Hi there, I am Jiayi Zhang (张珈译), a Mathematics and Applied Mathmatics Undergrad student at University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC).

I am currently a research assistant in the Tsinghua Embodied AI lab at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS), Tsinghua University, advised by Professor Huazhe Xu. Previously, I worked as a research assistant in the IWIN-FINS Lab at SJTU and the IoT Lab at HKU.

Besides research, I enjoy watching Formula 1 (tifosi!) and football games (ManCity fan!). I also love playing mahjong.

Anyways, if I am not in the lab you can probably find me running along the Yuanshi Park, taking a walk back home in Tianjin, or playing board games. I also enjoy drawing inspiration from great engineers and inventors such as Raffaello D’Andrea, and from literary rule-breakers like Hermann Hesse and James Joyce.

If you would like to schedule a coffee chat, please feel free to email me. I will be in Ningbo before January 8 2026, and in Beijing or Tianjin from January 8 to February 24 (tentative).

📄 You can download my CV here.

🌟 📢 Seeking Remote Intern/Assistant (RA) Opportunity
I am looking for research opportunities in 26Fall related to robotics and embodied intelligence, especially in labs based in the United States that support remote collaboration or on-site summer research. I am passionate about developing efficient and intelligent systems that connect decision-making, control, and real-world interaction. My current research interests include robotic manipulation and reinforcement learning for control. If our research interests align, please feel free to contact me via Email or WeChat.

🔎 Research

I aim to build intelligent agents that can efficiently perceive, interpret, and interact with the physical world. My current research interests focus on three areas:

a) Robotic Motion Planning: Models and algorithms for planning feasible and reliable actions in dynamic environments.

b) Reinforcement Learning (Post-Training): Post-training robotic foundation models for better speed, accuracy, adaptability, and safety.

c) Large Model Inference Acceleration: Efficient architectures and optimization techniques for fast reasoning in foundation models.

Previously, I worked on graph learning models for forecasting, image segmentation, and distributed learning frameworks.

I support Slow Science.

🔥 News

2025.11: 🎉 Our work: Multi-modal Dynamic Proxy Learning for Personalized Multiple Clustering was accpeted by AAAI 2026! See you in Singapore!
2025.10: 🎈 Great honor to have the opportunity to be a research assistant at the TEA lab at the Tsinghua University！
2025.09: 🎉 One our work was accepted by NeurIPS 2025 Embodied World Models Workshop. Congrats to Haidong!
2025.09: I serve as a reviewer for NeurIPS 2025 Efficient Reasoning Workshop.
2025.09: I serve as a semester peer mentor for 25-26 academic year for 2025 intake at UNNC.
2025.08: I serve as a reviewer for AAAI 2026.
2025.06: 🎈 Great honor to have the opportunity to be a research assistant at the IWIN-FINS lab at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
2025.06: 🎉 Our paper: Multi-Cali Anything was selected as an Oral Presentation at IROS 2025. See you in Hangzhou.
2025.06: 🎉 Our work: Spec-LLaVA was accepted by ICML 2025 TTODLer-FM Workshop. See you in Vancouver.
2025.05: 🥈 We got Honorable Mention (Second Prize) in ICM 2025! Congrads and thanks to my teammates!
2025.04: I serve as a reviewer for NeurIPS 2025.
2025.04: 🌐 My personal academic homepage is now online.
2025.03: 🎈 Great honor to have the opportunity to be a research intern at the IoT lab at The University of Hong Kong.
2025.03: 🎉 Our work: SCANet was accepted by ICLR 2025 Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning Workshop. See you in Singapore.
2025.01: I completed two additional AI4S articles during the machine learning process.
2025.01: I participated in The Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling (ICM).
2024.11: I participated in writing a paper for the first time and began studying machine learning.

📃 Selected Publications (Full List)

† Equal Contribution

2025

AAAI 2026: Multi-modal Dynamic Proxy Learning for Personalized Multiple Clustering; Jinfeng Xu, Zheyu Chen, Shuo Yang, Jinze Li, Ziyue Peng, Zewei Liu, Hewei Wang, Jiayi Zhang, Edith C. H. Ngai; The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2026

IROS 2025: Multi‑Cali Anything: Dense Feature Multi‑Frame Structure‑from‑Motion for Large‑Scale Camera Array Calibration; Jinjiang You†, Hewei Wang†, Yijie Li, Mingxiao Huo, Long Van Tran Ha, Mingyuan Ma, Jinfeng Xu, Jiayi Zhang, Puzhen Wu, Shubham Garg, Wei Pu; Oral Presentation in International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2025

ICMLw 2025: Spec‑LLAVA: Accelerating Vision‑Language Models with Dynamic Tree‑Based Speculative Decoding; Mingxiao Huo†,Jiayi Zhang† (co-first), Hewei Wang†, Jinfeng Xu, Zheyu Chen, Huilin Tai, Ian Yijun Chen; International Conference on Machine Learning Tiny Titans: The next wave of On-Device Learning for Foundational Models Workshop (ICML TTODLer-FM), 2025

ICLRw 2025: Segregation and Context Aggregation Network for Real‑Time Cloud Segmentation; Yijie Li†, Hewei Wang†, Jiayi Zhang, Jinjiang You, Jinfeng Xu, Puzhen Wu, Yunzhong Xiao, Soumyabrata Dev; International Conference on Learning Representations Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning Workshop(ICLR CCML), 2025

🎡 Service

Conference Committee Member

Reviewer for AAAI'2026, AISTATS'2026
Reviewer for NeurIPS'2025

🎖 Scholarships and Honors

2025.12 2024-25 University Academic Excellence Scholarship, Provost’s Prize (Top 5% student) UNNC
2025.11 9th Golden Interns Award, Third Prize + Best Researcher Award (实习金像奖三等奖+最佳研究奖) UNNC
2025.5 Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling 2025, Honorable Mention (Second Prize) (美赛建模 H奖) Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications