Kaiyuan (Eric) Chen
I am a postdoctoral scholar in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, working with Prof. Ken Goldberg in the Berkeley AUTOLab, part of Berkeley AI Research (BAIR). I received my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2025, co-advised by Prof. John Kubiatowicz and Prof. Ken Goldberg, and my B.S. summa cum laude from UCLA in 2020, where I worked with Prof. Songwu Lu on wireless networking.
I build the systems that let robots learn and act at scale, and most recently the agentic tooling that lets LLM coding agents program, simulate, and improve robots. I co-lead Graph-as-Policy (GaP) (CoRL 2026 Spotlight, top 3.4%), a multi-agent self-learning harness in which LLM agents write, verify, and optimize executable behavior graphs for variational automation tasks, and RoboSimStudio, an interactive toolkit that lets humans and coding agents rapidly build Real2Sim simulations of robot manipulation tasks — both in collaboration with NVIDIA.
My earlier work evaluates and trains vision-language models with robot data — RoboVista (RSS 2026) and Robo2VLM (NeurIPS 2025 Spotlight) — and builds cloud-robotics infrastructure with FogROS2, which ships as part of the official ROS 2 release. Previously, I was one of six core developers of SkyPilot, and spent summers at Bosch Research and VMware Research.
Education
Advisors: John Kubiatowicz & Ken Goldberg
Summa cum laude
Recent News
- Oct 2026🚀 Released RoboSimStudio, an interactive toolkit for human- and agent-driven Real2Sim of robot manipulation tasks, built on NVIDIA Newton — paper (arXiv:2610.18835), project page, and code.
- Oct 2026Energy-Efficient Precision Weed Elimination Using a Quadruped Robot published in the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR).
- Sep 2026🎉 GaP accepted to CoRL 2026 as a Spotlight (72 of 2,094 submissions, top 3.4%). See you in Austin, Nov 9–12.
- Jul 2026🚀 Released GaP: Graph-as-Policy, in collaboration with NVIDIA — paper (arXiv:2607.05369), project page, code, and docs are live.
- 2026RoboVista, evaluating vision-language models for diverse robot applications, accepted to RSS 2026.
- 2026RoboSQ, semantic queries for task-aligned robot training data, accepted to ICRA 2026.
Older news
- 2026RoboSegNet, multi-task robot trajectory segmentation from visual and kinematic streams, accepted to CVPR 2026 (Findings).
- 2026HarborMaster, rollback detection for trusted distributed computing, accepted to VLDB 2026.
- Sep 2025Robo2VLM accepted as a Spotlight (56 of 1,995) at the NeurIPS 2025 Datasets & Benchmarks track.
- Sep 2025Gave an invited talk at the Berkeley Humanoid Intelligence Center and was interviewed for IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine's “Mastering Research” series.
- May 2025🏆 Robo-DM won the Best Robot Learning Paper Award at ICRA 2025 (1 of 4,250 submissions), and my mentees won the Undergraduate Research Award at ICRA 2025 Art in Robotics.
- May 2025🎓 Received my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and stayed on as a postdoctoral scholar with Prof. Ken Goldberg.
- Jan 2025Joined SkyPilot (Berkeley Sky Computing Lab) as one of six core developers, through May 2025.
- Oct 2024FogROS2-FT named Best Paper Finalist and Best Student Paper Finalist at IROS 2024 (4 of 3,344 submissions).
- 2023–25Won Google–BAIR Commons research proposals three years in a row (top ~10%).
Agentic Robotics: RoboSimStudio & Graph-as-Policy
RoboSimStudio: An Interactive Toolkit for Human and Agent Rapid Real2Sim of Robot Manipulation Tasks
Kaiyuan Chen*, Shuangyu Xie*, Uksang Yoo, Xinyue Zhu, Cael Magner, Alvin Zhu, Daehwa Kim, Eric Heiden, Erwin Coumans, Miles Macklin, Spencer Huang, Ken Goldberg (*equal contribution)
GaP: A Graph-as-Policy Multi-Agent Self-Learning Harness for Variational Automation Tasks
Kaiyuan Chen*, Shuangyu Xie*, Letian Fu, Justin Yu, William Pacini, Sandeep Bajamahal, Hudson Kim, Jaimyn Drake, Daehwa Kim, Haoru Xue, Jonathan Francis, Christian Juette, Peter Schaldenbrand, Muhammet Yunus Seker, Ruwan Wickramarachchi, Uksang Yoo, Guanzhi Wang, Adithyavairavan Murali, Balakumar Sundaralingam, S. Shankar Sastry, Yuke Zhu, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Spencer Huang, Ken Goldberg (*equal contribution)
Preprints & Under Review
- 2026
- 2025
Conference & Journal
- 2026
- 2026
- 2026
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2026
RoboSQ: Semantic Queries for Task-Aligned Robot Training Data
- 2026
- 2026
- 2025
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2025
Robo-DM: Efficient Robot Big Data ManagementBest Robot Learning Paper
- 2025
- 2025
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2024
FogROS2-FT: Fault Tolerant Cloud RoboticsBest Paper Finalist ×2
- 2024
- 2024
- 2024
- 2023
- 2023
- 2021
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2021
