Fei Ni倪飞

MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow · Imperial College London

f.ni@imperial.ac.uk Google Scholar

I am a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Associate at Imperial College London, working with Prof. Stefanos Zafeiriou and Prof. Jiankang Deng, supported by the European Union's Horizon Europe programme. Before that, I obtained my Ph.D. from Tianjin University under the supervision of Prof. Jianye Hao, and my Master's and Bachelor's degrees from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, supervised by Prof. Kun He.

My research lies at the intersection of Embodied Intelligence, Multimodal Large Models, and Reinforcement Learning. I am especially interested in vision-language-action models, long-horizon robotic manipulation, generalist embodied agents, diffusion-based decision making, and benchmarks & evaluation for embodied AI — with the broader goal of bridging large language models with robotic control to develop generalizable approaches for embodied intelligence in the real world.

I am always happy to discuss research and explore potential collaborations — feel free to reach out via email.

News

• 2026.05One paper accepted to ICML 2026.
• 2026.02One paper accepted to CVPR 2026.
• 2026.02Awarded the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship (MSCA PF 2025).
• 2026.01Three papers accepted to ICLR 2026.
• 2025.08Joined Imperial College London to start my postdoctoral research.
• 2025.06One paper accepted to ICCV 2025.
• 2025.05One paper accepted to ACL 2025.
• 2025.01One paper accepted to WWW 2025 (Oral).
• 2024.12One paper accepted to AAAI 2025.
• 2024.09Three papers accepted to NeurIPS 2024.
• 2024.05One paper accepted to ICML 2024.
• 2024.02One paper accepted to CVPR 2024.
• 2024.01One paper accepted to ICLR 2024.
• 2023.04Two papers accepted to ICML 2023 (one Oral).
• 2023.01One paper accepted to ICLR 2023.
• 2022.11One paper accepted to AAAI 2022.
• 2022.09One paper accepted to NeurIPS 2022.
• 2021.05One paper accepted to KDD 2021.
• 2021.12Won Bronze Prize in the ML4CO Competition at NeurIPS 2021.

Selected PublicationsGoogle Scholar ↗

* denotes equal contribution.

SemanticVLA: Towards Semantic Reasoning over Action Memorization via Synergistic Explicit Trace and Latent Action Planning

Fei Ni, Zhuo Chen, Yifu Yuan, Zibin Dong, Xianze Yao, Shan Luo, Jianye Hao, Jiankang Deng, Stefanos Zafeiriou.

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026.

PDF Code Models Dataset

Embodied-R1: Reinforced Embodied Reasoning for General Robotic Manipulation

Yifu Yuan, Haiqin Cui, Yaoting Huang, Yibin Chen, Fei Ni, Zibin Dong, Pengyi Li, Yan Zheng, Hongyao Tang, Jianye Hao.

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026.

arXiv Project Code Model

RoboAnnotatorX: A Comprehensive and Universal Annotation Framework for Accurate Understanding of Long-horizon Robot Demonstration

Longxin Kou*, Fei Ni*, Jianye Hao, Peilong Han, Jinyi Liu, Haiqin Cui, Rui Liu, Yan Zheng.

IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025.

arXiv Project Code Model Dataset

Embodied Arena: A Comprehensive, Unified, and Evolving Evaluation Platform for Embodied AI

Fei Ni, Min Zhang, Pengyi Li, Yifu Yuan, Lingfeng Zhang, Yuecheng Liu, Peilong Han, Longxin Kou, Shaojin Ma, et al., Jiankang Deng, Shan Luo, Shuqiang Jiang, Wei Pan, Yang Gao, Stefanos Zafeiriou, Jan Peters, Yuzheng Zhuang, Yingxue Zhang, Yan Zheng, Hongyao Tang, Jianye Hao.

arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.15273, 2025.

arXiv Project Code

PERIA: Perceive, Reason, Imagine, Act via Holistic Language and Vision Planning for Manipulation

Fei Ni, Jianye Hao, Shiguang Wu, Longxin Kou, Yifu Yuan, Zibin Dong, Jinyi Liu, MingZhi Li, Yuzheng Zhuang, Yan Zheng.

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024.

PDF OpenReview Project

KISA: A Unified Keyframe Identifier and Skill Annotator for Long-Horizon Robotics Demonstrations

Longxin Kou*, Fei Ni*, Yan Zheng, Jinyi Liu, Yifu Yuan, Zibin Dong, Jianye Hao.

