Hi, I am Yibin!

I am a second-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Northwestern University, where I am a member of the Xenobot Lab advised by Prof. Sam Kriegman.

Previously, I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Mathematics, as well as my Master’s degree in Computer Science, from NYU Courant. I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Lerrel Pinto and Prof. Lakshminarayanan Subramanian.

My research focuses on robot learning and evolutionary robotics, exploring how robot bodies, sensing, and learned behaviors can develop together. My earlier work studied multimodal behavior learning and robotic manipulation in both simulated and real-world environments. I currently combine evolutionary algorithms with machine learning to jointly optimize robot morphologies and control policies, with an emphasis on preserving and reusing knowledge across changing embodiments. More broadly, I am interested in structured representations for robot design, the co-evolution of bodies and sensors, and vision-language-action models and world models for robotic planning and control.