Gu Zhang

Ph.D. student in Computer Science, IIIS, Tsinghua University

I am a second-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS), Tsinghua University under the supervision of Prof. Huazhe Xu. I obtained my bachelor's degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) and won the Best Bachelor Thesis Award.

My research mainly focuses on robotic manipulation, with an emphasis on building generalizable, dexterous, and robust manipulation capabilities. I am also interested in tactile sensing.

During my undergraduate study, I was fortunate to be mentored by Prof. Cewu Lu and Prof. Junchi Yan. I am also a research visiting student at MIT and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab under the supervision of Prof. Josh Tenenbaum and Prof. Chuang Gan.

Portrait of Gu Zhang

News

Selected recent updates

Publications

* indicates equal contribution, indicates equal advising. Representative papers are highlighted.

Maniwhere cover

Learning to Manipulate Anywhere: A Visual Generalizable Framework for Reinforcement Learning

Zhecheng Yuan*, Tianming Wei*, Shuiqi Cheng, Gu Zhang, Yuanpei Chen, and Huazhe Xu

Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2024

Maniwhere is a generalizable framework for visual reinforcement learning that enables robot policies to transfer across a mixture of visual disturbance types.

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Thin-Shell Object Manipulations With Differentiable Physics Simulations

Yian Wang*, Juntian Zheng*, Zhehuan Chen, Xian Zhou, Gu Zhang, Chao Liu, and Chuang Gan

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024 [Spotlight]

ThinShellLab is a fully differentiable simulation platform tailored for interactions with diverse thin-shell materials and varying mechanical properties.

Robo-ABC cover

Robo-ABC: Affordance Generalization Beyond Categories via Semantic Correspondence for Robot Manipulation

Yuanchen Ju*, Kaizhe Hu*, Guowei Zhang, Gu Zhang, Mingrun Jiang, and Huazhe Xu

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024

Robo-ABC enables zero-shot generalization to manipulate out-of-category objects without manual annotation, extra training, part segmentation, or pre-coded knowledge.

ArrayBot cover

ArrayBot: Reinforcement Learning for Generalizable Distributed Manipulation through Touch

Zhengrong Xue*, Han Zhang*, Jingwen Chen, Zhengmao He, Yuanchen Ju, Changyi Lin, Gu Zhang, and Huazhe Xu

International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024

ArrayBot is a distributed manipulation system made up of a 16x16 array of vertically sliding pillars with tactile sensing for simultaneous support, perception, and manipulation.

Flexible Handover cover

Flexible Handover with Real-Time Robust Dynamic Grasp Trajectory Generation

Gu Zhang, Hao-shu Fang, Hongjie Fang, and Cewu Lu

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023 [Oral]

This paper proposes a robust flexible handover approach that helps robots grasp moving objects using dynamic motion trajectories with a high success rate.

IOT-CL cover

Understanding and Generalizing Contrastive Learning from the Inverse Optimal Transport Perspective

Liangliang Shi, Gu Zhang, Haoyu Zhen, and Junchi Yan

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023

This work studies contrastive learning from a collective point-set matching perspective and formulates it as a form of inverse optimal transport.

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Relative Entropic Optimal Transport: a Prior-aware Matching Perspective to Unbalanced Classification

Liangliang Shi, Haoyu Zhen, Gu Zhang, and Junchi Yan

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023

This paper proposes Relative Entropic Optimal Transport (RE-OT), a new matching-based view for unbalanced classification and prior-aware visual learning.

Awards

Selected honors

Service. Reviewer for CVPR, ECCV, ICRA, CoRL, IROS, ICLR, NeurIPS, RA-L, and IJCAI.