Photo of Boyuan Chen

About Me

I'm Boyuan Chen (陈博远), an AI researcher and roboticist at MIT. I am currently a fourth year PhD student working with Prof. Russ Tedrake and Prof. Vincent Sitzmann. I am interested in model-based reinforcement learning, generative world models and robotics. I hope to leverage video world models trained on internet-scale data as planners for general-purpose robots, replicating LLM's success but for the visual world, and eventually solve robotics.

Previously, I interned at Google Deepmind and Google X. I obtained my bachelor's degree in computer science and math at UC Berkeley, where I spent a signficant amount of time doing research at Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) on deep reinforcement learning and unsupervised learning. I also spent a year studying philosophy during my undergrad. I am a big fan of chess, robots and boba.

My research

History-Guided Video Diffusion
Kiwhan Song*, Boyuan Chen*, Max Simchowitz, Yilun Du, Russ Tedrake, Vincent Sitzmann
* Equal contribution
arXiv 2025

website | paper | abstract | bibtex
@misc{song2025historyguidedvideodiffusion,
  title={History-Guided Video Diffusion}, 
  author={Kiwhan Song and Boyuan Chen and Max Simchowitz and Yilun Du and Russ Tedrake and Vincent Sitzmann},
  year={2025},
  eprint={2502.06764},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.LG},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06764}, 
}
              

Diffusion Forcing: Next-token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusion
Boyuan Chen, Diego Marti Monso, Yilun Du, Max Simchowitz, Russ Tedrake, Vincent Sitzmann
NeurIPS 2024 (Conference of Neural Information Processing Systems)

website | paper | abstract | bibtex
@article{chen2025diffusion,
  title={Diffusion forcing: Next-token prediction meets full-sequence diffusion},
  author={Chen, Boyuan and Mart{\'\i} Mons{\'o}, Diego and Du, Yilun and Simchowitz, Max and Tedrake, Russ and Sitzmann, Vincent},
  journal={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  volume={37},
  pages={24081--24125},
  year={2025}
}
              

SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities
Boyuan Chen, Zhuo Xu, Sean Kirmani, Brian Ichter, Danny Driess, Pete Florence, Dorsa Sadigh, Leonidas Guibas, Fei Xia
CVPR 2024 (Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition)

website | paper | abstract | bibtex
@InProceedings{Chen_2024_CVPR,
    author    = {Chen, Boyuan and Xu, Zhuo and Kirmani, Sean and Ichter, Brain and Sadigh, Dorsa and Guibas, Leonidas and Xia, Fei},
    title     = {SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2024},
    pages     = {14455-14465}
}
              

DittoGym: Learning to Control Soft Shape-Shifting Robots
Suning Huang, Boyuan Chen, Huazhe Xu, Vincent Sitzmann
ICLR 2024 (International Conference on Learning Representations)

website | paper | abstract | bibtex
@misc{huang2024dittogym,
  title={DittoGym: Learning to Control Soft Shape-Shifting Robots}, 
  author={Suning Huang and Boyuan Chen and Huazhe Xu and Vincent Sitzmann},
  year={2024},
  eprint={2401.13231},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.RO}
}
              

Self-Supervised Reinforcement Learning that Transfers using Random Features
Boyuan Chen, Chuning Zhu, Pulkit Agrawal, Kaiqing Zhang, Abhishek Gupta
NeurIPS 2023 (Conference of Neural Information Processing Systems)

website | paper | abstract | bibtex
@article{chen2024self,
  title={Self-supervised reinforcement learning that transfers using random features},
  author={Chen, Boyuan and Zhu, Chuning and Agrawal, Pulkit and Zhang, Kaiqing and Gupta, Abhishek},
  journal={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  volume={36},
  year={2024}
}
              

