Yifan Hou

yifanhou at stanford dot edu

I am a Postdoctoral researcher at the REALab, Stanford University, working with Prof. Shuran Song. Prior to joining Stanford, I was an Applied Scientist on the Vulcan team at Amazon Robotics. I obtained my PhD and MS degrees from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Matthew T. Mason. I obtained BoE from the department of Automation at Tsinghua University. I had also spent time at Toyota Research Institute and MIT.

My career goal is to achieve human level manipulation dexterity on robots. During my PhD, I designed methods to execute contact-rich manipulation robustly against modeling uncertainties and disturbance forces using active compliance control schemes. I then spent three years at Amazon Robotics pushing compliant manipulation from research to industrial products in the Stow project. I believe that robotic manipulation has an opportunity of wide adoption in people’s daily life, where the bottleneck is the ability to scale up the aquisition of robust, general manipulation skills. Currently my research interests include the intersection of data-driven visual motor policies and robust model-based control as well as dexterous manipulation.

news

Sep 29, 2025	DexUMI was selected as a best paper finalist at CoRL 2025!
Sep 27, 2025	CR-DAgger won the best paper award at the CoRL 2025 Human to Robot (H2R) workshop!
Aug 10, 2025	DexUMI and Vision in Action are accepted to CoRL 2025. See you at Seoul!
May 25, 2025	I gave an invited talk “Empower Robot Learning with Model-based Manipulation” at the Beyond Pick and Place workshop at ICRA 2025. Recording is available here.
May 21, 2025	Adaptive Compliance Policy won the best paper award at the ICRA 2025 Contact-rich Manipulation workshop.
Feb 19, 2025	I gave a lecture on “Introduction to Compliance Control” at Stanford EE/CS 381. Slides are available here.
Jan 17, 2025	My invited talk at the Stanford Robotics Seminar was released. This talk is an overview of my work on compliant manipulation.
Jun 26, 2024	Our paper simPLE: a visuotactile method learned in simulation to precisely pick, localize, regrasp, and place objects has been published at Science Robotics.

selected publications

Compliant Residual DAgger: Improving Real-World Contact-Rich Manipulation with Human Corrections

Xiaomeng Xu^*, Yifan Hou^*, Zeyi Liu, and Shuran Song

2025

Awarded Bib PDF Website

Best paper award at the Human2Robot workshop, CoRL 2025

@misc{CRDagger2025,
  title = {Compliant Residual DAgger: Improving Real-World Contact-Rich Manipulation with Human Corrections},
  author = {Xu, Xiaomeng and Hou, Yifan and Liu, Zeyi and Song, Shuran},
  year = {2025},
  booktitle = {The 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025)},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16685},
}

DexMachina: Functional Retargeting for Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation

Mandi Zhao, Yifan Hou, Dieter Fox, Yashraj Narang, Ajay Mandlekar, and Shuran Song

2025

Bib PDF Website

@misc{DexMachina2025,
  title = {DexMachina: Functional Retargeting for Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation},
  author = {Zhao, Mandi and Hou, Yifan and Fox, Dieter and Narang, Yashraj and Mandlekar, Ajay and Song, Shuran},
  year = {2025},
  eprint = {2505.24853},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.RO},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24853},
}

DexUMI: Using Human Hand as the Universal Manipulation Interface for Dexterous Manipulation

Mengda Xu^*, Han Zhang^*, Yifan Hou, Zhenjia Xu, Linxi Fan, Manuela Veloso, and Shuran Song

2025

Awarded Bib PDF Website

Conference Best Paper Finalist, CoRL 2025

@misc{DexUMI2025,
  title = {DexUMI: Using Human Hand as the Universal Manipulation Interface for Dexterous Manipulation},
  author = {Xu, Mengda and Zhang, Han and Hou, Yifan and Xu, Zhenjia and Fan, Linxi and Veloso, Manuela and Song, Shuran},
  year = {2025},
  booktitle = {2025 Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL)},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21864},
}

Adaptive Compliance Policy: Learning Approximate Compliance for Diffusion Guided Control

Yifan Hou, Zeyi Liu, Cheng Chi, Eric Cousineau, Naveen Kuppuswamy, Siyuan Feng, Benjamin Burchfiel, and Shuran Song

In 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025

Awarded Bib Website

Best paper award at the Contact-rich Manipulation workshop, ICRA 2025

@inproceedings{hou2024acp,
  title = {Adaptive Compliance Policy: Learning Approximate Compliance for Diffusion Guided Control},
  author = {Hou, Yifan and Liu, Zeyi and Chi, Cheng and Cousineau, Eric and Kuppuswamy, Naveen and Feng, Siyuan and Burchfiel, Benjamin and Song, Shuran},
  year = {2025},
  booktitle = {2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  pages = {4829--4836},
  organization = {IEEE},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09309},
}

SimPLE, a visuotactile method learned in simulation to precisely pick, localize, regrasp, and place objects

Maria Bauza, Antonia Bronars, Yifan Hou, Ian Taylor, Nikhil Chavan-Dafle, and Alberto Rodriguez

Science Robotics, 2024

Bib PDF Website

@article{bauza2024simple,
  title = {SimPLE, a visuotactile method learned in simulation to precisely pick, localize, regrasp, and place objects},
  author = {Bauza, Maria and Bronars, Antonia and Hou, Yifan and Taylor, Ian and Chavan-Dafle, Nikhil and Rodriguez, Alberto},
  journal = {Science Robotics},
  volume = {9},
  number = {91},
  pages = {eadi8808},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {American Association for the Advancement of Science},
}

Contact mode guided motion planning for quasidynamic dexterous manipulation in 3d

Xianyi Cheng, Eric Huang, Yifan Hou, and Matthew T Mason

In 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022

Bib PDF Video

@inproceedings{cheng2022contact,
  title = {Contact mode guided motion planning for quasidynamic dexterous manipulation in 3d},
  author = {Cheng, Xianyi and Huang, Eric and Hou, Yifan and Mason, Matthew T},
  booktitle = {2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  pages = {2730--2736},
  year = {2022},
  organization = {IEEE},
}

Manipulation with Shared Grasping

Yifan Hou, Zhenzhong Jia, and Matthew T Mason

Jun 2020

Bib PDF Video

@conference{hou2020manipulation,
  title = {Manipulation with Shared Grasping},
  author = {Hou, Yifan and Jia, Zhenzhong and Mason, Matthew T},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS '20)},
  year = {2020},
  month = jun,
}

Robust execution of contact-rich motion plans by hybrid force-velocity control

Yifan Hou and Matthew T Mason

In 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Jun 2019

Bib PDF Video Code Website

@inproceedings{hou2019robust,
  title = {Robust execution of contact-rich motion plans by hybrid force-velocity control},
  author = {Hou, Yifan and Mason, Matthew T},
  booktitle = {2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  pages = {1933--1939},
  year = {2019},
  organization = {IEEE},
}

Fast planning for 3d any-pose-reorienting using pivoting

Yifan Hou, Zhenzhong Jia, and Matthew T Mason

In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Jun 2018

Bib PDF Video Website

@inproceedings{hou2018fast,
  title = {Fast planning for 3d any-pose-reorienting using pivoting},
  author = {Hou, Yifan and Jia, Zhenzhong and Mason, Matthew T},
  booktitle = {2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  pages = {1631--1638},
  year = {2018},
  organization = {IEEE},
}