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Hi there, I'm Hanyang(Jeremy) Chen

I am a second-year MSCS student in UIUC, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Tong Zhang. I also work closely with two other amazing advisors, Prof. Manling Li and Prof. Huan Zhang. Prior to this, I obtained my Bachelor of Science in HKU, with the thesis advised by Prof. Yanchao Yang and Prof. Yi Ma.

My interest generally lies in Learning Algorithms for Decision Making, currently I work on problems related to VLM Post-training, with application on Embodied AI and Robotics.

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 CS441: Machine Learning
  • Teaching Assistant for CS307: Data modeling and learning
  • Teaching Assistant for CS231: Computer Architecture

Hobbies & Interests

  • I love music, played piano for fun and passed ninth-grade(highest) standard piano exam
  • I like many sports, currently i devote most of the time in table tennis