Haonan Chen

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Embodied Minds Lab at Harvard, working with Yilun Du. I also collaborate closely with Jiajun Wu at Stanford's Vision and Learning Lab and with Ted Adelson at MIT. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I was advised by Katie Driggs-Campbell and collaborated closely with Yunzhu Li.

My research focuses on multi-modal action composition — building generalizable robot behaviors by composing specialized models across sensory modalities and time scales.

Multisensory Learning: Integrating vision, touch, audio, and language for fine-grained, contact-rich manipulation.
Action Composition: Composing specialized models — skills, action abstractions, and physics-inspired world models — across diverse data and time scales to generalize to complex tasks.

I'm always excited to explore new collaborations in robotics and machine learning! If you're interested, please drop me an email. I'd love to chat!

haonan_chen [at] seas (dot) harvard (dot) edu / haonan [at] cs (dot) stanford (dot) edu

News

[2026/09] I am co-organizing the CoRL 2026 Workshop on Compositional Generalization for Real-World Robot Learning
[2026/09] I am co-organizing the CoRL 2026 Workshop on Bimanual Dexterous Tool Use: From Contact-Rich Execution to Generalist Robot Intelligence
[2026/09] I am co-organizing the IROS 2026 Workshop on Compositional and Modular Learning in the Era of Scaling in Robotics
[2026/07] I gave a talk at Professor Zackory Erickson's Group at CMU
[2026/04] I gave a talk at Professor Paul Liang's Group at MIT
[2025/10] I gave a talk at Computational Robotics Lab at Harvard
[2025/06] I gave a talk at Tacta Systems
[2025/05] Co-organizing the ICRA 2025 Workshop on Learning Meets Model-Based Methods for Contact-Rich Manipulation
[2025/05] I gave an outreach talk to Grade 5 Students at St. Matthew Catholic School

