Machine learning · Computer vision

Yanwei Fu 付彦伟

Full Professor (tenured)
School of Data Science, Fudan University
Faculty, Shanghai Innovation Institute

I study how machines learn and generalize from limited data. My research connects few-shot learning and statistical methods with generative models, 3D vision, robotics, and brain decoding.

CVPR Tutorial Organizer & Speaker, 2022–2024
Three consecutive years · Topics & talks →

Yanwei Fu standing beside a research robot
Fudan University · Shanghai, China

Research awards

  1. 2023

    State Natural Science Award, Second Class China

    多元协同的视觉计算理论与方法

    Team award · Fourth contributor · 2023 award year, announced in 2024

    Fudan University announcement ↗
  2. 2023

    Shanghai Technological Invention Award, First Class

    面向智能制造的跨域融合感知关键技术及应用

    Team award · Third contributor

    Shanghai government award list ↗
  3. 2023

    Shanghai Natural Science Award, Second Class

    面向行人重识别的高效学习理论与方法

    Team award · Fourth contributor

    Shanghai government award list ↗
  4. 2022

    Ministry of Education Natural Science Award, First Class China

    多元协同的视觉计算理论与方法

    Team award · 2022 award year, announced in 2023

    Fudan University announcement ↗

Industry recognition

  • Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, 2021Huawei Shanghai Research Institute华为上海研究所 · 2021 年度优秀技术成果奖
  • Tencent Rhino-Bird Visiting Scholar腾讯“犀牛鸟计划”访问学者

Research

How can models acquire new concepts, transfer knowledge, and generalize with only a few observations? This question underpins my work on learning to learn, from statistical foundations to visual and embodied intelligence.

Few-shot learning & statistical foundations

Meta-learning, sparsity, causal learning, and reliable generalization under limited supervision.

Generative models & 3D vision

Diffusion models, controllable video generation, and 3D/4D reconstruction from sparse observations.

Embodied intelligence

Vision-guided manipulation, vision-language-action models, learning from demonstrations, and egocentric & ego–exo understanding.

Multimodal learning & brain decoding

Large-scale fMRI pretraining, fMRI-to-3D decoding, and open fMRI/EEG datasets for the research community.

Selected publications

Full publication list →

Research highlights

  1. CVPR 2026Brain decoding

    CineBrain: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal Audiovisual Brain Dataset for Brain-Conditioned Video Generation

    Jianxiong Gao, Yichang Liu, Baofeng Yang, Jianfeng Feng, Yanwei Fu

    First large-scale audiovisual brain dataset pairing time-aligned fMRI and EEG recordings.

  2. ICML 2026Reliable generation

    Conformal Reliability: A New Evaluation Metric for Conditional Generation

    Yachen Gao, Xinwei Sun, Yikai Wang, Ye Shi, Jingya Wang, Jianfeng Feng, Yanwei Fu

  3. CVPR 2026Video world models

    VerseCrafter: Dynamic Realistic Video World Model with 4D Geometric Control

    Sixiao Zheng, Minghao Yin, Wenbo Hu, Xiaoyu Li, Ying Shan, Yanwei Fu

    To our knowledge, this is the first dynamic, realistic video world model with explicit 4D geometric control over camera and multi-object motion.

  4. CVPR 2026Robotics

    ActiveVLA: Injecting Active Perception into Vision-Language-Action Models for Precise 3D Robotic Manipulation

    Zhenyang Liu, Yongchong Gu, Yikai Wang, Xiangyang Xue, Yanwei Fu

    Bringing active perception into 3D robotic manipulation: virtual viewpoint selection and active 3D zoom-in overcome the constraints of fixed visual inputs.

  5. ICML 2025Diffusion bridges

    UniDB: A Unified Diffusion Bridge Framework via Stochastic Optimal Control

    Kaizhen Zhu, Mokai Pan, Yuexin Ma, Yanwei Fu, Jingyi Yu, Jingya Wang, Ye Shi

  6. ICLR 20243D reconstruction

    MVSFormer++: Revealing the Devil in Transformer's Details for Multi-View Stereo

    Chenjie Cao, Xinlin Ren, Yanwei Fu

  7. CVPR 2021Semantic segmentation

    SETR: Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers

    Sixiao Zheng, Jiachen Lu, Hengshuang Zhao, Xiatian Zhu, Zekun Luo, Yabiao Wang, Yanwei Fu, Jianfeng Feng, Tao Xiang, Philip H.S. Torr, Li Zhang

    To our knowledge, SETR was the first to formulate semantic segmentation as sequence-to-sequence prediction with a pure Vision Transformer encoder. It models global context at every encoder layer without progressive spatial downsampling.

