Yijun Shen (沈逸骏) is a master’s student at East China Normal University (ECNU), advised by Prof. Kai Zhang. He is currently a Research Intern at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), working on embodied agents and robotic manipulation. He received his B.Eng. degree from Hohai University in 2025, where he worked with Prof. Fan Liu. His research interests include Embodied Agents, World Models, VLA, and Long-horizon Task Planning. Originally from Shanghai, he enjoys badminton and action games outside of research.
🔍Research Interests
- Embodied Agents & Long-horizon Planning
- World Models
- Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models
🔥 News
- 2026.05: “Reward Prediction with Factorized World States” was accepted to ICML 2026 Workshop LM4Plan (Oral). 🎉🎉
- 2025.08: “Chain-of-Talkers (CoTalk): Fast Human Annotation of Dense Image Captions,” was accepted to EMNLP 2025. 🎉🎉
- 2025.03: “The Intelligent Audit Platform,” successfully completed its pilot phase and was officially deployed at the finance department of Spring Airlines. 🎉🎉
- 2024.08: As team leader, our project “E Mark: Intelligent Marking Platform” won the Second Prize in the National Computer Design Competition and the Third Prize in the National Service Outsourcing Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition. 🎉🎉
- 2024.06: Having been awarded the “Ten Outstanding and One Hundred Excellent Students” title (Top 100 university-wide). 🎓🎓
- 2023.09: “State index for interpreting the state-dependent behavior of granular soil: A review,” was accepted to Archives of Computational Methods in Engineering (IF 9.7)! 🎉🎉
📖 Educations
- 2025.09 - present, M.S. College of Computer Science and Technology, East China Normal University, supervised by Prof. Kai Zhang.
- 2021.08 - 2025.07, B.S. at College of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Hohai University, supervised by Prof. Fan Liu.
💻 Internships
- 2026.07 – Present, Research Intern, Embodied Intelligence Research Department, Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI).
- 2024.10 – 2025.03, Algorithm Intern, Spring Airlines, under the supervision of Dr. Zhenya Lin.
📝 Selected Publications
* Equal Contribution
CausGround: Causal Interaction Grounding for Adaptive Embodied Planning
Yijun Shen, Diqi He, Jinbang Guo, Wanyue Zhang, Jiaming Mi, Huan Yang, Zhongyuan Wang, Zhiwei Yu, Kai Zhang.
- We introduce CausGround, which grounds reusable action preconditions and effects from interaction experience in the current world state, enabling adaptive, training-free long-horizon embodied planning.
World Models with Configurable Perception
Yijun Shen*, Delong Chen*, Xianming Hu, Kai Zhang, Pascale Fung.
- We introduce ConfigWM, a world model with configurable perception that learns task-relevant visual representations for planning in noisy worlds.
Reward Prediction with Factorized World States
Yijun Shen*, Delong Chen*, Xianming Hu, Jiaming Mi, Hongbo Zhao, Kai Zhang, Pascale Fung.
- We introduce StateFactory, a factorized representation method that transforms unstructured observations into a hierarchical object-attribute structure for robust zero-shot reward prediction.
Chain-of-Talkers (CoTalk): Fast Human Annotation of Dense Image Captions
Yijun Shen*, Delong Chen*, Fan Liu*, Xingyu Wang, Chuanyi Zhang, Liang Yao, Yuhui Zheng.
- We propose an efficient image caption annotation method, which is a sequential cross modal input-output annotation framework, CoTalk.
👥 Co-authors
Prof. Kai Zhang, Prof. Fan Liu, Delong Chen, Liang Yao, Xingyu Wang
🏆 Competitions
- 2025, bronze medal, Kaggle —— CIBMTR - Equity in post-HCT Survival Predictions
- 2024, Second Prize, Final of National Computer Design Competition | 中国大学生计算机设计大赛全国总决赛二等奖
- 2024, Third Prize, Final of National Service Outsourcing Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition | 中国大学生服务外包创新创业大赛总决赛三等奖
- 2023, Second Prize, Final of Global Campus Artificial Intelligence Algorithm Elite Competition | 全球校园人工智能算法精英大赛全国总决赛二等奖
- 2023, Honorable Winner, The Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) | 美国大学生数学建模大赛 Meritorious Winner
🎖 Honors and Awards
- 2025, Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis, Hohai University | 河海大学优秀本科毕业论文
- 2024, “Ten Outstanding and One Hundred Excellent Students” Award, Hohai University | 河海大学海韵风华十杰百佳”优秀学生
- 2024, Outstanding Communist Youth League Cadre, Hohai University | 河海大学优秀共青团干部
- 2022, 2023, Merit Student, Hohai University | 河海大学优秀学生标兵
- 2023, 2025, Outstanding Student Leader, Hohai University | 河海大学优秀学生干部
- 2021-2025, Outstanding Undergraduate Student Scholarship, Hohai University | 河海大学优秀学生奖学金