Zifan (Eric) Zhao

I'm a senior undergraduate at NYU Shanghai majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics. My research interests lie in embodied intelligence, multimodal representation learning, and reinforcement learning.

I am currently working with Prof. Lerrel Pinto in the General-purpose Robotics and AI Lab (GRAIL) and Prof. Saining Xie at VISIONx. Previously, I was fortunate to be mentored by Prof. Keith Ross and Prof. Li Guo. I am also the founding chair of the NYUSH ACM Student Chapter and organized the Digital Innovation Challenge 2023.

Email / GitHub / LinkedIn / Google Scholar

News

2025-09: ViTaL was accepted at CoRL 2025 as a workshop best paper! See you in Korea!
2025-07: We've released ViTaL, a framework for precise, generalizable robot manipulation
2025-04: One paper is accepted at TMLR 2025.
2024-09: One paper is 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

	Touch begins where vision ends: Generalizable policies for contact-rich manipulation Zifan Zhao, Siddhant Haldar, Jinda Cui, Lerrel Pinto, Raunaq Bhirangi† 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.