Ziyi Yang bio photo

Ziyi Yang

Ph.D. student in Computer Science

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I am a Computer Science PhD student at Brown University advised by Prof. Stefanie Tellex and Prof. George Konidaris. My research lives at the intersection of Robotics, Language, and Planning. Broadly, I aim to bridge the gap between abstract human concepts and physical robot behaviors. I am particularly interested in building structural systems (e.g., neuro-symbolic, compositional, and hierarchical) to make these interactions more seamless. Here is a sketch of the framework I proposed. For a deeper dive into my work, feel free to check my thesis proposal.

Before Brown, I earned my M.S. in Robotics at Northeastern University, where I worked with Prof. Lawson Wong on vision-language navigation. I love discussing research ideas and PhD career/application. Please feel free to email me if you’d like to chat!

Outside of the lab, I’m leading a happy life with my girlfriend fiancé wife (!) and my cat in Providence :)


Current Interests:

  • Representation & Abstraction Learning: Modeling structured concepts in robotics, including motor skills, object-centric representations, and spatial/temporal relationships.
  • Skill Discovery & Composition: Learning reusable skills from unstructured robot demonstrations to efficiently solve novel, long-horizon tasks.
  • Language Grounding & Planning: Bridging natural language specification with robot execution through task-level planning.
  • Embodied Reasoning: Leveraging large pretrained models (LLMs/VLMs) for commonsense reasoning and decision-making in physical environments.
  • Reading manga. Osamu Tezuka is my GOAT. Here is my manga rating page.
  • The Binding of Isaac. (1200+ hrs on record)
  • (Last updated: Apr 26)

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