Jinliang Zheng

Jinliang Zheng 郑金亮

Ph.D. Candidate, Tsinghua University

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering at the Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University. I work on embodied AI, with a particular interest in generalist robot policies, cross-embodiment learning, multimodal representation learning, and generative models.

I am advised by Prof. Xianyuan Zhan and Prof. Ya-Qin Zhang. I am always open to research discussions and collaboration.

Email · GitHub · Google Scholar · Curriculum Vitae

Portrait of Jinliang Zheng

News

Research Interests

Embodied AI · Robot Learning · Vision-Language-Action Models · Cross-Embodiment Learning · Multimodal Representation Learning · Generative Models

Selected Publications

* denotes equal contribution

Overview of the action space taxonomy, experimental setup, and findings
2026

Demystifying Action Space Design for Robotic Manipulation Policies

Yuchun Feng*, Jinliang Zheng*, Zhihao Wang, Dongxiu Liu, Jianxiong Li, Jiangmiao Pang, Tai Wang, Xianyuan Zhan

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026

Best Paper Award, ES-Reasoning Workshop @ ICLR 2026

PaperOpenReview

Overview of the X-VLA architecture and cross-embodiment results
2026

X-VLA: Soft-Prompted Transformer as Scalable Cross-Embodiment Vision-Language-Action Model

Jinliang Zheng*, Jianxiong Li*, Zhihao Wang, Dongxiu Liu, Xirui Kang, Yuchun Feng, Yinan Zheng, et al.

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026

1st Place, AGIBOT World Challenge @ IROS 2025

PaperCodeProject

Overview of the UniAct universal action framework
2025

Universal Actions for Enhanced Embodied Foundation Models

Jinliang Zheng*, Jianxiong Li*, Dongxiu Liu*, Yinan Zheng, Zhihao Wang, Zhonghong Ou, Yu Liu, Jingjing Liu, Ya-Qin Zhang, Xianyuan Zhan

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025

PaperCodeProject

Examples of instruction-guided visual masking
2024

Instruction-Guided Visual Masking

Jinliang Zheng*, Jianxiong Li*, Sijie Cheng, Yinan Zheng, Jiaming Li, Jihao Liu, Yu Liu, Jingjing Liu, Xianyuan Zhan

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024

Outstanding Paper, MFM-EAI Workshop @ ICML 2024

PaperCodeProject

Overview of the DecisionNCE representation learning framework
2024

DecisionNCE: Embodied Multimodal Representations via Implicit Preference Learning

Jianxiong Li*, Jinliang Zheng*, Yinan Zheng*, Liyuan Mao, Xiao Hu, Sijie Cheng, Haoyi Niu, Jihao Liu, Yu Liu, Jingjing Liu, Ya-Qin Zhang, Xianyuan Zhan

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024

Outstanding Paper, MFM-EAI Workshop @ ICML 2024

PaperCodeProject

Additional publications
  1. Efficient Robotic Policy Learning via Latent Space Backward Planning. ICML 2025.
  2. Diffusion-Based Planning for Autonomous Driving with Flexible Guidance. ICLR 2025, Oral.
  3. Robo-MUTUAL: Robotic Multimodal Task Specification via Unimodal Learning. ICRA 2025.
  4. GLID: Pre-training a Generalist Encoder-Decoder Vision Model. CVPR 2024.
  5. Enhancing Vision-Language Model with Unmasked Token Alignment at Scale. TMLR 2024.
  6. MixMAE: Mixed and Masked Autoencoder for Efficient Pretraining of Hierarchical Vision Transformers. CVPR 2023.
  7. GoBigger: A Scalable Platform for Cooperative-Competitive Multi-Agent Interactive Simulation. ICLR 2023.

Education

2023–Present

Tsinghua University

Ph.D. Candidate in Mechanical Engineering

School of Vehicle and Mobility · Institute for AI Industry Research

2019–2023

Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

B.S. in Computer Science and Technology

Excellent Graduate

Selected Honors

  • 2026Best Paper Award, ES-Reasoning @ ICLR
  • 2026Gold Reviewer, ICML
  • 2026Top Reviewer, ICLR
  • 2025Graduate National Scholarship
  • 20251st Place, AGIBOT World Challenge @ IROS
  • 2024Outstanding Paper, MFM-EAI @ ICML
  • 2022Undergraduate National Scholarship

Professional Service

Reviewer for RA-L, ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI, and WACV.