| CARVIEW |
About me
I am a Robotics Ph.D student at Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science, CMU, advised by Prof. Sebastian Scherer. (I've been working with Basti since RISS 2021). I also collaborate closely with Prof. Tom Silver, Dr. Alex Gray and Prof. Chen Wang.
Prior to CMU, I obtained my B.ENG in Mechanical Engineering from Tongji University (TJU) with National Scholarship, and Shanghai Scholarship, where I focused on UAV tracking in Vision4robotics Group. I was also fortunate to work with Prof. Hang Zhao in the MARS Lab at QiZhi Institute.
My past (undergrad/master) research were about Generalizable Object Perception in Challenging Environments, details see Here.
Now (Ph.D. thesis topic), I work on Learning to Reason and Plan for Robots. Specifically, I'm excited about how robots can learn to achieve long-horizon physical tasks (with thousands to millions of low-level steps) in a generalizable, efficient, and smart way. Techniques that I am particularly interested in and actively working on include:
Education
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Ph. D. in Robotics
Sept. 2022 -- presentCarnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh
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Master of Science in Robotics
Sept. 2022 -- Dec. 2024Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh
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B.Eng. of Mechanical Engnieering
Sept. 2018 -- Jul. 2022Tongji University, Shanghai
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High School Student
Sept. 2015 -- Jun. 2018No.1 Middle School Attached to Central China Normal University
News
- 12/2025: One paper submitted to TR-O-FoundationModel, fingers crossed.
- 11/2025: I gave a talk at PRPL@Princeton, great discussion!!
- 10/2025: I gave a talk at SBPL@CMU, great discussion!!
- 08/2025: I gave a talk at NSSS'25. Super excited to share the same research interest with Prof. Richard Sutton!
- 06/2025: I am attending RSS'25 to present one workshop and one conference paper! Happy to meet you there!
- 04/2025: IVNTR has been accepted by RSS'25, stay tuned!
- 12/2024: I obtained Master's degree in robotics!
- 10/2024: I have satisfied the Robotics Ph.D. (speaking) Qualification!!
- 09/2024: LogiCity is accepted by NeurIPS'24 D&B Track!! Stay Tuned!!
Selected Publications
Bowen Li, Tom Silver, Sebastian Scherer, Alexander Gray
RSS 2025 [Paper] [Project] [Code]
"A bilevel learning framework that invents neural predicates for long-horizon hybrid planning."
Bowen Li, Zhaoyu Li, Qiwei Du, Jinqi Luo, Wenshan Wang, Yaqi Xie, Simon Stepputtis, Chen Wang, Katia Sycara, Pradeep Ravikumar, Alexander Gray, Xujie Si, Sebastian Scherer*
NeurIPS 2024 D&B Track [Project] [Paper] [Code, Data]
"A flexible First-Order Logical abstraction-based multi-agent urban simulator, where LLMs fail."
Bowen Li, Jiashun Wang, Yaoyu Hu, Chen Wang, Sebastian Scherer*
NeurIPS 2023 (★ SpotLight ★) [Paper] [Project] [Code, Data]
"A 3D-inspired framework for detecting ANY (Novel) specific instance in the wild."
Bowen Li^, Ziyuan Huang^, Junjie Ye, Yiming Li, Sebastian Scherer, Hang Zhao, Changhong Fu*
ICCV 2023 [Paper] [Project] [Code]
"A simple, general, and effective framework for end-to-end predictive tracking that largely compentes for onboard latency."
Bowen Li, Chen Wang, Pranay Reddy, Seungchan Kim, Sebastian Scherer*
ECCV 2022 [Paper] [Project] [Code]
"Leverage class-agnostic relation to implement few-shot detection w/o fine-tuning, which enables fast and efficient robotic exploration."
Selected Pre-Prints
Isabel Liu, Bowen Li, Benjamin Eysenbach, Tom Silver,
[Paper] [Code]
"A general framework for automated shortcut physical option discovery on provided hierarchical planners."
Qianwei Wang*, Bowen Li*, Zhanpeng Luo, Yifan Xu, Alexander Gray, Tom Silver, Sebastian Scherer Katia Sycara, Yaqi Xie,
[Paper] [Project]
"An LLM-in-the-loop agentic framework for discovering and optimizing deep predicates on real images."
Awards
- Gibbons-Newell Graduate Fellowship 2023@RI, Carnegie Mellon University
- National Scholarship (top 1%, twice) for Undergraduates
- Shanghai Scholarship (top 2%) for Undergraduates
- Robotics Institute Summer Scholar (RISS2021), Carnegie Mellon University
- Excellent Student (top 1%), Tongji University
- Academic Star Model of Tongji University (Ranking 1st)
Service
Academic Reviewer
- International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
- International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
- Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
- IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
- IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
- European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)
- IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
- International Journal on Robotics Research (IJRR)
- IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
- IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Area Chair
- ICRA 2025 Workshop on Foundation Models and Neural-Symbolic AI for Robotics (FMNS)
Current and Past Affiliations
Mentors and Collaborators
Prof. Sebastian Scherer@CMU
Prof. Tom Silver@Princeton
Dr. Alexander Gray@Centaur AI
Prof. Chen Wang@Buffalo
Prof. Changhong Fu@Tongji
Prof. Hang Zhao@Tsinghua
Contact
- bowenli2@cs.cmu.edu
- +1-412-608-2217
- 1723 Murray Ave, Robotics Institute SQH, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15217, USA