Intro

I am a co-founder of Archon Robotics (源策未来), where I serve as Head of AI. I am also pursuing a PhD at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) as a member of OpenDriveLab and MMLab, under the supervision of Prof. Ping Luo and Prof. Hongyang Li. I earned my Master's in Robotics from the Robotics Institute at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2020, after a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2019.

My research focuses on robot learning, autonomous driving, and robotic systems. Representative projects are highlighted below.

Research

(*: Equal contribution. †: Project lead/Corresponding author.)

Selected Publications (See all here.)

EgoHumanoid project demonstration

EgoHumanoid: Unlocking In-the-Wild Loco-Manipulation with Robot-Free Egocentric Demonstration
Modi Shi*, Shijia Peng*, Jin Chen*, Haoran Jiang, Tianyu Li, Ping Luo, Di Huang, Hongyang Li, Li Chen†.
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2026
[page] [paper] [code]

RISE robot policy demonstration

RISE: Self-Improving Robot Policy with Compositional World Model
Jiazhi Yang*, Kunyang Lin*, Wencong Zhang*, Jinwei Li*, Tianwei Lin, Longyan Wu, Ya-Qin Zhang, Hao Zhao, Ping Luo, Zhizhong Su, Hongyang Li, Xiangyu Yue, Li Chen†.
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2026
[page] [paper] [code]

GO1-Pro scalable robotic manipulation project

Is Diversity All You Need for Scalable Robotic Manipulation?
Modi Shi*, Li Chen*, Jin Chen*, Yuxiang Lu, Chiming Liu, Guanghui Ren, Ping Luo, Di Huang, Maoqing Yao, Hongyang Li.
IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2026
[paper] [code]

Self-directed learning for intelligent robot manipulation

Intelligent Robot Manipulation Requires Self-Directed Learning
Li Chen, Chonghao Sima, Kashyap Chitta, Antonio Loquercio, Ping Luo, Yi Ma, Hongyang Li.
CVPR Workshop, 2026
ICLR Workshops, 2026
[paper]

Agility Meets Stability humanoid control demonstration

Agility Meets Stability: Versatile Humanoid Control with Heterogeneous Data
Yixuan Pan*, Ruoyi Qiao*, Li Chen, Kashyap Chitta, Liang Pan, Haoguang Mai, Qingwen Bu, Hao Zhao, Cunyuan Zheng, Ping Luo, Hongyang Li.
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2026
[page] [paper] [code]

TopoNet graph-based topology reasoning for driving scenes

Graph-based Topology Reasoning for Driving Scenes
Tianyu Li*, Li Chen*†, Huijie Wang, Yang Li, Jiazhi Yang, Xiangwei Geng, Hang Xu, Chunjing Xu, Junchi Yan, Ping Luo, Hongyang Li.
SCIENCE CHINA Information Sciences (SCIS), 2026
[paper] [code] [dataset]

ReSim autonomous driving world simulation

ReSim: Reliable World Simulation for Autonomous Driving
Jiazhi Yang, Kashyap Chitta, Shenyuan Gao, Long Chen, Yuqian Shao, Xiaosong Jia, Hongyang Li, Andreas Geiger, Xiangyu Yue, Li Chen†.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025
Spotlight (3.2%)
[page] [paper] [code]

End-to-end autonomous driving challenges and frontiers

End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers
Li Chen, Penghao Wu, Kashyap Chitta, Bernhard Jaeger, Andreas Geiger, Hongyang Li.
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI), 2024
[TPAMI Top-1 Popular, Jan 2025 - Now]
[page] [paper]

CLOVER closed-loop visuomotor control project

Closed-Loop Visuomotor Control with Generative Expectation for Robotic Manipulation
Qingwen Bu*, Jia Zeng*, Li Chen*, Yanchao Yang, Guyue Zhou, Junchi Yan, Ping Luo, Heming Cui, Yi Ma, Hongyang Li.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024
[paper] [code]

