Carl (Hanwen) Qi

I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin, where I am advised by Prof. Amy Zhang.

Pror to UT, I obtained my Master's degree at CMU, where I was advised by Prof. David Held. I obtained my undergraduate degree in CS and Applied Math at UC Berkeley, where I was fortunate to work with Prof. Pieter Abbeel and Prof. Aditya Grover.

carlq@utexas.edu  /  CV  /  LinkedIn  /  Google Scholar

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News and Updates
  • Jan. 2025: Our paper on Entity-Centric Diffuser is accepted to ICLR.
  • Jan. 2025: Our paper on Null Counterfactual Factor Interactions is accepted to ICLR.
  • Oct. 2024: Our paper on Robot Air Hockey is accepted to ICRA Workshop on Manipulation Skills.
  • Research

    I'm broadly interested in Reinforcement Learning, Computer Vision, and Robotics. My specific interests include object-centric learning, long-horizon reasoning, and generalization. My long-term research goal is to allow autonomous agents to act and learn in unstructured real world environments.

    EC-Diffuser: Multi-Object Manipulation via Entity-Centric Behavior Generation
    Carl Qi, Dan Haramati, Tal Daniel, Aviv Tamar, Amy Zhang
    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
    Paper / Project Page / Code

    Null Counterfactual Factor Interactions for Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
    Caleb Chuck, Fan Feng, Carl Qi, Chang Shi, Siddhant Agarwal, Amy Zhang, Scott Niekum
    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
    Paper

    Robot Air Hockey: A Manipulation Testbed for Robot Learning with Reinforcement Learning
    Caleb Chuck*, Carl Qi*, Michael Joseph Munje*, Shuozhe Li*, Max Rudolph*, Chang Shi*, Siddhant Agarwal*, Harshit Sikchi*, Abhinav Peri, Sarthak Dayal, Evan Kuo, Kavan Mehta, Anthony Wang, Peter Stone, Amy Zhang, Scott Niekum
    ICRA Workshop Manipulation Skills, 2024
    Paper / Project Page / Code (coming soon)

    Learning Generalizable Tool-use Skills through Trajectory Generation
    Carl Qi*, Yilin Wu*, Lifan Yu, Haoyue, Liu, Bowen Jiang, Xingyu Lin**, David Held**
    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024
    Paper / Project Page / Code

    Planning with Spatial-Temporal Abstraction from Point Clouds for Deformable Object Manipulation
    Xingyu Lin*, Carl Qi*, Yunchu Zhang, Zhiao Huang, Katerina Fragkiadaki, Yunzhu Li, Chuang Gan, David Held
    Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2022
    Paper / OpenReview / Project Page / Code

    Learning Closed-loop Dough Manipulation using a Differentiable Reset Module
    Carl Qi, Xingyu Lin, David Held
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2022
    Paper / Project Page / Code

    Covered by [The Washington Post] [CMU SCS News (robots roll dough)]
    Imitating, Fast and Slow: Robust learning from demonstrations via decision-time planning
    Carl Qi, Pieter Abbeel, Aditya Grover
    Preprint, 2022
    Paper

    Teaching
    cmu-cs TA, 10-418/618: ML for Structured Data, Spring 2022
    TA, 10-725: Convex Optimization, Fall 2021
    cs188 Instructor, CS188: Artificial Intelligence, Summer 2021
    TA, CS188: Artificial Intelligence, Spring 2021
    TA, CS188: Artificial Intelligence, Fall 2020
    TA, CS188: Artificial Intelligence, Spring 2020
    TA, CS188: Artificial Intelligence, Fall 2019

    Website source taken from here.