Three consecutive years

CVPR tutorials · 2022–2024

Co-organizer and speaker for three consecutive years, giving opening remarks and tutorial talks at CVPR 2022, 2023, and 2024.

  1. CVPR 2024

    Object-centric Representations in Computer Vision

    Talk: More Real-world Applications by Object-centric Representations

  2. CVPR 2023

    Few-shot Learning from Meta-Learning, Statistical Understanding to Applications

    Talk: Few-shot Learning by Statistical Methods (with Yikai Wang)

  3. CVPR 2022

    Sparse Learning in Neural Networks and Robust Statistical Analysis

    Talks: Introduction; Sparse Learning in Noisy Data Detection (with Yikai Wang)

Academic service

Fellowships & honors

  • Ten-Year Honor Certificate2026 · School of Data Science, Fudan University复旦大学大数据学院十周年荣誉证书View certificate ↗
  • Fellow of the British Computer Society2022 · BCS
  • Young Thousand Talents Program2018 · 国家青年千人计划
  • Shanghai Eastern Scholar2017 · 上海市东方学者
  • ARC DECRA Fellow2016 · Australian Research CouncilDiscovery Early Career Researcher Award
  • Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad2014 · 国家优秀自费留学生奖学金

Academic background

Selected paper honors

Paper awards & recognition

  1. 2026

    Best Paper Award Candidate CVPR 2026 · Oral

    CineBrain: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal Audiovisual Brain Dataset for Brain-Conditioned Video Generation

    Official conference program ↗
  2. 2025

    Top Viewed Article Wiley · Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES)

    TC-GEN: Data-Driven Tropical Cyclone Downscaling Using Machine Learning-Based High-Resolution Weather Model

    Coauthored with Kerry Emanuel (MIT; Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), Noah S. Diffenbaugh (Stanford), and Eran Bendavid (Stanford).

    Wiley recognition, 2025 · Among JAMES articles published in 2024, with views counted 12 months after publication.

  3. 2025

    TMLR Journal-to-Conference (J2C) Certification ICML 2026 · Poster

    Repositioning the Subject within Image

    Published in TMLR, November 2024 · J2C certified October 2025 · Selected for the ICML 2026 Journal-to-Conference Track.

  4. 2025

    Long Paper Outstanding Paper Award DeLTa Workshop at ICLR 2025

    A Unified Diffusion Bridge Framework via Stochastic Optimal Control

    Official award announcement ↗
  5. 2024

    Highest Impact Award IEEE Computer Society Biometrics Workshop

    When Person Re-Identification Meets Changing Clothes

    Published at the CVPR 2020 Biometrics Workshop · Awarded in 2024

    Coauthor's award record ↗
  6. 2023

    Youth Outstanding Paper Award World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC)

    SETR: Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers

    Coauthored work · Award recipient: Sixiao Zheng

    Official award list ↗
  7. 2019

    Best Paper Award IEEE ICME 2019

    An End-to-End Architecture for Class-Incremental Object Detection with Knowledge Distillation

    Official award announcement ↗
  8. 2019

    Best Paper Finalist CVPR 2019 · Oral

    Image Deformation Meta-Networks for One-Shot Learning

    Official award announcement ↗

Academic recognition & media

ACM China Rising Star Awards

2017 · SIGAI China
2018 · Shanghai Chapter

World’s Top 2% Scientists · 2026

Selected for both career-long and single-year citation impact lists in the Stanford/Elsevier database.

Global Top 100 AI Talents · 2025

Also included in the Top 100 Chinese AI Talents list. The lists were jointly released by UNIDO ITPO Beijing and Dongbi Data.

World Robot Contest · 2020

Best Collaboration Award for FDU-Insight in the collaborative robotics challenge. I led the team and co-advised it with Xiangyang Xue.

