About Me
I am a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at UC Riverside, advised by Prof. Jiachen Li. Before that, I was advised by Prof. Qian Zhang.
My research focuses on robot learning for manipulation and test-time adaptation, as well as the mechanistic interpretability and personalization of robotic foundation models (Vision-Language-Action models and world models). I study what happens inside VLA policies when they generalize or fail, and use those findings to design lightweight interventions and personalized behaviors. My long-term goal is trustworthy, personalized embodied AI for real-world applications.
News
Sep 2026LIBERO-PeRM and Agents' Last Exam accepted to NeurIPS 2026 Datasets & Benchmarks Track.
Sep 2026Started as a Research Intern (Student Associate) at Honda Research Institute USA, San Jose.
Aug 2026CoopUQ accepted to CoRL 2026.
Jan 2026CommCP accepted to ICRA 2026.
Oct 2025Selected to serve as a reviewer for ICRA'26.
Aug 2025Selected to serve as a reviewer for T-RO'25.
Apr 2025Selected to serve as a reviewer for IROS'25.
Jan 2025Selected to serve as a reviewer for RA-L'25.
Nov 2024Selected to serve as a reviewer for ICLR'25 and ICRA'25.
Jun 2024Selected to serve as a reviewer for NeurIPS'24.
Apr 2024Joined Prof. Jiachen Li's
TASL Lab \(^o^)/~
Jul 2023 – Apr 2024Served on the ASPLOS'24 Artifact Evaluation Committee; received an Excellent Service certificate in all three cycles.
Sep 2023Started my Ph.D. at UCR with the UCR Dean's Distinguished Fellowship.
Jun 2023Served on the 24th ChinaSys Workshop (ChinaSys 2023 Posters) Program Committee.
Publications
LIBERO-PeRM: Benchmarking Personalized Robotic Manipulation
Zhixu Li, Keqian Tang, Litian Gong, Jingyu Yao, Wenqian Zhang, Tianze Xu, Zehao Wang, Yuping Wang, Junge Zhang, Jiachen Li
NeurIPS 2026Datasets & Benchmarks Track
What Happens Inside VLAs for Compositional Generalization? A Mechanistic Analysis
Zhixu Li, Haoxuan Li, Keqian Tang, Dowling Wong, Zhiwen Fan, Jiachen Li
In submissionICLR 2027
CoopUQ: Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Robot Social Navigation with Cooperative Occupancy Prediction
Zehao Wang, Jianpeng Yao, Yuping Wang, Zhixu Li, Kanghoon Lee, Jinkyoo Park, Jiachen Li
CoRL 2026Conference on Robot Learning
CoReNav: Conformal Prediction-Calibrated Foundation Model Rewards for Object Navigation
Xiaopan Zhang, Sai Surya Vidul Chinthamaneni, Zillur Rahman, Zhixu Li, Huaide Jiang, Jinfeng Wang, Shreyas Battula, Jiachen Li
In submission
Agents' Last Exam
Yiyou Sun et al. (including Zhixu Li)
NeurIPS 2026Datasets & Benchmarks Track
CommCP: Efficient Multi-Agent Coordination via LLM-Based Communication with Conformal Prediction
Xiaopan Zhang*, Zejin Wang*, Zhixu Li, Jianpeng Yao, Jiachen Li (*equal contribution)
ICRA 2026IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
Teaching
Jul – Sep 2026TA, CS111UCR, Computer Science & Engineering
Apr – Jun 2026TA, CS131 & CS152UCR, Computer Science & Engineering
Jan – Mar 2026TA, CS010CUCR, Computer Science & Engineering
Oct – Dec 2025TA, CS010CUCR, Computer Science & Engineering
Apr – Jun 2025TA, CS100UCR, Computer Science & Engineering
Jan – Mar 2025TA, CS142 & CS178BUCR, Computer Science & Engineering
Oct – Dec 2024TA, CS111UCR, Computer Science & Engineering
Jun – Aug 2024TA, CS111UCR, Computer Science & Engineering
Apr – Jun 2023Reader, CS260UCR, Computer Science & Engineering
Jan – Apr 2023Reader, CS142UCR, Computer Science & Engineering
