Yao ZHONG

PhD Student
MIRoC Lab, The University of Hong Kong

I am a PhD student in the Medical Intelligence and Robotic Cognition Lab (MIRoC) at The University of Hong Kong , working with Prof. Zhongliang Jiang.
I received my M.Sc. degree with distinction from Technical University of Munich (Robotics, Cognition, Intelligence) and my B.Eng. degree from Zhejiang University. During my master's studies, I was with the Mobile Robot Lab (MRL), supervised by Prof. Stefan Leutenegger and Hanzhi Chen, focusing on robot learning.
My favorite leisure hours are spent wandering the trails and catching the golden hour.

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Academic & Professional Experiences

ZJU B.Eng.

TUM M.Sc.

HKU PhD Student

MIRoC Lab PhD Student

MRL Master Thesis Student

NIO Internship · Working Student

Fraunhofer Institute IKS Student Project

Siemens Student Project

Selected Publications

GOPLA: Generalizable Object Placement Learning via Synthetic Augmentation of Human Arrangement

Yao Zhong*, Hanzhi Chen*, Simon Schaefer, Anran Zhang, Stefan Leutenegger

IROS 2026

            Highlight:
            We learn generalizable object placement through hierarchical language and spatial reasoning, using augmented human demonstrations.
          

Project Video Code Paper

Actron3D: Learning Actionable Neural Functions from Videos for Transferable Robotic Manipulation

Anran Zhang*, Hanzhi Chen*, Yannick Burkhardt, Yao Zhong, Johannes Betz, Helen Oleynikova, Stefan Leutenegger

ICRA 2026

            Highlight:
            Actron3D enables robots to acquire transferable 6-DoF manipulation skills from just a few monocular, uncalibrated, RGB-only human videos.
          

Project Video Code Paper

An Efficient Temperature Calibration Method Based on the Improved Infrared Forward Model and Bayesian Inference

Ning Chu, Xu Yan, Yao Zhong, Li Wang, Liang Yu, Caifang Cai, Ali Mohammad-Djafari

IEEE Sensors Journal 2024

Journal