About Me

Welcome! I’m Yuanqi Yao (姚元淇, CC Yao), a researcher at INSAIT, under the supervision of Prof. Luc Van Gool and Dr. Danda Paudel. My research focuses on Embodied AI, particularly Vision-Language-Action(VLA) foundation models. Welcome to discuss and collaborate!

Prior to this, I completed a long-term internship at the Shanghai AI Laboratory, where I was supervised by Dr. Dong Wang. I also earned both my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science at Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT).

News

• 2026.03: One paper is accepted by CVPR 2026!
• 2025.06: One paper is accepted by IROS 2025!
• 2025.04: Our paper SpatialVLA is accepted by RSS 2025 Highlight (Project Page)!
• 2025.03: One paper is accepted by CVPR 2025!
• 2024.09: One paper is accepted by NeurIPS 2024!
• 2024.07: We placed 2^nd in ECCV 2024 AIM Depth Upsampling Challenge!
• 2024.07: One paper is accepted by ECCV 2024!

Internships

• 2023.11 - 2025.07, Shanghai AI Laboratory
• 2023.08 - 2023.11, Baidu VIS
• 2023.06 - 2023.08, Lenovo Research
• 2022.06 - 2022.10, NIO

Honors and Awards

• 2^nd place at Multi-Agent Embodied Intelligence Challenge, Control Track (NeurIPS 2025 Workshop)
• 2^nd place at ECCV 2024 AIM, Depth Upsampling Challenge (ECCV 2024 Workshop)
• 1^st place at ICCV 2023 The ROAD++ Challenge, Agent Detection Track (ICCV 2023 Workshop)
• 2^nd place at ICCV 2023 The ROAD++ Challenge, Road event detection Track (ICCV 2023 Workshop)
• 3^rd place at ICRA 2023 The RoboDepth Challenge (ICRA 2023 Workshop)
• 1^st Scholarship for Postgraduate Students. 2023-2024.
• The People’s Scholarship in China. 2018-2020.
• National Second Prize (Top 1%), National University IoT Design Competition, Huawei Cup. 2019.

Selected Publications

CVPR 2026

• FM-Steer: Enhance Generalist Policies with Value-Guided Cascaded Denosing

  Haoming Song*, Delin Qu*, Yuanqi Yao, Qizhi Chen, Qi Lv, Yiwen Tang, Modi Shi, Guanghui Ren, Maoqing Yao, Bin Zhao, Dong Wang, Xuelong Li

  CVPR 2026 | paper | project page

IROS 2025

• FUSE: Label-Free Image-Event Joint Monocular Depth Estimation via Frequency-Decoupled Alignment and Degradation-Robust Fusion

  Pihai Sun, Junjun Jiang, Yuanqi Yao, Youyu Chen, Wenbo Zhao, Kui Jiang, Xianming Liu.

  IROS 2025 | paper | project page

RSS 2025 Highlight

• SpatialVLA: Exploring Spatial Representations for Visual-Language-Action Models

  Delin Qu*, Haoming Song*, Qizhi Chen*, Yuanqi Yao, Xinyi Ye, Jiayuan Gu, Bin Zhao, Dong Wang, Xuelong Li.

  RSS 2025 Highlight | paper | project page

CVPR 2025

• Think Small, Act Big: Primitive Prompt Learning for Lifelong Robot Manipulation

  Yuanqi Yao, Siao Liu, Haoming Song, Yan Ding, Bin Zhao, Zhigang Wang, Dong Wang, Xuelong Li.

  CVPR 2025 | paper | project page

ECCV 2024

• Improving Domain Generalization in Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation via Stabilized Adversarial Training

  Yuanqi Yao, Gang Wu, Kui Jiang, Siao Liu, Jian Kuai, Xianming Liu, Junjun Jiang.

  ECCV 2024 | paper | project page

Meow & Woof