Zifan Wang

Zifan Wang

HKUST (Guangzhou)

My name is Zifan Wang. I am a PhD student in Artificial Intelligence at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), supervised by Prof. Junwei Liang.

My primary research focus is on legged robots, including quadrupeds, humanoids, and wheeled-legged robots. I work on optimal control, reinforcement learning, and loco-manipulation.

If you have any interesting projects related to legged robots, please contact me! I am very eager to collaborate on creating intelligent robots.

I am currently on the job market. I am actively seeking opportunities related to (visual) behavior foundation models and world models for humanoids. If you have a suitable position or collaboration in mind, I would love to hear from you — please feel free to reach out!

Robotics Researcher

  • Research focus on Legged Robots
  • Publications at RSS, NeurIPS, CoRL, CVPR, IROS
  • Optimal control & Reinforcement Learning

Full-Stack Roboticist

  • Software: Python, C/C++, ROS/ROS2
  • Hardware: STM32, Jetson
  • Design: SolidWorks, Altium Designer

Academic Service

  • Reviewer for T-RO, RAL, IROS
  • Reviewer for CoRL, ICCV
  • Reviewer for Humanoids

News

Publications

Locomotion

Perceptive Behavior Foundation Model

Perceptive Behavior Foundation Model: Adapting Human Motion Priors to Robot-Centric Terrain

Z Wang, et al.
Under Review
Project Page
Omni-Perception

Omni-Perception: Omnidirectional Collision Avoidance for Legged Locomotion in Dynamic Environments

Z Wang, T Ma, Y Jia, X Yang, J Zhou, W Ouyang, Q Zhang, J Liang
CoRL 2025 Oral
Project Page Code
Humanoid Locomotion

End-to-End Humanoid Robot Safe and Comfortable Locomotion Policy

Z Wang, X Yang, J Zhao, J Zhou, T Ma, Z Gao, A Ajoudani, J Liang
arXiv 2025
Diffusion Planner

Preference Aligned Diffusion Planner for Quadrupedal Locomotion Control

X Yuan, Z Shang, Z Wang, C Wang, Z Shan, M Zhu, C Bai, X Li, W Wan, et al.
IROS 2025
Project Page
MeshMimic

MeshMimic: Geometry-Aware Humanoid Motion Learning through 3D Scene Reconstruction

Q Zhang, J Ma, P Liu, S Shi, Z Su, Z Wang, J Sun, W Cui, J Yu, G Han, et al.
arXiv 2026

Loco-Manipulation

Loco-Manipulation

Arm-Constrained Curriculum Learning for Loco-Manipulation of a Wheel-Legged Robot

Z Wang, Y Jia, L Shi, H Wang, H Zhao, X Li, J Zhou, J Ma, G Zhou
IROS 2024 Oral
Code

Manipulation & Imitation Learning

DiT4DiT

DiT4DiT: Jointly Modeling Video Dynamics and Actions for Generalizable Robot Control

T Ma, J Zheng, Z Wang, C Jiang, A Cui, J Liang, S Yang
arXiv 2025
Project Page arXiv Code
VLA Cross-Task

Exploring the Limits of Vision-Language-Action Manipulations in Cross-Task Generalization

J Zhou, K Ye, J Liu, T Ma, Z Wang, R Qiu, KY Lin, Z Zhao, J Liang
NeurIPS 2025
GLOVER++

GLOVER++: Unleashing the Potential of Affordance Learning from Human Behaviors for Robotic Manipulation

T Ma, J Zheng, Z Wang, Z Gao, J Zhou, J Liang
CoRL 2025
Contrastive IL

Contrastive Imitation Learning for Language-guided Multi-Task Robotic Manipulation

T Ma, J Zhou, Z Wang, R Qiu, J Liang
CoRL 2024
Project Page
Human-Robot Domain

Mitigating the Human-Robot Domain Discrepancy in Visual Pre-training for Robotic Manipulation

J Zhou, T Ma, KY Lin, Z Wang, R Qiu, J Liang
CVPR 2025
Project Page
GLOVER

GLOVER: Generalizable Open-Vocabulary Affordance Reasoning for Task-Oriented Grasping

T Ma, Z Wang, J Zhou, M Wang, J Liang
CoRL 2024 GenPriors Workshop Best Paper Award
Project Page

Simulation

GS-Playground

GS-Playground: A High-Throughput Photorealistic Simulator for Vision-Informed Robot Learning

Y Jia, H Zhang, Z Zhang, J Wu, M Yu, Z Wang, et al.
RSS 2026
Project Page arXiv Code
UniLab

UniLab: A Heterogeneous Architecture for Robot RL Beyond GPU-Dominant Paradigms

Y Jia, Z Cao, M Yu, H Zhang, S Chen, D Jiang, ..., Z Wang, et al.
arXiv 2026
Project Page arXiv Code
DISCOVERSE

DISCOVERSE: Efficient Robot Simulation in Complex High-Fidelity Environments

Y Jia, G Wang, Y Dong, J Wu, Y Zeng, H Lin, Z Wang, H Ge, W Gu, K Ding, et al.
IROS 2025 Oral
Project Page
FGGS-LiDAR

FGGS-LiDAR: Ultra-Fast, GPU-Accelerated Simulation from General 3DGS Models to LiDAR

J Wu, Y Jia, Y Yan, Z Chen, T Tan, Z Wang, G Wang
arXiv

Open Source Projects

Genesis Legged Gym — Legged Robots Framework for Genesis

Zifan Wang
Open Source   GitHub stars
Code

Awesome Loco-Manipulation: A Curated List

Zifan Wang
Open Source   GitHub stars
Code

Education

PhD in Artificial Intelligence

  • HKUST (Guangzhou)
  • 2024 - 2027 (Expected)
  • Supervisor: Junwei Liang

MSc in Robotics & Autonomous Systems

  • HKUST (Guangzhou)
  • 2022 - 2024, GPA: 3.84
  • Supervisors: Ming Liu, Jun Ma

BEng in Automation

  • Southwest Jiaotong University
  • 2017 - 2021, Score: 85.45
  • School of Information Science and Technology

Honors & Awards

  • First Class Scholarship — Southwest Jiaotong University
  • The Enterprise Scholarship — Southwest Jiaotong University
  • Outstanding Students Cadre — Southwest Jiaotong University

Competitions

National Second Prize — ABU Robocon (Equestrian Simulation)

Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union Robocon, 2020

Developed Simulink simulation system and co-simulation with Adams for quadruped robot maneuvers.

National Third Prize — RoboMaster (DJI)

RoboMaster, 2020

Developed LQR-based control framework, image processing and LiDAR sensing algorithms, sensor fusion, and hardware circuit design.

National Second Prize — ABU Robocon

Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union Robocon, 2019

Responsible for quadruped robot leg motion control and upper structure ejection/gripping device control.

Provincial Second Prize — Engineering Training Competition

National College Student Engineering Training Competition, 2019

Hardware circuit design, sensor data fusion with orthogonal code disk and DT35 laser ranging module.

Provincial Third Prize — Electronics Design Contest

National Undergraduate Electronics Design Contest, 2019

Electromagnetic gun hardware circuit design, BP neural network-based control algorithm, and UCOS-III RTOS porting on ARM processor.

Contact: wang_zifan@outlook.com / zwang765@connect.hkust-gz.edu.cn / +86 135 1839 3890