Yi Zhao
I am a PhD candidate in the Robot Learning Group at Aalto University, advised by Prof. Joni Pajarinen and Juho Kannala. My research focuses on reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and planning, with an emphasis on learning versatile robot skills in a sample-efficient manner. I have developed algorithms that have been applied to various domains, including locomotion, robotic manipulation, and dexterous robotic hands. I hold an MSc in Robotics from Aalto University, Finland, and a BEng from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China. In 2024, I was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, where I collaborated with Prof. Dieter Büchler and Bernhard Schölkopf. There, we developed the first agent capable of autonomously learning to play Flight of the Bumblebee with bimanual dexterous robotic hands, without human demonstrations.
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Aalto University, FinlandDoctoral CandidateFeb. 2021 - now -
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, GermanyResearch VisitFeb. 2024 - Dec. 2024 -
Aalto University, FinlandMaster of ScienceOct. 2020
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Huazhong University of Science and Technology, ChinaBachelor of EngineeringJune 2017
Publications (view all )
Efficient Reinforcement Learning by Guiding Generalist World Models with Non-Curated Data
Yi Zhao, Aidan Scannell, Wenshuai Zhao, Yuxin Hou, Tianyu Cui, Le Chen, Dieter Büchler, Arno Solin, Juho Kannala, Joni Pajarinen
Preprint 2025
Symbolically-Guided Visual Plan Inference from Uncurated Video Data
Wenyan Yang, Ahmet Tikna, Yi Zhao, Yuying Zhang, Luigi Palopoli, Marco Roveri, Joni Pajarinen
Preprint 2025
iQRL--Implicitly Quantized Representations for Sample-efficient Reinforcement Learning
Aidan Scannell, Kalle Kujanpää, Yi Zhao, Mohammadreza Nakhaei, Arno Solin, Joni Pajarinen
International Conference on Machine Learning, Workshop (ICML Workshop) 2024
Hscnet++: Hierarchical Scene Coordinate Classification and Regression for Visual Localization with Transformer
Shuzhe Wang, Zakaria Laskar, Iaroslav Melekhov, Xiaotian Li, Yi Zhao, Giorgos Tolias, Juho Kannala
International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV) 2024
Continuous Monte Carlo Graph Search
Kalle Kujanpää*, Amin Babadi*, Yi Zhao, Juho Kannala, Alexander Ilin, Joni Pajarinen (* equal contribution)
International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) 2023
