Celia Zhang

I’m a CS undergraduate student at Purdue, with a research focus on robot learning. I worked with Professor Ahmed H. Qureshi at Purdue, and was a visiting researcher at BAIR at UC Berkeley last summer, supervised by Professor Jitendra Malik.
I also spent time at Zhenfund, a VC firm where I learned a great deal about startups and met many talented people. Full of fond memories.
I recently wrapped up an internship at a stealth startup working on VLA models for dexterous manipulation. Can’t wait to see the company go public and the demos we worked on out in the world :)

Email / Google Scholar / LinkedIn / Github

Research

My research focuses on foundation models for robotics. I am particularly interested in how large-scale training can endow robots with strong generalization and the ability to handle complex tasks. More concretely, my interests include leveraging pretrained models to help robots better understand the physical world, improving the data efficiency of imitation learning under limited demonstrations, and enabling closed-loop control through environment interaction.

Large Video Planner Enables Generalizable Robot Control

Boyuan Chen*, Tianyuan Zhang*, Haoran Geng*, Kiwhan Song, Caiyi Zhang, Peihao Li, William T. Freeman, Jitendra Malik, Pieter Abbeel, Russ Tedrake, Vincent Sitzmann, Yilun Du
In Submission
Website / ArXiv / HuggingFace

First open video model at a foundation-model scale for generative robotics planning.

Projects

Leap Hand VLA in Simulation

Rebuilt the DexGraspNet data collection pipeline in isaaclab to generate large-scale training data for dexterous hand manipulation. The pipeline supports VLA training across multiple model families including SmolVLA, OpenVLA, and the Pi series.

RoboVerse

A unified simulation and benchmarking framework for robot learning, enabling scalable data generation, cross-simulator interoperability, and consistent evaluation to advance imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and sim-to-real transfer.

Awards

Jandos Scholarship, supports students from underrepresented backgrounds in science, aligned with my belief in creating more opportunities for women and minorities in STEM, 2025
Dean's List, all semesters at Purdue
National First Prize, Chinese Mathematics Competition for College Students (CMC), 2022

Misc

Outside of research, I enjoy piano🎹, singing🎤 and reading📖, especially poetry.
I have been writing Chinese lyrics since middle school, evolving from early independent creations to contributing to soundtracks (OSTs) for radio dramas and TV series, with over 100M✨ total plays across platforms.
I have also been thinking about building a portfolio website for my lyrics, and would be happy to hear any thoughts or ideas :)