Xuan Zhao

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I am a senior researcher at Noah’s Ark Lab focusing on robot learning and motion planning. My goal is to build autonomy systems that react smoothly, behave predictably and work in real environments.

I earned my PhD in robotics at City University of Hong Kong, where I was advised by Prof. Jia Pan and worked on human robot interaction and motion planning. Before that, I earned my MSc in Robotics from the University of Bristol and received my BEng from Xi’an Jiaotong University.

Research interest: imitation learning, reinforcement learning, motion planning

news

Nov 22, 2025 Launched my personal website to share updates on research and projects.

selected publications

  1. 2025_diffusion_collsiion.png
    CAPE: Context-Aware Diffusion Policy Via Proximal Mode Expansion for Collision Avoidance
    Rui Heng Yang, Xuan Zhao, Leo Maxime Brunswic, Montgomery Alban, and 4 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.22773, 2025
  2. x_il.png
    X-IL: Exploring the Design Space of Imitation Learning Policies
    Xiaogang Jia, Atalay Donat, Xi Huang, Xuan Zhao, and 7 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.12330, 2025
  3. 2025_two_step.png
    Two-Steps Diffusion Policy for Robotic Manipulation via Genetic Denoising
    Mateo Clemente, Leo Brunswic, Rui Heng Yang, Xuan Zhao, and 4 more authors
    The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025
  4. 2020_adversarial.png
    An efficient and responsive robot motion controller for safe human-robot collaboration
    Xuan Zhao, Tingxiang Fan, Yanwen Li, Yu Zheng, and 1 more author
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2021
  5. 2020_human_aware.png
    An Actor-Critic Approach for Legible Robot Motion Planner
    Xuan Zhao, Tingxiang Fan, Dawei Wang, Zhe Hu, and 2 more authors
    In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020