I am currently a third-year SoC PhD student at National University of Singapore advised by Prof. Lin Shao (邵林). Previously, I got my master’s degree at Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Xueqian Wang (王学谦). During my master’s degree, I also worked as an intern at Tencent AI Lab, collaborating with Dr. Liu Liu (刘浏) and Dr. Peilin Zhao (赵沛霖). Prior to that, I completed my bachelor’s degree at School of Mechatronics and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology.
💡 Research Interests: I am broadly interested in robot learning for dexterous manipulation, with a focus on generalizable policies, contact-rich interaction, and efficient learning in complex environments.
You are very welcome to contact me regarding my research through email. I typically respond within a few days.
🔥 News
- 2026.07 ContactExplorer was selected for a Spotlight at the RSS 2026 Workshop “Dexterous Manipulation: Scalable Learning for Human-Level Skills”.
- 2026.07 DAWN was accepted to ICML 2026 as a Spotlight paper.
- 2025.12 VLA-OS was awarded Outstanding Paper in the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop “Embodied World Models for Decision Making”.
- 2025.11 DexSinGrasp was accepted to RA-L.
- 2025.09 VLA-OS was accepted to NeurIPS 2025.
- 2024.06 ManiFM was accepted to IROS 2024 as an Oral Presentation.
- 2024.03 I was offered the PGF with admissions to ISEP to pursue a PhD at NUS.
- 2024.02 DFWLayer was accepted to Tiny Papers @ ICLR 2024 as Notable.
- 2024.01 Revisiting Plasticity was accepted to ICLR 2024. Congratulations to Guozheng!
- 2023.09 I started to work as a research assistant in Prof. Lin Shao’s Lab.
- 2023.06 DYNAIL was accepted to TMLR.
📝 Publications
* denotes equal contribution.
Selected Publications
DexEyeGrasp: Learning Dexterous Grasping in Clutter with FingerEye Observations
Zixuan Liu*, Lizhi Bi*, Xicheng Gong, Ruoyi Qiao, Wei Ken Ng, Tianrui Zhang, Xin Fei, Yiwen Hou, Zhixuan Xu, Lin Shao
Manuscript under review, 2026.
ContactExplorer: Contact Coverage-Guided Exploration for General-Purpose Dexterous Manipulation
Zixuan Liu*, Ruoyi Qiao*, Chenrui Tie, Xuanwei Liu, Yunfan Lou, Chongkai Gao, Zhixuan Xu, Lin Shao
[Spotlight] RSS 2026 Workshop “Dexterous Manipulation: Scalable Learning for Human-Level Skills”
What Makes Value Learning Efficient in Residual Reinforcement Learning?
Guozheng Ma, Lu Li, Haoyu Wang, Zixuan Liu, Pierre-Luc Bacon, Dacheng Tao
[Spotlight] International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026
VLA-OS: Structuring and Dissecting Planning Representations and Paradigms in Vision-Language-Action Models
Chongkai Gao, Zixuan Liu, Zhenghao Chi, Junshan Huang, Xin Fei, Yiwen Hou, Yuxuan Zhang, Yudi Lin, Zhirui Fang, Zeyu Jiang, Lin Shao
Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025
[Outstanding Paper] NeurIPS 2025 Workshop “Embodied World Models for Decision Making”
DexSinGrasp: Learning a Unified Policy for Dexterous Object Singulation and Grasping in Densely Cluttered Environments
Lixin Xu*, Zixuan Liu*, Zhewei Gui, Jingxiang Guo, Zeyu Jiang, Zhixuan Xu, Chongkai Gao, Lin Shao
ICRA 2025 Workshop “Handy Moves: Dexterity in Multi-Fingered Hands”
ManiFoundation Model for General-Purpose Robotic Manipulation of Contact Synthesis with Arbitrary Objects and Robots
Zhixuan Xu*, Chongkai Gao*, Zixuan Liu*, Gang Yang*, Chenrui Tie, Haozhuo Zheng, Haoyu Zhou, Weikun Peng, Debang Wang, Tianyi Chen, Zhouliang Yu, Lin Shao
[Oral Presentation] International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024
Revisiting Plasticity in Visual Reinforcement Learning: Data, Modules and Training Stages
Guozheng Ma*, Lu Li*, Sen Zhang, Zixuan Liu, Zhen Wang, Yixin Chen, Li Shen, Xueqian Wang, Dacheng Tao
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024
OpenReview | Code | Bibtex
Dynamics Adapted Imitation Learning
Zixuan Liu, Liu Liu, Bingzhe Wu, Lanqing Li, Xueqian Wang, Bo Yuan, Peilin Zhao
Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2023
Openreview | Code | Bibtex
Other Publications
Tiny Papers @ ICLR 2024DFWLayer: Differentiable Frank-Wolfe Optimization Layer, Zixuan Liu, Liu Liu, Xueqian Wang, Peilin Zhao, [Notable] Tiny Papers @ ICLR 2024. OpenReview | Code | BibtexTNNLSNN-Based Reinforcement Learning Optimal Control for Inequality-Constrained Nonlinear Discrete-Time Systems With Disturbances, Shu Li, Liang Ding, Miao Zheng, Zixuan Liu, Xinyu Li, Huaiguang Yang, Haibo Gao, Zongquan Deng, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), 2023. IEEE | Bibtex
🎖 Honors and Awards
- President Graduate Fellowship, National University of Singapore, 2024
- Outstanding Research Scholarship, Tsinghua University, 2023
- Outstanding Graduates, Harbin Institue of Technology, 2021
- National Scholarship, Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, 2019
- Provincial Merit Students, Heilongjiang Provincial Education Department, 2019
📖 Educations
- 2024.08 - Present, PhD, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
- 2021.09 - 2024.06, M.E., Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
- 2016.09 - 2021.06, B.E., Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, Heilongjiang, China.
💻 Internships
- 2023.09 - 2024.03, LinS Lab @ NUS SoC, Singapore.
- 2022.01 - 2023.08, Tencent AI Lab, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China.
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