Haochen Zhang
Hi! I’m Haochen and I’m a 1st-year PhD student in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. I work with Dr. Yonatan Bisk in the CLAW Lab. My main research interests are in semantic reasoning for VLAs, and policy steering towards safe action spaces.
I recently completed my MS in Robotics as part of the Field Robotics Center under the supervision of Dr. Ji Zhang and Dr. Wenshan Wang. There, I conducted research in 3D semantic scene understanding, and vision-language navigation.
Previously, I obtained my BASc in Engineering Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. I completed my undergrad thesis under Dr. Scott Sanner in natural language preference retrieval at the Data-Driven Decision Making (D3M) Lab. I also obtained a Minor in Artificial Intelligence and Certificate in Engineering Leadership.
news
| Jun 15, 2025 | Paper on object grounding for navigation accepted to IROS 2025! |
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| Jun 02, 2025 | Our 2025 CMU Vision-Language-Autonomy Challenge is now open for registration! Results will be presented at the 2nd AI Meets Autonomy workshop at IROS 2025. |
| Jan 27, 2025 | Benchmark paper on referential grounding accepted to ICRA 2025! |
| Oct 19, 2024 | I organized and hosted our workshop, AI Meets Autonomy: Vision, Language, and Autonomous Systems at the IROS 2024 conference in Abu Dhabi! Read my recap about the workshop here! |
| Oct 09, 2024 | Attended the 4th Space Imaging Workshop in Atlanta, Georgia where our extended abstract “Using Simulated Lunar Imagery to Train Real Networks” was presented. Read about it here.  |
teaching
| Fall 2025 | Graduate Teaching Assistant for 16-831 Introduction to Robot Learning |
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| Spring 2025 | Graduate Teaching Assistant for 16-831 Introduction to Robot Learning |