White paper contribution

Industry deployment

3D reconstruction & generative foundation models

Controllable video generation & adoption

Embodied intelligence

  • Shanghai Innovation Institute · AGIBOT Finch

    τ₀-WM: a unified video-action world model for robotic manipulation

    I coauthored τ₀-WM, jointly released by Shanghai Innovation Institute and AGIBOT Finch. Pretrained on approximately 27,300 hours of robot and human interaction data, the model unifies video prediction, action generation, and evaluation of action consequences, allowing robots to predict, evaluate, and revise candidate actions before execution.

    He You, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, featured τ₀-WM in his presentation on intelligent unmanned systems at the Fourth Shanghai Computer Vision Conference (2026). His slide highlighted its training-data scale and described it at the time as the world’s largest-scale open-source pretrained embodied world model.

    Featured in Wenhui Daily / Shangguan News, Xinmin Evening News, and QbitAI. The coverage explains how the model anticipates action consequences and generalizes across tasks; code and model weights are openly available.

  • MIT Technology Review China · DeepTech

    Schrödinger’s Navigator: letting robots imagine before navigating

    A novel AI framework for zero-shot object navigation (ZSON), enabling robots to imagine possible futures before acting. It uses a 3D world model to explore possibilities beyond occlusions, weighing target cues, navigable space, and geometric risks to guide navigation in unfamiliar environments.

    MIT Technology Review China / DeepTech interviewed me about this research, including its real-world quadruped demonstrations, the motivation for imagining before navigating, and mentoring students to develop new research frameworks.

  • RSS 2026

    Pose-VLA: reshaping VLA around 3D poses

    Pose-VLA puts universal 3D poses at the core of VLA representation and pretraining. Discrete pose tokens unify spatial learning from diverse 3D datasets and robot trajectories; pretraining builds transferable geometric priors before these are aligned to a specific robot’s action space. This addresses the gap between semantic recognition and the fine 3D state distinctions that precise actions require.

    Our central message to the embodied AI community: 3D spatial understanding is crucial for embodied foundation models. Published at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2026, Pose-VLA demonstrates real-world generalization across diverse objects with only 100 demonstrations per task.

    I see a parallel in the recent GPT-6 Astra robot demonstrations documented in Wentao Zhu’s technical perspective: using a low-level robot SDK, the model plans bimanual coordination, active vision, and error recovery. These developments underscore, through a different approach, the importance of connecting spatial understanding with action.

  • CVPR 2026

    ActiveVLA: bringing active perception into 3D robotic manipulation

    ActiveVLA’s core advance is to integrate active perception into precise 3D manipulation, enabling a VLA to decide where to look and how closely to inspect. It tackles a central limitation of fixed-view VLA approaches: task-critical geometry can be obscured or too small to resolve in the original camera inputs.

    Our novel coarse-to-fine framework combines task-driven virtual viewpoint selection with active 3D zoom-in. It first locates the relevant 3D region, then synthesizes informative views and magnifies local geometry before predicting an action, overcoming the viewpoint and resolution constraints of fixed visual inputs.

    I am a co-corresponding author of this CVPR 2026 paper. Evaluations on RLBench, COLOSSEUM, and GemBench, together with real-robot demonstrations, show improved precision and robustness for manipulation in cluttered and occluded scenes.

  • Fudan University · Shanghai Innovation Institute

    TriVLA: unifying world knowledge and world modeling in a triple-system VLA

    TriVLA was first publicly introduced on (arXiv v1). The initial version already unified world knowledge from a vision-language model, a video world model, and an action policy in a triple-system VLA architecture.

    The v3 revision explicitly formalizes episodic world modeling, describing TriVLA as the first framework to do so within a unified triple-system VLA architecture, supporting complex instructions and long-horizon robotic manipulation.

    Discussed in a Shenlan Academy video and research reviews by Moonlight and the CSDN developer community.

  • WAIC 2025 · Fudan University

    Visuo-tactile AI sensing: live demonstration to Premier Li Qiang

    I contributed to the team’s adaptive visuo-tactile AI sensor, demonstrated live to Chinese Premier Li Qiang at WAIC 2025. The work enables delicate robotic handling of fragile objects such as tofu and jelly.