ViDAR visual point cloud forecasting demonstration

Visual Point Cloud Forecasting enables Scalable Autonomous Driving
Zetong Yang, Li Chen, Yanan Sun, Hongyang Li.
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024
Highlight (11.9%)
[paper] [code]

GenAD generalized predictive model demonstration

Generalized Predictive Model for Autonomous Driving
Jiazhi Yang*, Shenyuan Gao*, Yihang Qiu*, Li Chen†, Tianyu Li, Bo Dai, Kashyap Chitta, Penghao Wu, Jia Zeng, Ping Luo, Jun Zhang, Andreas Geiger, Yu Qiao, Hongyang Li†.
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024
Highlight (11.9%)
[paper] [dataset]

UniAD planning-oriented autonomous driving system

Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving
Yihan Hu*, Jiazhi Yang*, Li Chen*†, Keyu Li*, Chonghao Sima, Xizhou Zhu, Siqi Chai, Senyao Du, Tianwei Lin, Wenhai Wang, Lewei Lu, Xiaosong Jia, Qiang Liu, Jifeng Dai, Yu Qiao, Hongyang Li†.
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023
Best Paper (2/9155)
[paper] [code]

Policy pre-training with self-supervised geometric modeling

Policy Pre-training for Autonomous Driving via Self-supervised Geometric Modeling
Penghao Wu, Li Chen, Hongyang Li, Xiaosong Jia, Junchi Yan, Yu Qiao.
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023
[paper] [code]

Trajectory-guided control prediction for end-to-end driving

Trajectory-guided Control Prediction for End-to-end Autonomous Driving: A Simple yet Strong Baseline
Penghao Wu*, Xiaosong Jia*, Li Chen*, Junchi Yan, Hongyang Li, Yu Qiao.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022
[paper] [code]

ST-P3 vision-based autonomous driving system

ST-P3: End-to-End Vision-Based Autonomous Driving via Spatial-Temporal Feature Learning
Shengchao Hu, Li Chen†, Penghao Wu, Hongyang Li, Junchi Yan, Dacheng Tao.
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022
[paper] [code]

PersFormer 3D lane detection demonstration

PersFormer: 3D Lane Detection via Perspective Transformer and the OpenLane Benchmark
Li Chen*†, Chonghao Sima*, Yang Li*, Zehan Zheng, Jiajie Xu, Xiangwei Geng, Hongyang Li†, Conghui He, Jianping Shi, Yu Qiao, Junchi Yan.
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022
Oral Presentation (2.7%)
[paper] [code] [dataset]

Selected Preprints (See all here.)

World Engine for physical AI post-training

World Engine: Towards the Era of Post-Training for Physical AI
Tianyu Li*, Li Chen*, Caojun Wang*, Haochen Liu*, Kashyap Chitta, Yuhang Lu, Naisheng Ye, Yufei Wang, Jiaxin Peng, Jin Pan, Zhaoyu Su, Andrei Bursuc, Shengbo Eben Li, Andreas Geiger, Honglin Bian, Hongyang Li*, Peng Su.
arXiv preprint, 2026
[page] [code]

Resource-aware robust manipulation demonstration

χ0: Resource-Aware Robust Manipulation via Taming Distributional Inconsistencies
Kinetix AI.
arXiv preprint, 2026
[page] [paper] [code]

Openpilot end-to-end autonomous driving project

Mastering End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Low-Cost Device: Diving into the Devils of Openpilot
Li Chen*†, Huijie Wang*, Tutian Tang, Gen Liu, Zihao Zhang, Zhitian Cai, Yang Li, Penghao Wu, Tianyu Li.
Tech report, 2022
[page] [paper] [code]

Activity

Honors

  • Outstanding/Top/Gold Reviewer: CVPR'23, NeurIPS'23, ICML'26
  • The World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) Yunfan Award, 2023
  • HKU Presidential PhD Scholar (HKU-PS), 2023
  • Outstanding Graduate of Shanghai, 2019