Yifan Hou
yifhou at nvidia dot com
I am a senior research scientist at the NVIDIA GEAR Lab and an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas, Austin. Before that, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University working with Prof. Shuran Song. I obtained my PhD 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 also spent time at Amazon Robotics, Toyota Research Institute and MIT.
My work focuses on extending the capabilities and robustness of robotic manipulation. I have been approaching the problem from the following perspectives:
- Multi-modal imitation learning: Incorporating force/tactile as input modalities and using compliance control as an output modality. MCC, UMI-FT, Dex-UMI, ACP
- DAgger/Post-training: Efficiently learning of contact-rich behavior from a small amount of rich data. MuSe, CR-DAgger
- Sim2real transfer: Exploring physics safely in simulation to guide robots in the real world. DexMachina, SimPLE
- Mechanics-based sythesis and optimization: Quantifying contact mode robustness and optimizing control for them. Hybrid Servoing, Shared Grasping, Planning
news
| Jul 03, 2026 | Checkout Multisensory Continual Learning (MuSe) for how we use a small amount of force data to unlock force-aware behavior on pretraining tasks. |
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| May 26, 2026 | I joined the NVIDIA GEAR Lab as a scientist. |
| May 05, 2026 | I accepted the faculty offer from UT Austin CS and will start in Fall 2027. |
| Apr 27, 2026 | Minimalist Compliance Control is accepted by RSS 2026. |
| Jan 31, 2026 | UMI-FT is accepted by ICRA 2026. |
| 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! |
| 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. |