Zixing “Elwood” Lei · PhD Student, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Agents that improve, explore, and act.

Supervised by Prof. Siheng Chen, I focus on Recursive Self-Improvement, Reinforcement Learning, and Embodied AI. I believe that using powerful agents to reshape today’s scientific and engineering R&D pipelines is a critical path toward a superintelligent future.

Explore by direction

Three directions. One path toward autonomous intelligence.

RSI

Long-horizon autonomy

RSI systems and context management support agentic, long-horizon autonomous research.

RL

Learning through exploration

RL environments and algorithms let agents explore autonomously and acquire efficient, learnable signals.

Embodied AI

Verifiable physical intelligence

Embodied AI grounds agents in the physical world, where intelligence can be tested and verified.

Latest research

Embodied AI
2026

Qwen-RobotNav: A Scalable Navigation Model Designed for an Agentic Navigation System

J. Zhang, G. Zhou, H. Yin, et al.

A scalable navigation model with a reconfigurable observation strategy, allowing a high-level planner to switch task modes and context strategies during long-horizon execution.

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Embodied AI
2026

Qwen-RobotManip: Alignment Unlocks Scale for Robotic Manipulation Foundation Models

H. Yuan, Z. Liang, A. Chen, et al.

A generalizable vision-language-action foundation model that aligns heterogeneous manipulation data across representation, motion, and behavior to enable large-scale training and cross-embodiment transfer.

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Embodied AI
2026

Qwen-RobotWorld: Unifying Embodied World Modeling through Language-Conditioned Video Generation

J. Zhang, X. Chen, A. Chen, et al.

A language-conditioned video world model that predicts physically grounded futures across manipulation, autonomous driving, navigation, and human-to-robot transfer.

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Embodied AI
2026

Qwen-VLA: Unifying Vision-Language-Action Modeling across Tasks, Environments, and Robot Embodiments

Q. Wang, M. Li, J. Guan, et al.

A unified embodied foundation model for manipulation, navigation, and trajectory prediction, extending vision-language reasoning into continuous action generation across robot embodiments.

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Embodied AI
2026

Towards Long-horizon Embodied Agents with Tool-Aligned Vision-Language-Action Models

Z. Lei, C. Liu, Y. Xiong, et al.

VLAs-as-Tools separates temporal reasoning from local physical execution, enabling high-level agents to plan, select specialized VLA tools, monitor progress, and recover over long horizons.

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RSI
2026

DataMaster: Data-Centric Autonomous AI Research

Y. Du, X. Yang, Z. Zhou, et al.

An autonomous data-engineering agent that searches, constructs, evaluates, and remembers data interventions to improve a fixed learning algorithm through downstream feedback.

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