Open-vocabulary Queryable Scene Representations for Real World Planning
Boyuan Chen, Fei Xia, Brian Ichter, Kanishka Rao, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Michael S. Ryoo, Austin Stone, Daniel Kappler
ICRA 2023 (International Conference on Robotics and Automation)

website | paper | abstract | bibtex | talk video
@inproceedings{chen2023open,
  title={Open-vocabulary queryable scene representations for real world planning},
  author={Chen, Boyuan and Xia, Fei and Ichter, Brian and Rao, Kanishka and Gopalakrishnan, Keerthana and Ryoo, Michael S and Stone, Austin and Kappler, Daniel},
  booktitle={2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  pages={11509--11522},
  year={2023},
  organization={IEEE}
}
              

Unsupervised Learning of Visual 3D Keypoints for Control
Boyuan Chen, Pieter Abbeel, Deepak Pathak
ICML 2021 (International Conference on Machine Learning)

website | paper | abstract | bibtex | code | talk video
@inproceedings{chen2021unsupervised,
  title={Unsupervised learning of visual 3d keypoints for control},
  author={Chen, Boyuan and Abbeel, Pieter and Pathak, Deepak},
  booktitle={International Conference on Machine Learning},
  pages={1539--1549},
  year={2021},
  organization={PMLR}
}
              

Zero-shot Policy Learning with Spatial Temporal Reward Decomposition on Contingency-aware Observation
Boyuan Chen*, Huazhe Xu*, Yang Gao and Trevor Darrell
ICRA 2021 (International Conference on Robotics and Automation)

website | paper | abstract | bibtex | code |
@inproceedings{xu2021zero,
  title={Zero-shot policy learning with spatial temporal reward decomposition on contingency-aware observation},
  author={Xu, Huazhe and Chen, Boyuan and Gao, Yang and Darrell, Trevor},
  booktitle={2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  pages={10786--10792},
  year={2021},
  organization={IEEE}
}
              

Discovering Diverse Multi-agent Strategic Behavior via Reward Randomization
Zhenggang Tang, Chao Yu, Boyuan Chen, Huazhe Xu, Xiaolong Wang, Fei Fang, Simon Shaolei Du, Yu Wang, Yi Wu
ICLR 2021 (International Conference on Learning Representations)

website | paper | abstract | bibtex | code |
@misc{tang2021discovering,
    title={Discovering Diverse Multi-Agent Strategic Behavior via Reward Randomization}, 
    author={Zhenggang Tang and Chao Yu and Boyuan Chen and Huazhe Xu and Xiaolong Wang and Fei Fang and Simon Du and Yu Wang and Yi Wu},
    year={2021},
    eprint={2103.04564},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    primaryClass={cs.AI}
}
                            

MISC

  • Robots
  • Cooking
  • Teams
Robomooc Robotics Kit

I designed it with my friend, Kinsky. We sold it as an education kit to schools. You can ride on it!

Robomaster ICRA challenge

DJI robomaster robot for ICRA AI Challenge. During my undergrad, I was the captain of the team, leading the development of autonomous algorithms in the robot shooting challenge.

Autonomous Bogie Rover

My personal robot that can handle a variety of terrains. I did everything from machanical design, electronics to programming. It uses computer vision to autonomously follow me and avoid obstables.

FRC 2017 Robot

In 2017, I founded my high school's first FRC team. We didn't have the mentorship nor funding we need, but the team did amazing. I did the majority of the design.

PR2 in RLL

In 2021, I graduated from UC Berkeley, where I spent some amazing time doing research in robotics learning lab.

Autonomous Drone

An autonomous drone which I built and coded. I installed a camera a mini railgun on it to track and aim at the target I select.

FTC 2017 Robot

Our FTC competition robot in 2017, when I became the captain of the team. It's my team's first robot designed with CAD. The robot won the east China regional.

My first ftc robot

In 2016, I participanted in robotics competition for the first time. This is a super cool robot which marks the beginning of my robotics journey.

FRC 2018 Robot

After my graduation from high school, I continued mentoring the team. My successor Xinpei designed the robot under my mentorship.

Blog