Robotics • Machine Learning • Generalist Robots
I am a PhD student at Princeton University, advised by Anirudha Majumdar. I am interested in building generalist robots.
Previously, I graduated from Tsinghua University, where I worked with Jianyu Chen on humanoid robots. I was also a research intern at Stanford, advised by Dorsa Sadigh.
Email: lihanzha [at] princeton [dot] edu
Selected work
TL;DR: We introduce PlayWorld, a system for training video-based robot world models using autonomous self-play rather than human demonstrations, generating high-quality physically consistent predictions for contact-rich interactions that enable reinforcement learning in simulation with 65% improvements in real-world policy success rates.
Paper Website Code Checkpoints
TL;DR: We introduce Language-Action Pre-training (LAP), which represents robot actions as natural language tokens to enable vision-language-action models to transfer zero-shot to new robot embodiments, achieving over 50% zero-shot success on novel robots—approximately twice the performance of prior methods.
TL;DR: We survey video generation models in robotics, covering current applications, core research challenges, and promising future directions for using generative video models to support robot prediction, planning, and interaction.
Best Paper Award, CoRL 2025 Eval&Deploy workshop
TL;DR: We present a framework that augments real-world evaluations with simulation evaluations to provide stronger inferences on real-world policy performance that could otherwise only be obtained by scaling up real-world evaluations.
TL;DR: We introduce VLM2VLA, a VLA model training paradigm that represents low-level robot actions in natural language to better align the robot fine-tuning data with the base VLM’s representation space. VLM2VLA yields a policy with strong VQA performance and zero-shot generalization to new scenarios.
Best Paper Award, RSS 2025 SWoMo and SemRob workshops
TL;DR: We introduce World Models for Active Perception (WoMAP), a scalable recipe for training open-vocabulary object localization policies that are grounded in the physical world.
Spotlight, RSS 2025 CRLH workshop
Paper Talk Video Website Code Slides
TL;DR: We introduce Factored Scaling Curves (FSC), which model how policy performance scales with data for different environmental factors and can be extrapolated to guide principled data collection.
TL;DR: We propose DROC that can respond effectively to online human language corrections, distill generalizable knowledge from corrections, and retrieve usable knowledge for future tasks.
TL;DR: We show how to leverage LLMs to generate constraints that can indicate misalignment during execution, and use VLMs to detect constraint violations continuously.
Best Presentation Award
TL;DR: We propose using time series reconstruction to process serial wind power data and achieve state-of-the-art wind power prediction accuracy.
Recognition