My name is Yiming Li. I am a final-year PhD student in the Robot Learning & Interaction group at the Idiap Research Institute and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), supervised by Dr. Sylvain Calinon.

I work on learning representations for robotics to enable robust robot manipulation in unstructured environments. A central challenge is to learn representations that support reasoning, efficiency, and generalization for real-world deployment. My research spans robot learning, computer visoin, motion planning, and optimization, with three focus areas:

• Spatial reasoning (ICRA’24, RSS’24): Real-world manipulation is inherently 3D, so spatial understanding is critical for transferring skills across new objects, layouts, and interactions.
• Geometry-aware decision-making (RAL’25, ICLR’26, IJRR’26): Robotics is inherently geometric, and leveraging geometric structure is essential for fast, stable, and deployable decisions.
• Multimodal learning (RAL’22, ICRA’22, IROS’21): Multimodality is essential for robot manipulation tasks because it grounds semantics and affordances and connects naturally to language-conditioned decision-making.

I’m currently building something new and always happy to connect with those interested in my work. Feel free to reach out!

🔥 News

• 2026.01: Geometry-aware Policy Imitation - accepted to ICLR 2026. See you in Rio de Janeiro!

• 2026.01: A Riemannian Take on Distance Fields and Geodesic Flows in Robotics - accepted to IJRR

• 2025.07: From Movement Primitives to Distance Fields to Dynamical Systems - accepted to RAL. See you in Vienna!

• 2024.07: Configuration space distance fields - Best Paper Award Finalist at RSS 2024!

• 2024.05: Configuration space distance fields accepted to RSS 2024

• 2024.04: Online learning signed distance fields accepted to RA-L

• 2024.01: Robot geometry as distance fields accepted to ICRA 2024

📖 Educations

• 2022.10 - now, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland.
• 2019.06 - 2022.06, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
• 2015.09 - 2019.06, Tongji University, Shanghai, China.

📞 Contact

• Email: ymli.cn@gmail.com
• Telephone: (+41) 77 278 38 48
• Address: Idiap Research Institute, Centre du Parc, Rue Marconi 19, CH-1920 Martigny, Switzerland

🧭 Misc.

• Outside research, I enjoy skiing，hiking and video games.
• I also serve as vice president of the Association Suisse de Ski Chinoise.