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Publications

Representative works / All publications

	ARGUS: Aligning Robot Scene Geometry Under Shifting Views with Large 3D Vision Models Rishik Sathua, Haonan Chen, Katherine Driggs-Campbell 2026 Preprint, [Project] [Paper] [BibTeX]
	Masked Visual Actions for Unified World Modeling Hadi Alzayer, Wenlong Huang, Haonan Chen, Christopher Luey, Lvmin Zhang, Maneesh Agrawala, Gordon Wetzstein, Li Fei-Fei, Yilun Du, Jiajun Wu, Jia-Bin Huang 2026 Preprint, [Project] [Paper] [Code] [BibTeX]
	DriftWorld: Fast World Modeling through Drifting Susie Lu, Haonan Chen, Weirui Ye, Yilun Du 2026 Preprint, [Project] [Paper] [Code] [BibTeX]
	B-spline Policy: Accelerating Manipulation Policies via B-spline Action Representations Xiaoshen Han^, Haoyu Xiong^, Haonan Chen, Chaoqi Liu, Antonio Torralba, Yuke Zhu, Yilun Du ^ Equal contribution* 2026 Preprint, [Project] [Paper] [Code] [BibTeX]
	You Only Touch Once: 6-DoF Object Pose Estimation from Single Tactile Contact Pengfei Ye, Yuxiang Ma, Haonan Chen, Guangming Wang, Yixiong Jing, Brian Sheil, Yilun Du, Edward Adelson 2026 Preprint, [Paper] [BibTeX]
	MemoBench: Benchmarking World Modeling in Dynamically Changing Environments Haoyu Chen, Kaichen Zhou, Hang Hua, Kaile Zhang, Jingwen Qian, Wufei Ma, Haonan Chen, Chunjiang Liu, Yizhou Zhao, Xiaoyuan Wang, Weiyue Li, Alan Yuille, Paul Pu Liang, Yilun Du 2026 European Conference on Computer Vision, [Project] [Paper] [Code] [BibTeX]
	CoStream: Composing Simple Behaviors for Generalizable Complex Manipulation Haonan Chen^, Yuxiang Ma^, Stephen Tian, Xiaoshen Han, Wenlong Huang, Feiyang Wu, Yunzhu Li, Jiajun Wu, Edward H. Adelson, Yilun Du ^ Equal contribution* 2026 Conference on Robot Learning, [Project] [Paper] [BibTeX]
	OAT: Ordered Action Tokenization Chaoqi Liu, Xiaoshen Han, Jiawei Gao, Yue Zhao, Haonan Chen, Yilun Du 2026 Robotics: Science and Systems, [Project] [Paper] [Code] [Blog] [BibTeX] Finalist - Best/Outstanding Paper Awards Media Coverage: [MarkTechPost]
	IMPACT: Learning Internal-Model Predictive Control for Forceful Robotic Manipulation Jiawei Gao, Chaoqi Liu, Peilin Wu, Haonan Chen, Yilun Du 2026 Preprint, [Project] [Paper] [Code] [Video] [BibTeX]
	SIMPACT: Simulation-Enabled Action Planning using Vision-Language Models Haowen Liu^, Shaoxiong Yao^, Haonan Chen, Jiawei Gao, Jiayuan Mao, Jia-Bin Huang, Yilun Du ^ Equal contribution* 2026 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, [Project] [Paper] [BibTeX]
	Multi-Modal Manipulation via Multi-Modal Policy Consensus Haonan Chen, Jiaming Xu^, Hongyu Chen^, Kaiwen Hong, Binghao Huang, Chaoqi Liu, Jiayuan Mao, Yunzhu Li, Yilun Du⁺, Katherine Driggs-Campbell⁺ ^ Equal contribution; ⁺ Equal advising* 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, [Project] [Paper] [Code] [Dataset] [Video] [Audio] [Blog] [Deepwiki] [BibTeX] Best Paper Award at CVPR 2026 Workshop on Multi-Sensory Modeling for Embodied Intelligence [Link] Media Coverage: Featured in Video Friday on [IEEE Spectrum]
	Flexible Multitask Learning with Factorized Diffusion Policy Chaoqi Liu, Haonan Chen, Sigmund H. Høeg^, Shaoxiong Yao^, Yunzhu Li, Kris Hauser, Yilun Du ^ Equal contribution* 2026 IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, [Project] [Paper]
	Tool-as-Interface: Learning Robot Policies from Observing Human Tool Use Haonan Chen, Cheng Zhu, Shuijing Liu, Yunzhu Li, Katherine Driggs-Campbell 2025 Conference on Robot Learning, [Project] [Paper] [Code] Best Paper Award at ICRA 2025 Workshop on Foundation Models and Neuro-Symbolic AI for Robotics [Link] Best Presentation Award at CSL Student Conference 2025 [Link] Media Coverage: Featured in Video Friday on [IEEE Spectrum] Media Coverage: [The Grainger College of Engineering], [TechXplore], [Hackster.io]
	Towards Uncertainty Unification: A Case Study for Preference Learning Shaoting Peng, Haonan Chen, Katherine Driggs-Campbell 2025 Robotics: Science and Systems, [Project] [Paper] [Code] [Video] Best Paper Award at ICRA 2026 Workshop on Uncertainty in Open-World Robotics
	Learning Coordinated Bimanual Manipulation Policies using State Diffusion and Inverse Dynamics Models Haonan Chen, Jiaming Xu^, Lily Sheng^, Tianchen Ji, Shuijing Liu, Yunzhu Li, Katherine Driggs-Campbell ^ Equal contribution* 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, [Project] [Paper]
	Cooperative Advisory Residual Policies for Congestion Mitigation Aamir Hasan, Neeloy Chakraborty, Haonan Chen, Jung-Hoon Cho, Cathy Wu, Katherine Driggs-Campbell 2024 ACM Journal on Autonomous Transportation Systems, [Paper]
	Lessons in Cooperation: A Qualitative Analysis of Driver Sentiments towards real-time Advisory Systems through a Focus Group User Study Aamir Hasan, Neeloy Chakraborty, Haonan Chen, Jung-Hoon Cho, Cathy Wu, Katherine Driggs-Campbell 2024 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine, [Paper]
	Predicting Object Interactions with Behavior Primitives: An Application in Stowing Tasks Haonan Chen, Yilong Niu^, Kaiwen Hong^, Shuijing Liu, Yiqing Wang, Yunzhu Li, Katherine Driggs-Campbell ^ Equal contribution* 2023 Conference on Robot Learning, [Project] [Paper] Finalist - Best Paper/Best Student Paper Awards
	Towards Safety of Multi-Level Human-Robot Interaction in Industrial Tasks Zhe Huang, Yeji Mun, Haonan Chen, Yiqing Xie, Yilong Niu, Xiang Li, Ninghan Zhong, Haoyuan You, Daniel L. McPherson, Katherine Driggs-Campbell 2023 IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (Special Session), [Paper]
	Learning Task Skills and Goals Simultaneously from Physical Interaction Haonan Chen^, Yeji Mun^, Zhe Huang, Yilong Niu, Yiqing Xie, D. Livingston McPherson, Katherine Driggs-Campbell ^ Equal contribution* 2023 IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (Special Session), [Paper]
	PeRP: Personalized Residual Policies For Congestion Mitigation Through Co-operative Advisory Systems Aamir Hasan, Neeloy Chakraborty^, Haonan Chen^, Jung-Hoon Cho, Cathy Wu, Katherine Driggs-Campbell ^ Equal contribution* 2023 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, [Paper] [Website] Best Presentation Award at CSL Student Conference 2024
	Combining Model-Based Controllers and Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning for Traffic Simulation Haonan Chen, Tianchen Ji, Shuijing Liu, Katherine Driggs-Campbell 2022 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, [Paper]
	Learning to Navigate Intersections with Unsupervised Driver Trait Inference Shuijing Liu, Peixin Chang, Haonan Chen, Neeloy Chakraborty, Katherine Driggs-Campbell 2022 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, [Paper] [Website] [Video]
	Robot Sound Interpretation: Combining Sight and Sound in Learning-Based Control Peixin Chang, Shuijing Liu, Haonan Chen, Katherine Driggs-Campbell 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, [Paper] [Video]

