About

Hi, I’m a PhD student at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, advised by Prof. Robert Platt. Previously, I worked with Prof. Jiachen Li and Prof. Donglin Wang. I earned my BEng in Computer Science from Tongji University, which included a memorable semester as an exchange student at EPFL.

I am currently interested in robot learning with generative models and reinforcement learning, particularly for manipulation tasks in real-world scenarios. My long-term goal is to enable general-purpose robots to learn autonomously, adaptively, and efficiently in dynamic, unstructured environments, bridging the gap from lab demonstrations to everyday human settings.

I’d love to connect with and learn from people working on similar problems. Feel free to reach out by email. Students at Northeastern are especially welcome to get in touch about research or collaboration.

• News
• Research
• Projects
• Awards
• Academic Services

News

[Sep.9th, 2026] Started my PhD in Boston, a historic city with lovely views — at least in the current season.

[Sep.4th, 2026] Excited that HiRe-MoMa has been accepted to CoRL 2026. Looking forward to learning more in Austin!

[May.29th, 2026] Heading to Vienna for ICRA 2026. Looking forward to exploring new ideas in robotics.

[May.27th, 2026] LIT has been accepted to CASE 2026. Congratulations to Wei!

[Jan.31st, 2026] Happy to share that my first-author paper, KORR, has been accepted to ICRA 2026! Many thanks to my co-authors.

[Jun.25th, 2025] Thrilled to share that my first first-author paper, CARP, has been accepted to ICCV 2025! Huge thanks to everyone who supported me along the way.

[Jun.24th, 2025] Joined TASL as a visiting scholar and Excited for the journey ahead!

[Jan.23rd, 2025] One paper on vision-language-action model (VLAS) has been accepted to ICLR 2025!

[Jul.9th, 2024] Joined MiLab as a research assistant working on Robot Learning. Wish me luck!

[Jul.1st, 2024] Graduated from Tongji University with four years of wonderful memories, and here's my undergrad thesis.

Research

Hierarchical Residual Policy Learning for Real-World Mobile Manipulation with Sparse Human Guidance Zhefei Gong, Hefeifei Jiang, Zehao Wang, Jiachen Li The Tenth Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2026 Links: arXiv | website | video

Robust Online Residual Refinement via Koopman-Guided Dynamics Modeling Zhefei Gong, Shangke Lyu, Pengxiang Ding, Wei Xiao, Donglin Wang IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2026 Links: arXiv | website | code

Learning Robotic Policy with Imagined Transition: Mitigating the Trade-off between Robustness and Optimality Wei Xiao, Shangke Lyu, Zhefei Gong, Renjie Wang, Donglin Wang IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), 2026 Links: arXiv | website | video

CARP: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Coarse-to-Fine Autoregressive Prediction Zhefei Gong, Pengxiang Ding, Shangke Lyu, Siteng Huang, Minyang Sun, Wei Zhao, Zhaoxin Fan, Donglin Wang International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025 Links: arXiv | website | code

VLAS: Vision-Language-Action Model with Speech Instructions for Customized Robot Manipulation Wei Zhao, Pengxiang Ding, Zhang Min, Zhefei Gong, Shuanghao Bai, Han Zhao, Donglin Wang The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025 Links: arXiv | code

Projects

On the Synergy of Structured Visual Representation Learning and Embodied Self-Supervised Learning Zhefei Gong, Alexandre Alahi Semester Project at EPFL Links: Report | Thesis(zh)

Intelligent Park Unmanned Parking Method Based on Space-Time Vehicle Re-Identification Worked with professors and graduate students Completed during internship at IRCP Lab Links: Patent | Patent(zh)

Awards

• National First Prize, Intelligent Robot Fighting and Gaming Competition, CAAI
• The Second Prize in East China Region, National Intelligent Car Competition for Undergraduates, CAA
• LuHao Scholarship (1/119), Honor, Tongji University
• Merit Scholarship (10%, twice), Honor, Tongji University

Academic Services

Conference Reviewer

▸ International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)

▸ Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL)

Journal Reviewer

▸ IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO)