Yuke Zhu (@yukez) header
Yuke Zhu (@yukez) profile picture

Associate Professor @UTCompSci | Director @NVIDIAAI Co-Leading GEAR | CS PhD @Stanford | Building generalist robot autonomy in the wild | Opinions are my own

Austin, TX
Joined August 2008
Photo by Yuke Zhu (@yukez)Photo by Yuke Zhu (@yukez)Photo by Yuke Zhu (@yukez)Photo by Yuke Zhu (@yukez)Photo by Yuke Zhu (@yukez)Photo by Yuke Zhu (@yukez)Photo by Yuke Zhu (@yukez)Photo by Yuke Zhu (@yukez)Photo by Yuke Zhu (@yukez)Photo by Yuke Zhu (@yukez)
Meet GR00T 2, our new generation of world-action models (WAMs): it imagines how the physical world will unfold and generates the actions that get it there. One model runs on parallel grippers, dexterous hands, and humanoids. research.nvidia.com/labs/gea…
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GR00T 2 Turbo, a faster version of GR00T 2, runs onboard a humanoid with NVIDIA Jetson Thor and drives its whole body as it walks, bends, reaches, and carries: serving popcorn, wiping up spills, clearing tables.
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GR00T 2 code is coming in December. We have released 100k hours of our human video datasets on Hugging Face: huggingface.co/spaces/nvidia… Data collection hardware designs are also open-source here: research.nvidia.com/labs/gea…
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Something exciting is coming next Monday 👀
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Come to @DrJimFan's CoRL keynote talk for a sneak peek of what we've been cooking at NVIDIA GEAR: teapawt.net/DrJimFan/status/211911…
CoRL Keynote. Hilton Austin. Monday Nov 9, 1:45 pm. 2 days countdown. Something extraordinary.
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Alright, alright, alright… CoRL registration is completely maxed out, with hundreds of people on the waiting list. Please stop flooding my inbox for tickets 😂 You can still join the fun! Our partners are hosting social events all over town. We gathered the list of public events here: corl.org/program/socials Many don’t require a conference badge to attend. Let’s turn Ausitn into a Robotics Party Town!
CoRL is now sold out. We have an incredible program lined up. Can't wait to see y'all in Austin next week! corl.org/program
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CoRL is now sold out. We have an incredible program lined up. Can't wait to see y'all in Austin next week! corl.org/program
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Yuke Zhu retweeted
Introducing Flora, an open model suite for scaling robotics data engines. It watches robot and human video and annotate what happened (timestamped instructions) and how well it went (rewards and failure reasons). 🔗 research.nvidia.com/labs/gea… We use it to train NVIDIA GR00T. 🧵
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ASPIRE is now open-source! Since our initial release, we've made exciting progress: 🤖 Real-world robot manipulation with GPT-6 Astra. 🔄 Continual skill refinement on physical robots. 📈 Saturated simulation benchmarks: 99% on LIBERO-Pro (80 tasks), 100% on Robosuite (7 representative tasks), and 100% on BEHAVIOR-1K (2 representative tasks). Code: github.com/NVlabs/ASPIRE Project: research.nvidia.com/labs/gea… 🧵 More results in the thread below.
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Sharing a copy of my ICRA'26 keynote talk from three months ago. 3 key messages: 1. Building a human-like machine, a dream that has fascinated humankind for centuries, is rapidly becoming a reality. 2. Human data is, by far, the most scalable source of training data to fuel robot foundation models. 3. World models are a "data sponge" that can absorb massive amounts of multimodal data for policy generalization. Video: youtube.com/watch?v=cNU_8t7i… Slides: yukezhu.me/talks/building_ge… The talk brought together our work over the past year: GR00T, EgoScale, SONIC, WAM, and more. Here’s the same demo I showed on stage: Our (now old!) model learning to assemble the YCB airplane with zero teleop data. We've made incredible progress since then. What's coming next? 🚀
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CoRL 2026 paper decisions are out — check them out on OpenReview! As General Chair, I'm delighted to welcome you to #CoRL2026 in Austin, TX, this November. We expect tickets to sell out quickly, so please register early! corl.org/attending/registrat…
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SimFoundry is now open source. Explore it here: github.com/NVlabs/SimFoundry Give it a try and tell us what you think!
Today, we're introducing SimFoundry, our real2sim2real framework at NVIDIA GEAR that automatically turns real-world scenes into simulation-ready worlds from a single image or video. Website: research.nvidia.com/labs/gea… Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2606.28276 This work marks a major step for our team toward leveraging simulations and synthetic data for foundation model training and systematic policy evaluation at scale. Code will be open-sourced soon. Stay tuned!
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SONIC is officially published in Science Robotics today and it made the Science front page. We show the promise of scaling motion tracking toward natural, robust whole-body control for humanoid robots. Huge thanks to the team, and more exciting work is on the way. Paper: science.org/doi/10.1126/scir… Code: nvlabs.github.io/GEAR-SONIC
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Proud to be building open robotics models @NVIDIA. Open research FTW!
For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter. AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models. images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-W…
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📢 CoRL early-career keynote nominations are due July 30. Early-career researchers: we encourage reaching out to someone who knows your work well and asking whether they’d consider nominating you. ➡️Nominations: CoRL website.
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Success rate has long been the primary metric for evaluating robot manipulation. What about speed? Today, we introduce ⚡️B-spline Policy (BSP). Instead of predicting discrete fixed-rate action chunks, we parameterize actions as continuous B-spline curves. Together with our system design, BSP enables fast manipulation on low-cost robot arms. This project is co-led by @xshenhan, check out his following threads for more details. 🧵 PS: one of my favorite parts of this project was the first time we saw the robots move significantly faster and smoother than the baselines. The videos below are all real time. 👇
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Yuke Zhu retweeted
We scaled a robot model natively to 8,000 timesteps of context, 5 minutes worth of muscle memory, with constant inference cost. Robot policies used to live their lives a few frames at a time (< 0.1 sec), instantly forgetting what just happened. We pushed to 3 orders of magnitude beyond SOTA. Introducing RoboTTT. Test-Time Training (“TTT”) carries a tiny model *inside* the model. Every incoming sensor reading triggers one gradient step on that tiny core, so the history keeps getting compressed into its weights. The hidden state has a fixed size (literally a small neural net), so the robot can “grok” arbitrarily long experience with little overhead. Learning continues indefinitely after deployment. We can then put an entire video in context as prompt! RoboTTT enables one-shot in-context learning from human video: in circuit board assembly, a human demonstrates a never-seen configuration once, and the robot imitates it faithfully. Humans drop things all the time, but we pick them up so fast that we don’t even notice. That reflex to fix is half of our physical competence. RoboTTT shows self-improvement on the fly: the robot is skilled at recovering from its own errors mid-episode, and each fix enters its context to inform the next move. The TTT core distills a general-purpose, failure-to-correction mapping from the training data. One more thing. What excites me the most is a new Context Scaling Curve: from 128 to 8K timesteps, closed-loop performance hill-climbs steadily with no sign of saturation. 8K-context pretraining beats 1K by 62%. What LLM enjoys, robotics should too. Soon, even 1M context is not a fantasy. Deep dive in thread:
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