Celia Zhang

I’m a senior undergraduate student at Purdue, majoring in CS with a research focus on robot learning. I worked with Professor Ahmed H. Qureshi at Purdue, and was a visiting researcher at BAIR at UC Berkeley last summer, supervised by Professor Jitendra Malik.
I also spent time at Zhenfund, a VC firm where I learned a great deal about startups and met many talented people. Full of fond memories.
I recently wrapped up an internship at a stealth startup working on VLA models for dexterous manipulation. Can’t wait to see the company go public and the demos I worked on out in the world :)

Email  /  LinkedIn  /  Github

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Research

My research focuses on foundation models for robotics. I am particularly interested in how large-scale training can endow robots with strong generalization and the ability to handle complex tasks. More concretely, my interests include leveraging pretrained models to help robots better understand the physical world, improving the data efficiency of imitation learning under limited demonstrations, and enabling closed-loop control through environment interaction.

Large Video Planner Enables Generalizable Robot Control
Boyuan Chen*, Tianyuan Zhang*, Haoran Geng*, Kiwhan Song, Caiyi Zhang, Peihao Li, William T. Freeman, Jitendra Malik, Pieter Abbeel, Russ Tedrake, Vincent Sitzmann, Yilun Du
In Submission
Code / ArXiv / HuggingFace

First open video model at a foundation-model scale for generative robotics planning.

Projects

Leap Hand VLA in Simulation
Rebuilt the DexGraspNet data collection pipeline in isaaclab to generate large-scale training data for dexterous hand manipulation. The pipeline supports VLA training across multiple model families including SmolVLA, OpenVLA, and the Pi series.

Awards

  • Jandos Scholarship, supports students from underrepresented backgrounds in science, aligned with my belief in creating more opportunities for women and minorities in STEM, 2025
  • Dean's List, all semesters at Purdue
  • National First Prize, Chinese Mathematics Competition for College Students (CMC), 2022