Bowen Yang

Bowen Yang

A Junior Student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, focusing on Robotics.

Hi, I’m Bowen Yang (杨博文)

I am a junior undergraduate at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Paris Elite Institute of Technology, majoring in Information Engineering and French. I have the privilege of working with Prof. Junchi Yan and Prof. Xiaosong Jia.

RoboMaster competition — on-robot debugging and systems check
RoboMaster competition — on-robot debugging and systems check (© RoboMaster).

I am set to graduate in June 2027 and am actively seeking research internship opportunities in robotics, embodied AI, and robot learning.

Research

My research focuses on robotics and vision–language–action (VLA) models, with an emphasis on how multimodal representations affect perception, action generation, and generalization in embodied systems.

At RethinkLab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, I work with Prof. Junchi Yan and Prof. Xiaosong Jia on robust VLA policy learning, representation alignment, and mechanism interpretability. My recent work studies how to guide action-token attention toward task-relevant factors such as object grounding, temporal skill recognition, and geometric perception.

My broader technical interests include SLAM, motion planning, sensor fusion, embedded systems, and robotic autonomy, shaped by extensive hands-on experience from RoboMaster competitions, where I served as Vice-Captain and Algorithm Lead and earned two consecutive national championships.

Back-to-Back National Championships

RoboMaster 2024 National Champion — Team Jiao Loong
National Champion 2024
RoboMaster 2025 National Champion — Team Jiao Loong
National Champion 2025

Publication

GuidedVLA: Specifying Task-Relevant Factors via Plug-and-Play Action Attention Specialization
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2026 Published: Apr 27, 2026

Xiaosong Jia*, Bowen Yang*, Zuhao Ge*, Xian Nie*, Yuchen Zhou*, Cunxin Fan*, Yufeng Li, Yilin Chai, Chao Jing, Zijian Liang, Qingwen Bu, Haidong Cao, Chao Wu, Qifeng Li, Zhenjie Yang, Chenhe Zhang, Hongyang Li, Zuxuan Wu, Junchi Yan, Yu-Gang Jiang.

* Equal contribution.

TL;DR: We explicitly guide the action decoder of VLA models to extract decoupled task-relevant factors by specifying specialized attention heads.

News

  • Apr 2026 – Our paper GuidedVLA: Specifying Task-Relevant Factors via Plug-and-Play Action Attention Specialization was accepted to Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2026.
  • Oct 2025 – Awarded the RM Award (Algorithm); contributed to SLAM and navigation supporting our team’s National Championship at RoboMaster 2025.
  • Sep 2025 – Received the National Scholarship 2025 (top 0.2% nationwide).
  • Sep 2025 – Joined RethinkLab, SJTU as a research assistant.
  • Aug 2025 – Our team won the RoboMaster University Championship National Champion (2025).
  • Feb 2025 – Selected as Finalist (Top 2%) in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM), Problem B.
  • Sep 2024 – Received the National Scholarship 2024 (top 0.2% nationwide).
  • Aug 2024 – Aug 2025 – Served as Vice-Captain and Algorithm Lead of Team Jiao Loong, directing work on SLAM, motion planning, and embedded autonomy.
  • Aug 2024 – Our team won the RoboMaster University Championship National Champion (2024).
  • Oct 2023 – Joined Team Jiao Loong, RoboMaster Team of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.