Lester Li
Contact: sizheli [at] mit [dot] edu
I am a PhD student in Computer Science at MIT CSAIL, advised by Vincent Sitzmann and Josh Tenenbaum . My research is supported by the MIT Presidential Fellowship.
Research Objectives. I study how robots can learn to model their bodies and the physical world, predict the consequences of their actions, and use these predictions for planning and control. My work connects representation learning, generative modeling, and physical reasoning, with the goal of enabling robots to generalize across tasks, environments, and embodiments.
News
| May 27, 2026 | We released VERA, a video-model-based generalist robot policy. Read the paper and the announcement. |
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| Jul 07, 2025 | Thank you Forbes, MIT News, and DeepTech深科技 for covering our recent work! |
| Mar 23, 2025 | Very excited to share my blog post on robot modeling and representation! A tutorial of Jacobian Fields with code. |
| Jul 15, 2024 | Check out our new preprint on learning representation of robotic embodiment! |
Blog
| Mar 15, 2025 | Rethinking Robot Modeling and Representations |
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Student Mentorship
- Evan Kim OpenAI, Pretraining Team
- Isabella Yu UC Berkeley, EECS PhD student
