Justin Yu

Justin Yu

PhD Student · AI & Robotics · UC Berkeley


About

I am a third-year PhD student in the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) group, specializing in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. My research interests include robot learning for manipulation, code-as-policy, real-to-sim-to-real, and reward function learning. Broadly, I focus on developing systems and algorithms that enable real-world robots to learn and improve on practical manipulation tasks.

I am advised by Ken Goldberg in the AUTOLab and am supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP). I graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2023.

Interactive 3D Scenes — click & drag to orbit
 Click & drag to explore

Egocentric Manipulation Interface (EgoMI)

 Click & drag to explore

Real2Render2Real (R2R2R)

Education
2020 - 2023
2016 - 2020
Experience
Jun 2025 -
AI & Robotics PhD Research Intern
May 2023 - Aug 2023
Software Engineering Intern
Aug 2020 - May 2023
Nov 2021 - May 2023
RF Wireless Communications Electrical Team Lead
Jun 2018 - Jun 2020
Head of Mechanical Build & Design

Research Publications
2026 arXiv Preprint

WARP-RM: A Warp-Augmented Relative Progress Reward Model for Data Curation

Justin Yu*, Andrew Goldberg*, Kavish Kondap*, Karim El-Refai*, Ethan Ransing, Qianzhong Chen, Mac Schwager, Yide Shentu, Philipp Wu, Ken Goldberg

2026 arXiv Preprint

Scalable Behavior Cloning with Open Data, Training, and Evaluation

Arthur Allshire*, Himanshu Gaurav Singh*, Ritvik Singh*, Adam Rashid*, Hongsuk Choi*, David McAllister*, Justin Yu, Yiyuan Chen, Huang Huang, Pieter Abbeel, Xi Chen, Rocky Duan, Phillip Isola, Jitendra Malik, Fred Shentu, Guanya Shi, Philipp Wu, Angjoo Kanazawa

2026 arXiv Preprint

SARM2: Multi-Task Stage Aware Reward Modeling for Self Improving Robotic Manipulation

Qianzhong Chen, Hau Zheng, Justin Yu, Suning Huang, Jiankai Sun, Ken Goldberg, Chuan Wen, Pieter Abbeel, Yide Shentu, Philipp Wu, Mac Schwager

2026 arXiv Preprint

Playful Agentic Robot Learning

Junyi Zhang*, Jiaxin Ge*, Hanjun Yoo, Letian Fu, Zihan Yang, Yaowei Liu, Raj Saravanan, Shaofeng Yin, Justin Yu, Dantong Niu, Zirui Wang, Roei Herzig, Ken Goldberg, Yutong Bai, David M. Chan, Ion Stoica, Angjoo Kanazawa, Jiahui Lei, Haiwen Feng, Trevor Darrell

ICML 2026 · Seoul

CaP-X: A Framework for Benchmarking and Improving Coding Agents for Robot Manipulation

Letian Fu*, Justin Yu*, Karim El-Refai*, Ethan Kou*, Haoru Xue*, Huang Huang, Wenli Xiao, Guanzhi Wang, Fei Fei Li, Guanya Shi, Jiajun Wu, Shankar Sastry, Yuke Zhu, Ken Goldberg, Linxi "Jim" Fan

ICRA 2026 · Vienna

EgoMI: Learning Active Vision and Whole-Body Manipulation from Egocentric Human Demonstrations

Justin Yu*, Yide Shentu*, Di Wu, Pieter Abbeel, Ken Goldberg, Philipp Wu

ICLR 2026 · Rio de Janeiro

SARM: Stage-Aware Reward Modeling for Long Horizon Robot Manipulation

Qianzhong Chen, Justin Yu, Mac Schwager, Pieter Abbeel, Yide Shentu, Philipp Wu

CoRL 2025 · Seoul Oral

Real2Render2Real: Scaling Robot Data Without Dynamics Simulation or Robot Hardware

Justin Yu*, Letian Fu*, Huang Huang, Karim El-Refai, Rares Ambrus, Richard Cheng, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Ken Goldberg

ICRA 2025 · Atlanta Oral

POGS: Persistent Object Gaussian Splat for Tracking Human and Robot Manipulation of Irregularly Shaped Objects

