Yiming Li

Yiming Li

Robot Learning

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.
Research highlights

📖 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.