Yaru Niu

yarun@andrew.cmu.edu

4805 Frew St

Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Hi! I am a final-year PhD student at the CMU Safe AI Lab, advised by Prof. Ding Zhao. I am currently a research scientist intern with the Data-Driven AI for Robotics (DAIR) and LPR teams at NVIDIA Research, working with Ye Yuan and Umar Iqbal. My research focuses on scalable dexterity for robotic manipulation. My work has been supported by Google DeepMind and Toyota North America.

Previously, I received my M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech and my B.E. in Intelligence Science and Technology from South China University of Technology. I have also spent wonderful time at BCAI, Baidu Research, and the MSC Lab at UC Berkeley.

My Chinese name is 牛雅儒 (Niu-Ya-Ru); my given name, 雅儒, means an elegant scholar in classical Chinese.

CV / Google Scholar / Twitter / Github / Linkedin

News

May, 2026	Delivered a live Demo of the HTD system to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at CMU, and joined NVIDIA LPR as a research intern to work on robot learning from human data.
Oct, 2025	Lightning talk at CMU-Amazon AI Innovation Hub events.
Oct, 2025	Talk and live demo at Google DeepMind, Mountain View.
Aug, 2025	Human2LocoMan (in RSS 2025) is coverd by CMU Engineering (video story), 3D视觉工坊 (invited talk), IEEE Spectrum, etc.
Jan, 2025	MAPush is accepted to ICRA 2025. See you in Atlanta!
May, 2024	Our work LocoMan is covered by TechXplore, IEEE Spectrum, CMU Engineering, GlobalSpec, and Interesting Engineering.
Nov, 2023	Our work RoboTool is covered by TechXplore, ML@CMU Blog, and CMU Engineering.
Jun, 2023	Our work on goal-conditioned curriculum reinforcement leanring for robotic scooping is accepted to IROS 2023.
Apr, 2022	Our work Interpretable Continuous Control Tree (ICCT) is accepted to RSS 2022!
Oct, 2021	Our work Multi-Agent Graph-Attention Communication (MAGIC) receives the Best Paper Award at ICCV 2021 Mair2 Workshop!

Selected Publications

Notation * indicates equal contributions.

Learning Versatile Humanoid Manipulation with Touch Dreaming

Yaru Niu, Zhenlong Fang, Binghong Chen, Shuai Zhou, Revanth Senthilkumaran, Hao Zhang, Bingqing Chen, Chen Qiu, H. Eric Tseng, Jonathan Francis, Ding Zhao

International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2026)
Whole-Body Control and Bimanual Manipulation Workshop (RSS 2026), Oral Presentation

PDF Code Webpage Video X Summary TechXplore IEEE Spectrum
HALyPO: Heterogeneous-Agent Lyapunov Policy Optimization for Human-Robot Collaboration

Hao Zhang, Yaru Niu, Yikai Wang, Ding Zhao, H. Eric Tseng

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026), Oral (top 0.7%)

PDF Webpage
Human2LocoMan: Learning Versatile Quadrupedal Manipulation with Human Pretraining

Yaru Niu*, Yunzhe Zhang*, Mingyang Yu, Changyi Lin, Chenhao Li, Yikai Wang, Yuxiang Yang, Wenhao Yu, Tingnan Zhang, Zhenzhen Li, Jonathan Francis, Bingqing Chen, Jie Tan, Ding Zhao

Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS 2025)

PDF Code Webpage Talk 中文讲解 Video X Summary CMU Engineering IEEE Spectrum
Learning Multi-Agent Loco-Manipulation for Long-Horizon Quadrupedal Pushing

Yuming Feng*, Chuye Hong*, Yaru Niu*, Shiqi Liu, Yuxiang Yang, Wenhao Yu, Tingnan Zhang, Jie Tan, Ding Zhao

International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2025)

PDF Code Webpage
LocoMan: Advancing Versatile Quadrupedal Dexterity with Lightweight Loco-Manipulators

Changyi Lin, Xingyu Liu, Yuxiang Yang, Yaru Niu, Wenhao Yu, Tingnan Zhang, Jie Tan, Byron Boots, Ding Zhao

International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024)
Future Roadmap for Manipulation Skills Workshop (ICRA 2024), Spotlight

PDF Code Webpage X Summary TechXplore CMU Engineering IEEE Spectrum
COMPOSER: Scalable and Robust Modular Policies for Snake Robots

Yuyou Zhang, Yaru Niu, Xingyu Liu, Ding Zhao

International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2024)
Learning for Soft Robots Workshop (CoRL 2023), Spotlight

PDF Webpage
Creative Robot Tool Use with Large Language Models

Mengdi Xu*, Peide Huang*, Wenhao Yu*, Shiqi Liu, Xilun Zhang, Yaru Niu, Tingnan Zhang, Fei Xia, Jie Tan, Ding Zhao

arXiv preprint, 2023
Language and Robot Learning Workshop (CoRL 2023)

PDF Poster Webpage X Summary TechXplore ML@CMU CMU Engineering
GOATS: Goal Sampling Adaptation for Scooping with Curriculum Reinforcement Learning

Yaru Niu, Shiyu Jin*, Zeqing Zhang*, Jiacheng Zhu, Ding Zhao, Liangjun Zhang

International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2023)
Representing and Manipulating Deformable Objects Workshop (ICRA 2023), Spotlight Talk

PDF Poster Webpage Talk Video
Learning Interpretable, High-Performing Policies for Autonomous Driving

Rohan Paleja*, Yaru Niu*, Andrew Silva, Chace Ritchie, Sugju Choi, Matthew Gombolay

Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS 2022)

PDF Code Poster Talk
Multi-Agent Graph-Attention Communication and Teaming

Yaru Niu*, Rohan Paleja*, Matthew Gombolay

International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2021), Oral
MAIR2 Workshop (ICCV 2021), Best Paper Award

PDF Code Talk
Real-Time Whole-Body Imitation by Humanoid Robots and Task-Oriented Teleoperation using an Analytical Mapping Method and Quantitative Evaluation

Zhijun Zhang*, Yaru Niu*, Ziyi Yan, Shuyang Lin

Applied Sciences, 2018

PDF Code Video