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Hi there, I'm Hanyang(Jeremy) Chen

I am a 2nd year M.S and Incoming Ph.D student in UIUC Siebel School of Computer Science. I am a member of Scale-ML Lab, where I am advised by Prof. Tong Zhang. I also receive co-supervision from Prof. Huan Zhang.

My interest generally lies in Machine Learning Algorithms for Decision Making, with application on Embodied AI and Robotics.

Prior to this, I obtained my Bachelor of Science in HKU, with the thesis advised by Prof. Yanchao Yang and Prof. Yi Ma.

Recent News

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Oct 20, 2025

We got access to the UIUC Robotics Lab and started to work on Real Robots for the first time!

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Oct 14, 2025

ERA(Embodied Reasoning Agent) is finished and released! Check out if you are interested in transforming a small VLM into Embodied Agent with Pretraining and Online Reinforcement Learning.

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July 12, 2025

I am very fortunate to give an Oral Talk at ICML 2025 for our work EmbodiedBench.

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Mar 20, 2025

We released EmbodiedBench: A comprehensive evaluating system for more fine-grained understanding of the capability of VLM for embodied tasks.

Selected Publications

2025

ERA: Transforming VLMs into Embodied Agents via Embodied Prior Learning and Online Reinforcement Learning

Hanyang Chen*, Mark Zhao*, Rui Yang*, Qinwei Ma, Ke Yang, Jiarui Yao, Kangrui Wang, Hao Bai, Zhenhailong Wang, Rui Pan, Mengchao Zhang, Jose Barreiros, Aykut Onol, ChengXiang Zhai, Heng Ji, Manling Li, Huan Zhang, Tong Zhang

Preprint

Paper | Website | Code
2025

EmbodiedBench: Comprehensive Benchmarking Multi-modal Large Language Models for Vision-Driven Embodied Agents

Rui Yang*, Hanyang Chen*, Junyu Zhang*, Mark Zhao*, Cheng Qian, Kangrui Wang, Qineng Wang, Teja Venkat Koripella, Marziyeh Movahedi, Manling Li, Heng Ji, Huan Zhang, Tong Zhang

ICML 2025 (Oral)

Paper | Website | Code
2025

VAGEN: Reinforcing World Model Reasoning for Multi-Turn VLM Agents

Kangrui Wang*, Pingyue Zhang*, Zihan Wang*, Yaning Gao*, Linjie Li*, Qineng Wang, Hanyang Chen, Chi Wan, Yiping Lu, Zhengyuan Yang, Lijuan Wang, Ranjay Krishna, Jiajun Wu, Li Fei-Fei, Yejin Choi, Manling Li

NeurIPS 2025

Paper | Website | Code
2025

Visual Backdoor Attacks on MLLM Embodied Decision Making via Contrastive Trigger Learning

Qiusi Zhan*, Hyeonjeong Ha*, Rui Yang, Sirui Xu, Hanyang Chen, Liang-Yan Gui, Yu-Xiong Wang, Huan Zhang, Heng Ji, Daniel Kang

Preprint

Paper | Website | Code
2023

Mutual Information guided Visual Contrastive Learning

Hanyang Chen, Yanchao Yang

Undergraduate Thesis

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Awards & Honors

  • HKU & Tang Pik Kau, Full Tuition Scholarships from 2020-2024
  • HKU Undergraduate Scholarship for Outstanding Academic Talents
  • First Prize, National Applied Physics Competition
  • Silver medal, National Pan-Pearl River Delta Physics Competition
  • Second Prize, Chinese Physics Olympics Competition
  • First Prize, Beijing Mechanics Competition

Miscellaneous

Teaching

  • Teaching Assistant for CS443: Reinforcement Learning by Prof. Nan Jiang(This one and its theoretical version is really good, take it)
  • Teaching Assistant for CS441: Machine Learning by Prof. Dave Dalpiaz
  • Teaching Assistant for CS307: Data modeling and learning by Prof. Dave Dalpiaz
  • Teaching Assistant for CS231: Computer Architecture by Prof. Craig Zilles

Hobbies & Interests

  • I used to play piano for fun and passed ninth-grade standard piano exam
  • There are many sports i like(d), currently i devote most of the time in table tennis
  • I used to memorized the first 2000 digits of Pi forward and backward for i do not know why.