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024.

PDF Project Code

Generate Subgoal Images before Act: Unlocking the Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Diffusion Model for Robot Manipulation with Multimodal Prompts

Fei Ni, Jianye Hao, Shiguang Wu, Longxin Kou, Jiashun Liu, Yan Zheng, Bin Wang, Yuzheng Zhuang.

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024.

PDF CVF

AdaptDiffuser: Diffusion Models as Adaptive Self-evolving Planners

Zhixuan Liang, Yao Mu, Mingyu Ding, Fei Ni, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Ping Luo.

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023. Oral

arXiv Project

MetaDiffuser: Diffusion Model as Conditional Planner for Offline Meta-RL

Fei Ni, Jianye Hao, Yao Mu, Yifu Yuan, Yan Zheng, Bin Wang, Zhixuan Liang.

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023.

PDF arXiv Project

A Multi-Graph Attributed Reinforcement Learning based Optimization Algorithm for Large-scale Hybrid Flow Shop Scheduling Problem

Fei Ni, Jianye Hao, Jiawen Lu, Xialiang Tong, Mingxuan Yuan, Jiahui Duan, Yi Ma, Kun He.

ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD), 2021.

Paper

Publications

Preprints

Education & Profession

• Aug. 2025 – Present Imperial College London
  Postdoctoral Research Associate, MSCA Fellow · with Prof. Stefanos Zafeiriou and Prof. Jiankang Deng.
  Research Interests: Embodied Robotics, Multimodal Learning.
• Sept. 2021 – June 2025 Tianjin University
  Ph.D. in Electronics Information Science · with Prof. Jianye Hao.
  Research Interests: Embodied Intelligence, Multimodal Large Models.
• Sept. 2018 – June 2021 Huazhong University of Science and Technology
  M.S. in Computer Science · with Prof. Kun He.
  Research Interests: Combinatorial Optimization, Reinforcement Learning.
• Sept. 2014 – June 2018 Huazhong University of Science and Technology
  B.S. in Physics & B.S. in Computer Science (dual degree).

Honors & Awards

• 2026Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship (MSCA PF 2025).
• 2025UKRI AI Research Resource (AIRR) Academic Compute Grant, UK Research and Innovation.
• 2025Outstanding Graduate of Tianjin University.
• 2025Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation of Tianjin University.
• 2024Distinguished Doctoral Engineering Innovation Award, Tianjin University.
• 2024National Scholarship.
• 2023Outstanding Internship Award, 2012 Lab of HUAWEI.
• 2022Silver Medal, Tianjin "Internet+" Innovation & Entrepreneurship Competition.
• 2021Bronze Prize, Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization (ML4CO) Competition, NeurIPS 2021.
• 2018, 2021Outstanding Graduate of Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

Invited Talks

• 2025 Department of Computing, Imperial College London
  Vision-Language-Action Models for Long-Horizon Embodied Robotics.
• 2025 RLChina 2025
  Embodied Arena: A Comprehensive Platform for Embodied AI.
• 2025 MLNLP 2025
  Towards Complex and Long-horizon Manipulation Scenarios.
• 2024 LLM4RL Workshop @ AAAI 2024 (Virtual Oral)
  Generate Subgoal Images before Act: Unlocking the Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Diffusion Model for Robot Manipulation with Multimodal Prompts.
• 2023 Distributed AI (DAI) Conference 2023, Singapore (Oral)
  Diffusion meets Decision Making: Towards better planning for robotics.
• 2023 RLChina Seminar
  KISA: A Unified Keyframe Identifier and Skill Annotator for Long-Horizon Robotics Demonstrations.
• 2023 Huawei Summit at the Pinnacle Forum
  Multimodal Technologies in Robotics: Current Applications, Future Directions and Strategic Vision.
• 2022 AI Time Youth PhD Talk
  MetaDiffuser: Diffusion as Conditional Planner for Offline Meta-RL.
• 2022 RLChina Seminar
  A Multi-Graph Attributed Reinforcement Learning based Optimization Algorithm for Large-scale Hybrid Flow Shop Scheduling Problem. [Video]

Academic Service

Conference Reviewer: CVPR, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, AISTATS, AAMAS, ICCV.

Journal Reviewer: TPAMI, IEEE T-RO, Pattern Recognition, IEEE TNNLS, KBS, IEEE TCYB, JAAMAS.