Yu Fang

I am a fourth 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 interned at Salesforce AI Research with Dr. Michael S. Ryoo and Dr. Juan Carlos Niebles, and at Meta Monetization GenAI with Dr. Shoufa Chen.

I am broadly interested in embodied AI and robot learning. My long-term goal is to develop and study scalable, generalizable, and reliable agents that can perceive, reason, and act in complex real-world environments. My current research includes: (1) foundation models for robotic manipulation, including VLAs, world models, and agentic policies; (2) synthetic data generation and sim-to-real applications; and (3) systematic and scalable evaluation of robot policies.