruction with Neural Attenuation Fields

Yu Fang, Lanzhuju Mei, Changjian Li, Yuan Liu, Wenping Wang, Zhiming Cui, Dinggang Shen.
arXiv, 2022.
[paper]

Curvature-enhanced Implicit Function Network for High-quality Tooth Model Generation from CBCT Images

Yu Fang, Zhiming Cui, Lei Ma, Lanzhuju Mei, Bojun Zhang, Yue Zhao, Zhihao Jiang, Yiqiang Zhan, Yongsheng Pan, Min Zhu, Dinggang Shen.
International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), 2022.
[paper] [pdf] [poster]

A Fully Automatic AI System for Tooth and Alveolar Bone Segmentation from Cone-beam CT Images

Zhiming Cui*, Yu Fang*, Lanzhuju Mei*, Bojun Zhang*, Bo Yu, Jiameng Liu, Caiwen Jiang, Yuhang Sun, Lei Ma, Jiawei Huang, Yang Liu, Yue Zhao, Chunfeng Lian, Zhongxiang Ding, Min Zhu, Dinggang Shen.
Nature Communications, 2022.
[paper] [pdf] [code]

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