ZhiYuan(Aaron) Feng   |   冯志远

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Baining Guo. I received my B.S. in Computer Science from the Qian Xuesen Honors College at Xi’an Jiaotong University.

My research focuses on embodied AI, spatial reasoning, and multimodal large language models, especially vision-language-action systems for robotic perception, understanding, and decision-making. I am interested in building intelligent agents that can reason about complex physical environments and assist people in real-world scenarios.

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Selected Papers
Seeing across views: Benchmarking spatial reasoning of vision-language models in robotic scenes
Zhiyuan Feng, Zhaolu Kang, Qijie Wang, Zhiying Du, Jiongrui Yan, Shubin Shi, Chengbo Yuan, Huizhi Liang, Yu Deng, Qixiu Li, Rushuai Yang, Arctanx An, Leqi Zheng, Weijie Wang, Shawn Chen, Sicheng Xu, Yaobo Liang, Jiaolong Yang, Baining Guo
Paper / Webpage / Code / Data / SlideLive
ICLR 2026 🔥🔥🔥
Cited by DreamZero 🌟🌟🌟

We propose MV-RoboBench, a benchmark for evaluating the multi-view spatial reasoning capabilities of VLMs in robotic manipulation.

From Human Videos to Robot Manipulation: A Survey on Scalable Vision-Language-Action Learning with Human-Centric Data
Zhiyuan Feng, Qixiu Li, Huizhi Liang, Rushuai Yang, Yichao Shen, Zhiying Du, Zhaowei Zhang, Yu Deng, Li Zhao, Hao Zhao, Zongqing Lu, Oier Mees, Marc Pollefeys, Jiaolong Yang, Baining Guo
Paper / Webpage
IJCAI 2026 Survey Track 🔥🔥🔥

We survey how to turn abundant human videos into actionable supervision for VLA models, organizing methods into four categories and outlining key challenges for reliable real-world transfer.

AD-MIR: Bridging the Gap from Perception to Persuasion in Advertising Video Understanding via Structured Reasoning
Binxiao Xu, Junyu Feng, Xiaopeng Lin, Haodong Li, Zhiyuan Feng, Bohan Zeng, Shaolin Lu, Ming Lu, Qi She, Wentao Zhang
Paper
ICML 2026 🔥🔥🔥

We propose AD-MIR, a two-stage framework that decodes advertising intent by first constructing a structured multimodal database via semantic retrieval and keyword matching, then reasoning over it with an iterative, evidence-grounded inquiry loop that mimics marketing expertise, achieving state-of-the-art on AdsQA.

Discover, Learn, and Reinforce: Scaling Vision-Language-Action Pretraining with Diverse RL-Generated Trajectories
Rushuai Yang, Zhiyuan Feng, Tianxiang Zhang, Kaixin Wang, Chuheng Zhang, Li Zhao, Xiu Su, Yi Chen, Jiang Bian
Paper
arXiv 2025

We propose DLR, an information-theoretic multi-pattern RL framework that generates diverse, high-success manipulation trajectories for scalable VLA pretraining, improving transfer and showing better data-scaling than standard single-pattern RL.

WorldReasonBench: Human-Aligned Stress Testing of Video Generators as Future World-State Predictors
Keming Wu, Yijing Cui, Wenhan Xue, Qijie Wang, Xuan Luo, Zhiyuan Feng, Zuhao Yang, Sudong Wang, Sicong Jiang, Haowei Zhu, Zihan Wang, Ping Nie, Wenhu Chen, Bin Wang
Paper / Dataset
arXiv 2025

We introduce WorldReasonBench, a human-aligned benchmark that stress-tests video generators as future world-state predictors across four dimensions—World Knowledge, Human Centric, Logic Reasoning, and Information-Based reasoning—covering diverse tasks from physical dynamics and cultural understanding to spatial geometry and quantitative math.

Beyond human demonstrations: Diffusion-based reinforcement learning to generate data for vla training
Rushuai Yang, Hangxing Wei, Ran Zhang, Zhiyuan Feng, Xiaoyu Chen, Tong Li, Chuheng Zhang, Li Zhao, Jiang Bian, Xiu Su, Yi Chen
Paper
arXiv 2025

We propose a diffusion policy optimization method that uses RL to autonomously generate smooth, low-variance long-horizon manipulation trajectories, enabling VLA training that outperforms models trained on human or Gaussian RL demonstrations on LIBERO.

HiSpatial: Taming Hierarchical 3D Spatial Understanding in Vision-Language Models
Huizhi Liang, Yichao Shen, Yu Deng, Sicheng Xu, Zhiyuan Feng, Tong Zhang, Yaobo Liang, Jiaolong Yang
Paper / Webpage / Code
CVPR 2026 🔥🔥🔥

We propose a hierarchical framework that decomposes 3D spatial understanding in VLMs into four progressive levels, and build an automated pipeline over ~5M images to generate 3D spatial VQA data for fine-tuning, achieving state-of-the-art on multiple spatial reasoning benchmarks.

