Research Areas
Our team at the Department of Data and Systems Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, specializes in Agentic Intelligence.
Our lab aims to solve long-term, challenging, and meaningful real-world research problems.
We are interested in advancing the following research areas:
- Development of Robotic Foundation Models.
- Agentic Systems built upon Large Language Models.
- Reinforcement Learning Theory and Algorithm Design.
- Data-driven Control for Nuclear Fusion.
Grounded upon Reinforcement Learning, we aim at the Next-Generation Physical AI. Here is an interesting reading list.
News
- 2026-06-18: One paper accepted at ECCV (Ziyi) 🎉🎉🎉
- 2026-06-17: One paper accepted at IEEE IROS (Xiaoquan) 🎉🎉🎉
- 2026-06-13: One paper accepted at IEEE RAL (Wenqi) 🎉🎉🎉
- 2026-06-02: One paper accepted at UAI 2026 (Xudong) 🎉🎉🎉
- 2026-05-01: One paper accepted at ICML 2026 (XU Le) 🎉🎉🎉
- 2026-02-10: Mithun Vanniasinghe received HKU Presidential PhD Scholarship 🔥🔥🔥
- 2026-01-26: Two papers accepted at ICLR 2026 (Aravind) 🎉🎉🎉
- 2026-01-23: One paper on RL for Fusion accepted at L4DC (Rohit) 🎉🎉🎉
- 2025-12-21: One paper accepted at IEEE TPAMI (Mingqi) 🎉🎉🎉
- 2025-12-19: One paper accepted at AAMAS 2026 and will be presented orally (Wentse) 🎉🎉🎉
- 2025-12-08: Check the PI’s research story at MIT_Technology_Review 🌐🌐🌐
- 2025-11-10: I have joined INFIFORCE as the Chief Research Scientist to lead the research on RoboBrain.
- 2025-11-08: Two papers accepted at AAAI 2026, and one of them will be presented orally (Yiming) 🎉🎉🎉
- 2025-10-21: One paper accepted for the AAAI Student Abstract and Poster Program 2026, featuring an oral presentation (XU Le) 🎉🎉🎉
- 2025-10-09: Our RL-LLM framework Verlog is featured by JIQIZHIXIN 🌐🌐🌐
- 2025-09-19: Two papers accepted at NeurIPS 2025 (Wentse, Sizhe) 🎉🎉🎉
- 2025-07-22: Our survey on Behavior Foundation Models is featured by JIQIZHIXIN 🌐🌐🌐
Fundings
| Funding Scheme | Research Topic | Duration | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early Career Scheme, HK UGC | Skill-Based Continual Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models Empowering Generalist Robotic Agents | 2027/01–2029/12 | PI |
How to join us
Current Openings
(If interested, please contact Dr. Jiayu Chen directly. The Ph.D. application system accepts submissions year-round.)
- ❗❗❗ We are actively recruiting Ph.D. students and research assistants on LLM Agents.
Qualifications for Ph.D. and Postdoctoral Researchers:
Candidates should possess strong proficiency in mathematics or programming, as well as demonstrate self-motivation and resilience. Applicants with backgrounds in the following areas are highly preferred: Reinforcement Learing, Robotics,
Large Language/Reasoning Models.
For more information, please refer to the respective categories in openings.