    China Science Daily / ScienceNet and Wenhui Daily / Shangguan News interviewed me about the technology. Wenhui’s WAIC report discusses the sensing algorithm; China Science Daily’s covers jelly-grasping and tangyuan-scooping demonstrations and applications in precise sorting and assembly.

  • CoRL 2024
    PMLR proceedings · 2025

    TaMMa: connecting navigation with precise manipulation across subscenes

    TaMMa extends robotic manipulation across multiple tabletop subscenes, coordinating a mobile base with a robotic arm. A semantic 3D Gaussian representation first locates the target and guides the robot toward it; depth completion then refines local geometry and object poses. Gaussian inpainting represents the intended arrangement before execution, supporting real-robot pouring, stacking, and tidying tasks.

    The 2025 survey Towards a Unified Understanding of Robot Manipulation discusses TaMMa in its mobile-manipulation section, highlighting sparse Gaussian localization and depth completion as a way to connect 3D scene modeling with accurate target poses.

  • IROS 2024
    Interactive robot manipulation

    Polaris: grounding open-ended dialogue in real robot actions

    Polaris combines GPT-4 interaction with category-level 6D pose estimation trained on synthetic data to perform real tabletop manipulation. It connects users' open-ended requests to the geometry needed for grasping and placement, including stacking, tidying, and compositional tasks that account for object affordances. This develops our earlier dialogue-guided grasping work toward richer scene interaction.

    The independent 2025 paper Text-guided RGB-P grasp generation discusses Polaris in its review of LLM-based robotic grasping, describing how language interpretation is connected to visual grounding. Polaris provides a concrete example of bringing language reasoning and precise spatial perception together for physical action.

  • 2023 preprint

    WALL-E: from multi-round dialogue to visually grounded robot grasping

    WALL-E connects ChatGPT dialogue with visual grounding, object pose and size estimation, and physical robot grasping. Through successive exchanges, the system turns a user's preferences into a target instruction, locates the corresponding object, and executes the grasp. Publicly released in August 2023, it documents our early exploration of language models as an interface to a real robot.

    UT Dallas's Fall 2023 robot manipulation and navigation course selected WALL-E as a representative reference for language-guided manipulation, alongside SayCan and Instruct2Act in its project guide. A 2024 survey by researchers at KAIST also includes the work in its discussion of object grounding for LLM-integrated robots.

  • ICCV 2023
    Visual closed-loop pouring

    PourIt!: perceiving liquid for visual closed-loop robotic pouring

    PourIt! learns to perceive flowing liquid using image-level supervision and uses that perception to guide a real Franka robot. It combines a single image's liquid mask with the source container's pose to recover a 3D liquid representation, without requiring direct liquid-depth measurements. The resulting liquid-to-container geometry supplies visual feedback for pouring, linking weakly supervised perception with physical control.

    The project releases code and a dedicated dataset. An independent, ongoing IsaacLabPouringExtension project explicitly uses PourIt for image processing in a transparent-liquid pouring task, providing a concrete example of reuse in a subsequent robotics implementation.

  • CVPR 2023
    Vision-and-language navigation

    GeoVLN: geometry-aware visual representations for language-guided navigation

    GeoVLN brings explicit geometric cues into vision-and-language navigation. Depth and surface-normal information complement RGB appearance, while slot attention integrates the representations to help an agent relate language instructions to the surrounding scene. The work extends our embodied-intelligence research from object manipulation to navigation through an environment.

    GeoVLN continues to appear in subsequent navigation comparisons: the independent 2026 STE-VLN preprint includes it in its R2R benchmark table. This documents its use as a comparison method in later research.

  • CVPR 2022
    Category-level 6D perception

    SAR-Net: shape alignment and recovery for grasping unseen object instances

    SAR-Net estimates category-level 6D object poses and sizes through shape alignment and symmetry-aware recovery. It aligns a category template to the observed point cloud and reconstructs missing shape information to infer rotation, translation, and size, without requiring real pose-annotated training images. Experiments on a physical Baxter robot demonstrate grasping of previously unseen instances from known categories.