A Model Obfuscation Approach to IoT Security
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2019
Skip the Question You Don't Know: An Embedding Space Approach
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2019
Skull Stripping Using Confidence Segmentation Convolution Neural Network
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2018
A Visual Analytics Approach for Equipment Condition Monitoring in Smart Factories of Process Industry
Workshop papers & abstracts (9)
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2025
Robo2VLM: Visual Question Answering from Large-Scale In-the-Wild Robot Manipulation Datasets
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2025
Generative AI and Minimalist SculptureUndergraduate Research Award
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2024
Robo-DM: Efficient Robot Big Data Management
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2024
Blox-Net: Generative Design-for-Robot-Assembly Using VLM Supervision, Physics Simulation, and a Robot with Reset
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2024
RoboDM: Cloud-Based Large-Scale Data Collection
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2024
Fog-RT-X: Cloud-Based Large-Scale Collection and Management Framework
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2023
Paranoid Stateful Lambdas
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2019
Intelligent Wi-Fi Multicast for NDN AR
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2019
Classification of Large-Scale Lyme Disease Data
Honors & Awards
Best Robot Learning Paper Award, ICRA 2025
As first author · 1 of 4,250 submissions (Robo-DM)
Best Paper & Best Student Paper Finalist, IROS 2024
As first author · 4 of 3,344 submissions (FogROS2-FT)
Spotlight, CoRL 2026
As first author · 72 of 2,094 submissions, top 3.4% (GaP)
Spotlight, NeurIPS 2025 Datasets & Benchmarks
56 of 1,995 submissions (Robo2VLM)
Undergraduate Student Research Award, ICRA 2025 Art in Robotics
With my undergraduate mentees
Google–BAIR Commons Winner, 2023 · 2024 · 2025
Winning research proposals three consecutive years (top ~10%)
Outstanding Reviewer, CVPR 2026
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Summa Cum Laude, UCLA Computer Science
Highest Latin honor (top 1%) · Dean's List
Experience
- Postdoctoral Scholar, UC Berkeley AUTOLab / BAIR, with Prof. Ken Goldberg — robot data infrastructure & robot learning systems May 2025 – present
- Core Developer, SkyPilot One of six core developers of the inter-cloud brokerage platform from the Berkeley Sky Computing Lab Jan – May 2025
- Research Intern, Bosch Research Reliable cloud-robotics infrastructure on FogROS2 — led to adoptions, patents, and publications · with Dr. Nan Tian & Christian Juette Summers 2023, 2024
- Research Intern, VMware Research Certifier: a cryptographic certification protocol and framework for heterogeneous secure enclaves · with Dr. John Manferdelli Summer 2022
- Founding Engineer, MobIQ With Prof. Yuanjie Li and Prof. Songwu Lu 2018 – 2020
- Research Engineer, Siemens Gaussian-mixture time-series anomaly detection for industrial sensors Summer 2017
Invited Talks & Media
- Sep 2025Towards Scalable Data Infrastructure for Humanoid Intelligence — Berkeley Humanoid Intelligence Center
- Sep 2025Interviewee, "Mastering Research — Part 1/3: Choose Smart, Read Smarter!" — IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine
- Jun 2025Augmenting Open X-Embodiment Datasets — Google DeepMind–BAIR Commons
- May 2025FogROS: A Cloud Robotics System — General Robotics
- Feb 2025Cloud Robotics for Automation and Driving — Bosch Research
- Jun 2024Cloud Robotics: Past, Present and Future — Berkeley Sky Seminar
- May 2024FogROS2-SGC: Secure Global Connectivity — Berkeley Sky Retreat
- Jan 2024Fog-RT-X: Cloud-Based Large-Scale Collection and Management — Google DeepMind
- Aug 2023FogROS2: A Cloud Robotics Framework — Autodesk
- Aug 2023Cloud Robotics and FogROS2 — ROS-by-the-Bay, Open Robotics
Teaching & Service
Teaching
- Lead organizer, ICRA 2024 tutorial
Cloud and Fog Robotics: A Hands-On Tutorial with ROS 2 and FogROS2 - Graduate Student Instructor
IEOR 115: Industrial and Commercial Data Systems (Fall 2024) - Mentor
CS 262: Advanced Operating Systems (Fall 2020, Fall 2025) - Master's capstone advisor
CMU MCDS, co-advised with Prof. Jeffrey Ichnowski (Fall 2023) · Berkeley MEng (Spring 2022)
Academic Service
- Session Chair
Multi-Robot Systems, ICRA 2025 - Journal reviewer
IEEE T-RO · IEEE RA-L · IEEE Transactions on Robot Learning (T-RL) · IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine · IEEE JSAC · IEEE Internet of Things Journal - Conference reviewer
ICRA 2023–2027 · IROS 2022, 2024–2026 · CASE 2024–2025 · CoRL 2026 · RSS 2026 · NeurIPS 2026 · CVPR 2026 (Outstanding Reviewer) · ECCV 2026 · ICCV 2025