Awards and Honors

Finalist - Best/Outstanding Paper Awards, Robotics: Science and Systems 2026
Conference Travel Award, Graduate College, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 2023
Finalist - Best Paper/Best Student Paper Awards, Conference on Robot Learning 2023
Bronze Tablet Award, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 2020
Excellent Graduate, Zhejiang University 2020
Student Speaker at Graduation, ZJU-UIUC Institute 2020
Provincial Scholarship, Zhejiang Province, China (Top 3%) 2019
Dean's List, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 2019
National Scholarship, China (Top 1.8%) 2018
Excellent Undergraduate Scholarship, Zhejiang University (Top 3%) 2018-2019
Academic Excellence Scholarship Award, ZJU-UIUC Institute 2017-2019
Top Ten Social Practice, Zhejiang University (Top 1.5%) 2017

Service and Leadership

IROS 2026 Workshop on Compositional and Modular Learning in the Era of Scaling in Robotics
Co-organizer 2026
CoRL 2026 Workshop on Bimanual Dexterous Tool Use: From Contact-Rich Execution to Generalist Robot Intelligence
Co-organizer 2026
CoRL Workshop on Compositional Generalization for Real-World Robot Learning
Co-organizer 2026
Robotics Seminar @ Illinois
Organizer August 2023 - May 2025
Coordinated Science Laboratory Student Conference
Organizer 2024

Professional Service

Session Chair:
- CASE - IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, 2023
Reviewer:
- CoRL - Conference on Robot Learning
- ICRA - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
- ICLR - International Conference on Learning Representations
- RA-L - IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
- ITSC - IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems
- CASE - IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering

Extra-Curricular Service

Founding Team Leader, Robotic Team for RoboMaster Challenge, ZJU-UIUC Institute 10/2017 - 06/2018