Haode Zhang 张皓德

I am a rising fourth-year undergraduate student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, majoring in Mechanical Engineering. I'm currently a visiting student at UMD, working with Prof. Ruohan Gao and Ph.D. mentor Kelin Yu. I was also fortunate to work with Prof. Wanxin Jin from ASU and Prof. Yong-Lu Li from SJTU during my undergraduate.

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Research Interests

My research interests lie in robot learning, learning-based control and human-robot interaction. I want to explore:

(1) how robots could learn from human, interact with human and collaberate with human
(2) how to use vision to build structured representations or base policies, and combining learning/model-based methods with other modalities to achieve complex, long-horizon or mobile tasks

in the future. Feel free to contact me if we share same research interests.

I am currently seeking a Ph.D. opportunity for Fall 2026 in robotics!

News

[July. 2025] Start internship at UMD, College Park, Maryland.
[June. 2025] HSBC code is released. Check our page for more details.
[May. 2025] HSBC is accepted by ICML 2025.
[August. 2024] Start internship at ASU, Tempe, Arizona.

Publications

We propose a novel geometric view of reward alignment as an iterative cutting process over the hypothesis space. Our batched cutting method significantly improves data efficiency by maximizing the value of each human preference query. We introduce a conservative cutting algorithm that ensures robustness to unknown erroneous human preferences without explicitly identifying them.

We propose Scene Dynamic Field (SDF), a cost-efficient framework that integrates physics simulators into multi-task fine-tuning, substantially improving MLLMs’ intuitive physics understanding and achieving strong generalization across physical domains.

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