    The independent PACE benchmark (ECCV 2024) includes SAR-Net among its evaluated category-level pose-estimation methods and publishes its baseline results. This provides direct evidence of external evaluation and establishes SAR-Net as a reference point for later research on pose estimation in cluttered environments.

  • ICRA 2022
    Sketch-guided grasping

    I Know What You Draw: using a few freehand sketches to specify a grasping target

    This work explores freehand object sketches as an intuitive way to communicate a grasping target to a robot. A graph representation preserves sketch structure, allowing the system to learn from around 100 hand-drawn examples, connect drawings with objects in the observed scene, and predict the corresponding grasps. Dataset evaluations and physical robot demonstrations investigate how visual intent can guide manipulation without requiring a detailed verbal description.

    Toyota Frontier Research Center's subsequent Sketch-MoMa work explicitly discusses this paper as prior research on sketch-based object detection and manipulation. The connection places our ICRA 2022 study in the continuing development of drawing-based interfaces for robot control.

  • ICRA 2022 · IROS 2023
    Language-guided grasping

    Language-guided grasping: connecting object descriptions, 6D poses, and physical action

    Our ICRA 2022 work connects free-form language instructions to category-level 6D object localization and real robot grasping. Descriptions of names, attributes, and spatial relations identify the target; pose estimation supports grasping an unseen instance from a known category. Language Guided Robotic Grasping with Fine-grained Instructions (IROS 2023) further explores detailed language for specifying the intended object.

    The independent MaskGrasp study (IROS 2024) cites both papers in its discussion of language-driven grasp detection. Together, these studies form a sustained research direction connecting human instructions with robot perception and action.

  • IEEE Spectrum
    ICRA 2023 video selection

    Smart Bartender: serving drinks through interactive gaze following

    Our Smart Bartender lets users choose a drink by looking at it. Combining gaze following, category-level object pose estimation, and motion planning, the robot identifies the selected bottle, grasps it, and pours into a cup, generalizing to bottles and cups not seen during training.

    Featured in IEEE Spectrum’s Video Friday selection of ICRA 2023 robot videos. The editorial roundup includes the demonstration and credits the Fudan University team.

  • Fudan School of Data Science

    Robotics in early 2023: vision-guided grasping and pouring

    By February 2023, my group had publicly demonstrated robotic grasping and pouring using category-level generalization and 6D pose estimation, with models trained on synthetic images and applied to real scenes. Gaze tracking enabled user-directed drink serving. Fudan’s School of Data Science documented the demonstrations held on .

Egocentric vision & ego–exo understanding

Brain decoding & open research resources

Earlier work at Disney Research

Foundational contributions

  1. CVPR 2020
    TPAMI 2022Few-shot learning

    Instance Credibility Inference for Few-Shot Learning

    Yikai Wang, Chengming Xu, Chen Liu, Li Zhang, Yanwei Fu

    Journal extension

    How to Trust Unlabeled Data? Instance Credibility Inference for Few-Shot Learning

    Yikai Wang, Li Zhang, Yuan Yao, Yanwei Fu

    Uses sparse statistical modeling to identify trustworthy pseudo-labels for few-shot learning; the journal extension develops generalized linear models and theoretical analysis.

  2. TPAMI 2024Learning with noisy labels

    Knockoffs-SPR: Clean Sample Selection in Learning with Noisy Labels

    Yikai Wang, Yanwei Fu, Xinwei Sun

    Selects clean training samples with knockoff filters, controlling the false-selection rate under the method’s theoretical assumptions.

  3. ICML 2020
    TPAMI 2023Statistical foundations

    DessiLBI: Exploring Structural Sparsity of Deep Networks via Differential Inclusion Paths

    Yanwei Fu, Chen Liu, Donghao Li, Xinwei Sun, Jinshan Zeng, Yuan Yao

    Journal extension

    Exploring Structural Sparsity of Deep Networks Via Inverse Scale Spaces

    Yanwei Fu, Chen Liu, Donghao Li, Zuyuan Zhong, Xinwei Sun, Jinshan Zeng, Yuan Yao

    Learns sparse neural structures through inverse-scale-space dynamics; the journal extension also studies adaptive network growth and transfer of sparse subnetworks.