VITRA: Scalable vision-language-action model pretraining for robotic manipulation with real-life human activity videos
Qixiu Li, Yu Deng, Yaobo Liang, Lin Luo, Lei Zhou, Chengtang Yao, Lingqi Zeng, Zhiyuan Feng, Huizhi Liang, Sicheng Xu, Yizhong Zhang, Xi Chen, Hao Chen, Lily Sun, Dong Chen, Jiaolong Yang, Baining Guo
Paper / Webpage / Code
ICRA 2026 🔥🔥🔥

We propose VITRA, a novel approach for pretraining Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robotic manipulation using large-scale, unscripted, real-world videos of human hand activities.

My contribution: I focus on the data processing pipeline, leveraging HaWoR to reconstruct 3D hand poses from human-centric videos.

HSSBench: Benchmarking Humanities and Social Sciences Ability for Multimodal Large Language Models
Zhaolu Kang, Junhao Gong, Jiaxu Yan, Wanke Xia, Yian Wang, Ziwen Wang, Huaxuan Ding, Zhuo Cheng, Wenhao Cao, Zhiyuan Feng, Siqi He, Shannan Yan, Junzhe Chen, Xiaomin He, Chaoya Jiang, Wei Ye, Kaidong Yu, Xuelong Li
Paper / Code
ICLR 2026

HSSBench is a multilingual (UN six languages) benchmark of 13,000+ expert-curated samples designed to evaluate MLLMs’ cross-disciplinary, concept-to-vision reasoning in Humanities and Social Sciences, revealing clear gaps even in state-of-the-art models.

MIRA: Medical Time Series Foundation Model for Real-World Health Data
Hao Li, Bowen Deng, Chang Xu, Zhiyuan Feng, Viktor Schlegel, Yu-Hao Huang, Yizheng Sun, Jingyuan Sun, Kailai Yang, Yiyao Yu, Jiang Bian
Paper
NIPS 2025
AI4X-AC 2026 Oral

We introduce MIRA, a medical time-series foundation model pretrained on 454B+ time points that handles irregular sampling and missingness to deliver stronger zero-shot and fine-tuned forecasting across datasets and tasks.

TransDiff: Diffusion-Based Method for Manipulating Transparent Objects Using a Single RGB-D Image
Haoxiao Wang, Kaichen Zhou, Binrui Gu, Zhiyuan Feng, Weijie Wang, Peilin Sun, Yicheng Xiao, Jianhua Zhang, Hao Dong
Paper / Webpage
ICRA 2025

We propose TransDiff, a diffusion-based single-view RGB-D depth completion method for accurate grasping of transparent objects.

Deep evidential learning in diffusion convolutional recurrent neural network
Zhiyuan Feng, Kai Qi, Bin Shi, Hao Mei, Qinghua Zheng, Hua Wei
Paper
CIKM 2024 Workshop

We integrate evidential deep learning into DCRNN to provide sampling-free uncertainty quantification for spatiotemporal traffic forecasting, achieving improved predictive intervals measured by MIS.


Education Experience
Tsinghua University, Beijing 2024 - Present
Ph.D of Computer Science
Institute for Advanced Study
Advisor: Baining Guo (IEEE&ACM Fellow)
Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 2020 - 2024
B.E. of Computer Science
Qian Xuesen Honors College
Advisor: Bin Shi, Hua Wei (ASU), Qinghua Zheng (Academician of CAE)

Research Experience
Microsoft Research Asia Jul 2024 - Present
Spatial Intelligence Group
Role: Research Intern, working on Embodied AI.
Advisor: Yu Deng and Jiaolong Yang.
Microsoft Research Asia Dec 2023 - Jun 2024
Vision Computing Group
Role: Research Intern, working on LLM for reasoning.
Advisor: Zheng Zhang.

Honors & Services

Professional Service

  • Conference Reviewer: NeurIPS 2026, ECCV 2026, CVPR 2026, ICLR 2026, ICRA 2026
  • Journal Reviewer: IJCV
  • IEEE Student Member

Awards & Honors

  • Microsoft “Stars of Tomorrow” Internship, 2024
  • Outstanding Bachelor Graduate, 2024
  • China Mobile Outstanding Scholarship, 2023
  • National Scholarship, 2021 & 2022
  • Asia and Pacific Informatics Olympiad, Gold Medal, 2018
  • National Olympiad in Informatics in Provinces, First Prize, 2017 & 2018

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