Yiming Li

Yiming Li

idiap / EPFL

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 am on the job market, primarily seeking research scientist positions and postdoctoral opportunities. Feel free to reach out!

🔥 News

📝 Selected Publications

Please visit my Google Scholar page for full publications.

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Geometry-aware Policy Imitation

Yiming Li, Nael Darwiche, Amirreza Razmjoo, Sichao Liu, Yilun Du, Auke Ijspeert and Sylvain Calinon

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026).

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A Riemannian Take on Distance Fields and Geodesic Flows in Robotics

Yiming Li, Jiacheng Qiu, Sylvain Calinon

International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR).

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From Movement Primitives to Distance Fields to Dynamical Systems

Yiming Li and Sylvain Calinon

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L).

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Configuration Space Distance Fields for Manipulation Planning

Yiming Li, Xuemin Chi, Amirreza Razmjoo, Sylvain Calinon

In Proc. Robotics: Science and Systems 2024 (RSS 2024).

Best Paper Award Finalist

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Online Learning of Continuous Signed Distance Fields Using Piecewise Polynomials

Ante Marić, Yiming Li, Sylvain Calinon

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 9 (6), 6020-6026.

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Representing Robot Geometry as Distance Fields: Applications to Whole-body Manipulation

Yiming Li, Yan Zhang, Amirreza Razmjoo, Sylvain Calinon

In Proc. IEEE Intl Conf. on Robotics and Automation 2024 (ICRA 2024).

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HGC-Net: Deep Anthropomorphic Hand Grasping in Clutter

Yiming Li, Wei Wei, Daheng Li, Peng Wang, Wanyi Li, Jun Zhong

In Proc. IEEE Intl Conf. on Robotics and Automation 2022 (ICRA 2022).

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Learning Human-to-robot Dexterous Handovers for Anthropomorphic Hand

Hoanan Duan, Peng Wang, Yiming Li, Daheng Li, Wei Wei

IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems(T-CDS) 15 (3), 1224-1238.

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DVGG: Deep Variational Grasp Generation for Dextrous Manipulation

Wei Wei, Daheng Li, Peng Wang, Yiming Li, Wanyi Li,Yongkang Luo, Jun Zhong

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) 7 (2), 1659-1666.

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Simultaneous Semantic and Collision Learning for 6-dof Grasp Pose Estimation

Yiming Li, Tao Kong, Ruihang Chu, Yifeng Li, Peng Wang, Lei Li

In Proc. IEEE/RSJ Intl Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems 2022 (IROS 2022).

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📖 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