Zifan (Eric) Zhao

I'm a PhD student at UIUC, working with Prof. Saurabh Gupta and Prof. Shenlong Wang. Previously I was a Research Assistant at NYU with Prof. Lerrel Pinto and Prof. Saining Xie. I graduated summa cum laude from NYU Shanghai, mentored by Prof. Keith Ross and Prof. Li Guo.

My research interest lies in robotics, multimodal representation learning and reinforcement learning.

Email / GitHub / Twitter / Google Scholar

Touch, marked at the outstretched left hand. One project: ViTaL, published in IEEE RA-L, with a CoRL 2025 workshop best paper. Select to open the research map.

Spatial Intelligence, marked at the cranium. One project: Cambrian-P, ECCV 2026. Select to open the research map.

News

2026-06: Cambrian-P has been accepted at ECCV 2026
2026-05: Released Cambrian-P, a pose-grounded video understanding model.
2025-09: ViTaL has been accepted at CoRL 2025 as a workshop best paper.
2025-07: We've released ViTaL, a framework for precise, generalizable robot manipulation.
2025-04: One paper has been accepted at TMLR 2025.
2024-09: One paper has been accepted at NeurIPS 2024.
2024-08: Our TARS robot from Interstellar took its first step! Watch here.
2024-06: Invited by NYUSH AI Interest Group to give an introductory ML talk.

Publications

	Cambrian-P: Pose-Grounded Video Understanding Jihan Yang, Zifan Zhao, Xichen Pan, Shusheng Yang, Junyi Zhang, Bingyi Kang, Hu Xu, Shang-Wen Li, Saining Xie ECCV 2026
	Touch begins where vision ends: Generalizable policies for contact-rich manipulation Zifan Zhao, Siddhant Haldar, Jinda Cui, Lerrel Pinto, Raunaq Bhirangi† IEEE RA-L CoRL 2025 Rational Robots Workshop (Best Paper) CoRL 2025 GenPriors Workshop (Oral Presentation)
	Cross Entropy versus Label Smoothing: A Neural Collapse Perspective Li Guo, Keith Ross, Zifan Zhao, George Andriopoulos, Shuyang Ling, Yufeng Xu, Zixuan Dong TMLR 2025
	The Prevalence of Neural Collapse in Neural Multivariate Regression Zifan Zhao, Li Guo, George Andriopoulos, Zixuan Dong, Keith Ross† NeurIPS 2024*

* indicates equal contribution.