  4. 2023–2025Causal learning

    Causal learning: hidden confounding and reliable generalization

    Develops doubly robust estimation for continuous treatments and nonparametric causal discovery using proxy variables. These methods address unmeasured confounding, clarify when single-proxy tests can miss genuine causal relationships, and introduce additional proxy restrictions to restore identification under stated assumptions.

    Continuous-treatment estimation · ICLR 2024

    Doubly Robust Proximal Causal Learning for Continuous Treatments

    Yong Wu, Yanwei Fu, Shouyan Wang, Xinwei Sun

    Proxy-based causal discovery · ICML 2025

    Bivariate Causal Discovery with Proxy Variables: Integral Solving and Beyond

    Yong Wu, Yanwei Fu, Shouyan Wang, Xinwei Sun

    Related applications connect causal feature learning with few-shot recognition in PatchMix (TPAMI 2023), and incorporate intraoperative information into preoperative survival prediction in Causally-Aware Intraoperative Imputation (CVPR 2023).

    Independent research uptake. The continuous-treatment estimator appears in Arthur Gretton’s CLeaR 2026 keynote materials and was used as a baseline, with its experimental settings reused, in an independent NeurIPS 2025 study. A 2026 follow-up preprint develops statistical inference for proximal dose-response curves.

  5. TPAMI 2015Zero-shot learning

    Transductive Multi-view Zero-Shot Learning

    Yanwei Fu, Timothy M. Hospedales, Tao Xiang, Shaogang Gong

    Identifies projection domain shift in zero-shot learning and addresses it through transductive multi-view embedding.

Prospective students & visitors

For research inquiries, doctoral applications, or summer visits, please contact yanweifu@fudan.edu.cn. International students interested in summer internships are welcome to get in touch.

2026 年招生说明:本组仅在复旦大学大数据学院和上海创智学院招生。大数据学院科学硕士及直博生由学院统一招生,请先申请并获得学院 offer,再联系我;申请普博或暑期访问可提前联系。有兴趣研究统计稀疏性的本科生,也可联系孙鑫伟老师共同合作。

本组 2027年入学的普博博士名额已满。

U.S. patents

Granted U.S. patents from my research at Fudan University and Disney Research, spanning 3D vision, image restoration and visual recognition. The 11 grants below are grouped by invention.

Fudan University Original assignee

  1. Network and system for pose and size estimation

    Yanwei Fu, Haitao Lin, Xiangyang Xue

    US11593957B2 ↗
  2. System and method for image inpainting

    Yanwei Fu, Chenjie Cao

    US11580622B2 ↗
  3. Network and system for neural pose transfer

    Yanwei Fu, Xiangyang Xue, Yinda Zhang, Chao Wen, Haitao Lin, Jiashun Wang, Tianyun Zou

    US11455776B2 ↗
  4. Network, system and method for image processing

    Yugang Jiang, Yanwei Fu, Changmao Cheng, Xiangyang Xue

    US11055549B2 ↗
  5. Network, system and method for multi-view 3D mesh generation via deformation

    Yanwei Fu, Chao Wen, Yinda Zhang, Zhuwen Li

    US10885707B1 ↗
  6. Network, system and method for 3D shape generation

    Yugang Jiang, Yanwei Fu, Nanyang Wang, Yinda Zhang, Zhuwen Li

    US10783709B2 ↗ US10777003B2 ↗

Disney Enterprises, Inc. Original assignee

  1. Robust classification by pre-conditioned lasso and transductive diffusion component analysis

    Yanwei Fu, Leonid Sigal

    US10614379B2 ↗
  2. System and method of vocabulary-informed categorization of items of interest included within digital information

    Yanwei Fu, Leonid Sigal

    US10331676B2 ↗
  3. Systems and methods for identifying activities and/or events in media contents based on object data and scene data

    Zuxuan Wu, Yanwei Fu, Leonid Sigal

    US10482329B2 ↗ US9940522B2 ↗

Published U.S. patent application

Applicant: Tencent Technology (Shenzhen) Company Limited

  1. Three-dimensional image generation

    Shijie Zhang, Chengming Xu, Junwei Zhu, Xuelin Qian, Ying Tai, Yanwei Fu, Chengjie Wang

    US20260245287A1 ↗ · Published