Justin Yu*, Kush Hari*, Karim El-Refai*, Arnav Dalal, Justin Kerr, Chung Min Kim, Richard Cheng, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Ken Goldberg

IROS 2024 · Abu Dhabi Oral

LEGS: Incrementally Building Room-Scale Language-Embedded Gaussian Splats with a Mobile Robot

Justin Yu*, Kush Hari*, Kishore Srinivas*, Karim El-Refai, Adam Rashid, Chung Min Kim, Justin Kerr, Richard Cheng, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Ashwin Balakrishna, Thomas Kollar, Ken Goldberg

MANIP
IROS 2024 · Abu Dhabi

MANIP: Integrating Interactive Perception into Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation Systems

Justin Yu*, Tara Sadjadpour*, Abby O'Neill, Mehdi Khfifi, Lawrence Yunliang Chen, Richard Cheng, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Ashwin Balakrishna, Thomas Kollar, Ken Goldberg

CoRL 2021 · London

Legged Robot State Estimation using Invariant Kalman Filtering and Learned Contact Events

Tzu-Yuan Lin, Ray Zhang, Justin Yu, Maani Ghaffari


Projects

I2RT YAM Active Leader Arms (In Progress)

Weekend project to develop open source hardware and software for I2RT YAM leader arms (imitation learning teaching devices).

Realtime Robots Control Package

Open source software package to control real-world robot arms including the I2RT YAMs, Franka Panda.

YuMi IRB14000 Bimanual Robot Realtime Control Package

Open source software package to control the ABB YuMi IRB14000 bimanual robot in realtime (240Hz) through control interfaces including: interactive websocket GUI, Meta Quest VR Controllers, and autonomous Diffusion Policy (shown), PI0-FAST and NVIDIA-GR00T VLA models.

3D-Printed Quadrupedal Robot

3D-Printed Quadrupedal Robot

Personal project to design (mechanical electrical & software) and build a quadrupedal robot from scratch.

3D-Printed 6DoF Robot Arm

Personal project over the covid-19 quarantine to build a 6DoF robot arm platform from scratch.

2023 Michigan Mars Rover - Dahlia

2023 Michigan Mars Rover - Dahlia

Affiliation: Team Lead - RF Wireless Communications for University of Michigan Mars Rover team
Dahlia received a System Acceptance Review score of 92.21/100!

2022 Michigan Mars Rover - Rosie

2022 Michigan Mars Rover - Rosie

Affiliation: Team Lead - RF Wireless Communications for University of Michigan Mars Rover team
Rosie received a System Acceptance Review score of 90.97/100 and finished FIRST PLACE at the URC and CIRC competitions!

2021 Michigan Mars Rover - Blue

2021 Michigan Mars Rover - Blue

Affiliation: Robotic Arm Hardware Designer for University of Michigan Mars Rover team
Though in-person competition was cancelled due to the pandemic, we were still judged on our submission, receiving a System Acceptance Review score of 93.09/100!

2020 FRC Robot - Cheems

2020 FRC Robot - Cheems

Affiliation: Team Lead - Mechanical Design and Fabrication for 3128 Aluminum Narwhals.
Cheems is a transforming arm robot with a ball shooter at the end of the large arm. Unfortunately, the season was cut short due to the pandemic.

2019 FRC Robot - Gromit

2019 FRC Robot - Gromit

Affiliation: Team Lead - Mechanical Design and Fabrication for 3128 Aluminum Narwhals.
Gromit ranked 1st seed at Monterey Bay Regional and advanced to become an Alliance Captain at the FRC World Championship in Houston.

2018 FRC Robot - Guido

2018 FRC Robot - Guido

Affiliation: Member of Mechanical Design and Fabrication for 3128 Aluminum Narwhals.
Guido joined the first seeded team in the World Championship event, but was unfortunately eliminated in finals matches.

2017 FRC Robot - Ferb

2017 FRC Robot - Ferb

Affiliation: Member of Mechanical Design and Fabrication for 3128 Aluminum Narwhals.
Ferb became the Finalist Alliance Captain at the San Diego Regional, securing a spot at the FRC World Championship in Houston.