Yiyang Ling 凌逸飏

I am a first year PhD student in Computer Science at University of Southern California, advised by Prof. Daniel Seita. I received my Bachelor's degree at ACM Honors Class, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

My research interest lies in robot learning. Previously, I worked as a student intern at University of California San Diego, under the supervision of Prof. Xiaolong Wang. Before this, I gained valuable experience as a research assistant in the SJTU Machine Vision and Intelligence Group, where I was advised by Prof. Cewu Lu.

Email  /  GitHub  /  Google Scholar  /  Twitter  

profile photo

Research

project image

IMPACT: Intelligent Motion Planning with Acceptable Contact Trajectories via Vision-Language Models


Yiyang Ling*, Karan Owalekar*, Oluwatobiloba Adesanya, Erdem Bıyık, Daniel Seita
arXiv preprint, 2025
arxiv / website

We introduce IMPACT, a novel motion planning framework that uses Vision-Language Models to infer environment semantics, identifying which parts of the environment can best tolerate contact based on object properties and locations. Results both in simulation and real-world suggest that IMPACT enables robots to efficiently reach targets while making semantically acceptable contact when needed.

project image

GenSim: Generating Robotic Simulation Tasks via Large Language Models


Lirui Wang, Yiyang Ling*, Zhecheng Yuan*, Mohit Shridhar, Chen Bao, Yuzhe Qin, Bailin Wang, Huazhe Xu, Xiaolong Wang
Workshop on Language Grounding and Robot Learning, CoRL 2023 (Best Paper);
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024 (Spotlight)

arxiv / code / website

In this work, we propose to automatically generate rich simulation environments and expert demonstrations by exploiting LLMs’ grounding and coding ability. Our approach has two modes: goal-directed generation, wherein LLM proposes a task curriculum to solve a target task, and exploratory generation, wherein LLM bootstraps from previous tasks and iteratively proposes novel complex tasks.



Education

project image

University of Southern California


Aug 2024 - Present

Ph.D. student in Computer Science

project image

Shanghai Jiao Tong University


Sep 2020 - Jun 2024

B.S. in Computer Science



Design and source code from Leonid Keselman's website