Gen Li

On Westminster Bridge, London (2025)

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), working with Jianfei Yang at the MARS Lab. I completed my PhD in Robotics and Autonomous Systems at the University of Edinburgh, where I was supervised by Laura Sevilla and co-supervised by Timothy Hospedales. I was fortunate to be partially supported through Google DeepMind and Stability AI, where I collaborated with Deqing Sun and Varun Jampani.

🎯 My research aims to build intelligent physical agents that can perceive, reason, and act in real-world environments with human-like capability and high efficiency. This spans topics including:

Embodied AI: Robot Learning, VLA, RL
Multimodal AI: VLMs, MLLMs
Generative AI: Image / Video Generation, World Models
Efficient AI: Transfer Learning, Learning under Limited Data & Supervision
Human / Robot Interaction: Human-Robot collaboration, Human-to-Robot Learning

📢 If you are interested in these topics and would like to explore working together, please feel free to reach out via email.

news

Mar 24, 2026	📖 Invited to serve as an Area Chair for NeurIPS 2026!
Feb 21, 2026	🎉 Evo-1 and PALM are accepted to CVPR 2026!
Feb 11, 2026	📖 Invited to serve as an Area Chair for BMVC 2026!
Nov 08, 2025	🎉 Mask2IV has been accepted to AAAI 2026.
Sep 15, 2025	💂 Started my new position as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at NTU!
Jun 26, 2025	🎉 Two papers accepted to ICCV 2025. See you in Hawaii!
May 28, 2025	📖 Invited to serve as a Reviewer for Nature Machine Intelligence!

selected publications

CVPR’26

Evo-1: Lightweight Vision-Language-Action Model with Preserved Semantic Alignment

Tao Lin, Yilei Zhong, Yuxin Du, Jingjing Zhang, Jiting Liu, and 9 more authors

In IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2026

arXiv Bib Code Website

@inproceedings{evo1,
  title = {Evo-1: Lightweight Vision-Language-Action Model with Preserved Semantic Alignment},
  author = {Lin, Tao and Zhong, Yilei and Du, Yuxin and Zhang, Jingjing and Liu, Jiting and Chen, Yinxinyu and Gu, Encheng and Liu, Ziyan and Cai, Hongyi and Zou, Yanwen and Zou, Lixing and Zhou, Zhaoye and Li, Gen and Zhao, Bo},
  year = {2026},
  booktitle = {IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
}

AAAI’26

Mask2IV: Interaction-Centric Video Generation via Mask Trajectories

Gen Li, Bo Zhao, Jianfei Yang, and Laura Sevilla-Lara

In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2026

arXiv Bib Code Website

@inproceedings{Mask2IV,
  title = {Mask2IV: Interaction-Centric Video Generation via Mask Trajectories},
  author = {Li, Gen and Zhao, Bo and Yang, Jianfei and Sevilla-Lara, Laura},
  year = {2026},
  booktitle = {AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
}

ICCV’25

Learning Precise Affordances from Egocentric Videos for Robotic Manipulation

Gen Li, Nikolaos Tsagkas, Jifei Song, Ruaridh Mon-Williams, Sethu Vijayakumar, and 2 more authors

In IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, 2025

arXiv Bib Code Website

@inproceedings{Aff-Grasp,
  title = {Learning Precise Affordances from Egocentric Videos for Robotic Manipulation},
  author = {Li, Gen and Tsagkas, Nikolaos and Song, Jifei and Mon-Williams, Ruaridh and Vijayakumar, Sethu and Shao, Kun and Sevilla-Lara, Laura},
  year = {2025},
  booktitle = {IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision},
}

NMI

Embodied Large Language Models Enable Robots to Complete Complex Tasks in Unpredictable Environments

Ruaridh Mon-Williams^†, Gen Li^†, Ran Long, Wenqian Du, and Chris Lucas

Nature Machine Intelligence, 2025

Bib PDF Video Code

@article{ELLMER,
  title = {Embodied Large Language Models Enable Robots to Complete Complex Tasks in Unpredictable Environments},
  author = {Mon-Williams, Ruaridh and Li, Gen and Long, Ran and Du, Wenqian and Lucas, Chris},
  journal = {Nature Machine Intelligence},
  year = {2025},
}

CVPR’24

One-Shot Open Affordance Learning with Foundation Models

Gen Li, Deqing Sun, Laura Sevilla-Lara, and Varun Jampani

In IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2024

arXiv Bib Code Website

@inproceedings{OOAL,
  title = {One-Shot Open Affordance Learning with Foundation Models},
  author = {Li, Gen and Sun, Deqing and Sevilla-Lara, Laura and Jampani, Varun},
  booktitle = {IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
  year = {2024},
}

CVPR’23

LOCATE: Localize and Transfer Object Parts for Weakly Supervised Affordance Grounding

Gen Li, Varun Jampani, Deqing Sun, and Laura Sevilla-Lara

In IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2023

arXiv Bib Code Website

@inproceedings{LOCATE,
  title = {LOCATE: Localize and Transfer Object Parts for Weakly Supervised Affordance Grounding},
  author = {Li, Gen and Jampani, Varun and Sun, Deqing and Sevilla-Lara, Laura},
  booktitle = {IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
  year = {2023},
}

CVPR’21

Adaptive Prototype Learning and Allocation for Few-Shot Segmentation

Gen Li, Varun Jampani, Laura Sevilla-Lara, Deqing Sun, Jonghyun Kim, and 1 more author

In IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2021

arXiv Bib Code Website

@inproceedings{ASGNet,
  title = {Adaptive Prototype Learning and Allocation for Few-Shot Segmentation},
  author = {Li, Gen and Jampani, Varun and Sevilla-Lara, Laura and Sun, Deqing and Kim, Jonghyun and Kim, Joongkyu},
  booktitle = {IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
  pages = {8334--8343},
  year = {2021},
}