Kai Lu

I am a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at Oxford Robotics Institute, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, working with Prof. Ioannis Havoutis.
My current reserach focuses on generalizable learning-based mobile manipulation, with applications on household objects and everyday tasks.

Prior to this, I obtained my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Oxford, supervised by Prof. Andrew Markham and advised by Prof. Niki Trigoni FREng. I received my B.E. degree with outstanding graduate honor in Automation from Tsinghua University, where I was a student research assistant in Computer Science, advised by Prof. Huaping Liu. I was a student research intern at Duke and UIUC, advised by Prof. Kris Hauser.

Collaboration / Research Intern:
     ⋅   Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), Meta Research (FAIR, Habitat Team)
     ⋅   Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI), vLAR at Hong Kong PolyU (vLAR)

Sevice:
     ⋅    Associate Editor (AE): International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems (IJARS)
     ⋅    Reviewer: NeurIPS, ICRA, IROS, CoRL, RA-L, ICLR, ICMR, BMVC, ICCV

Resume     Github     Google Scholar     LinkedIn    

Email: kai.lu AT eng.ox.ac.uk / lukaiwork01 AT gmail.com

KitchenVLA: Iterative Vision-Language Corrections for Robotic Execution of Human Tasks

Kai Lu, Chenyang Ma, Chiori Hori, Diego Romeres
Patent (in submission) & IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025 SafeVLM

InteLiPlan: Interactive Lightweight LLM-Based Planner for Domestic Robot Autonomy

Kim Tien Ly, Kai Lu, Ioannis Havoutis
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
Webpage   •   PDF

COOPERA: Continual Open-Ended Human-Robot Assistance

Chenyang Ma, Kai Lu, Ruta Desai, Xavier Puig, Andrew Markham, Niki Trigoni
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2025
Webpage   •   PDF

Learning Generalizable Manipulation Policy with Adapter-Based Parameter Fine-Tuning

Kai Lu, Kim Tien Ly, William Hebberd, Kaichen Zhou, Ioannis Havoutis, Andrew Markham
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2024
Webpage   •   PDF

SpatialPIN: Enhancing Spatial Reasoning Capabilities of Vision-Language Models through Prompting and Interacting 3D Priors

Chenyang Ma, Kai Lu, Ta-Ying Cheng, Niki Trigoni, Andrew Markham
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2024
Webpage   •   PDF

Learning to Catch Reactive Objects with a Behavior Predictor

Kai Lu, Jia-Xing Zhong, Bo Yang, Bing Wang, Andrew Markham
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024
Webpage   •   PDF   •   Code

Decoupling Skill Learning from Robotic Control for Generalizable Object Manipulation

Kai Lu, Bo Yang, Bing Wang, Andrew Markham
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023
Webpage   •   PDF   •   Code

Semi-Empirical Simulation of Learned Force Response Models for Heterogeneous Elastic Objects

Yifan Zhu, Kai Lu, Kris Hauser
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2020
Webpage   •   PDF   •   Code

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Pushing and Picking in Cluttered Environment

Yuhong Deng*, Xiangfeng Guo*, Yixuan Wei*, Kai Lu*, Bin Fang, Di Guo, Huaping Liu, Fuchun Sun
*: co-first author, equal contribution
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2019
Webpage   •   PDF   •   Code

2020

Outstanding Graduate Honor, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University

2019

Technological Innovation Scholarship, Department of Automation,Tsinghua University

2019

Second Place, Adult-Size Technical Challenge, RoboCup 2019 Humanoid World Final

2019

First Prize, The 37th Tsinghua Challenge Cup Competition

2018

Champion, Robotic Innovation Contest, The 20th Chinese Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Competition

2016

Tsinghua Leading Talent Program, Tsinghua University

2015

First Prize, Chinese Physics Olympiad (CPhO) Provincial League

2014

First Prize, Chinese Mathematical Olympiad (CMO) Provincial League

2014

Bronze Medal, China Western Mathematical Olympiad (CWMO)

2024

Associate Editor, International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems (IJARS)

2024

Reviewer, ICRA 2025, ICLR 2025

2023

Reviewer, NeurIPS 2023, ICLR 2024, ICRA 2024

2026

Started my Postdoc at ORI, Dept of EngSci at Oxford.

2025

Obtained my Ph.D degree in Computer Science at Oxford.

2025

Completed my intership at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Boston.

2024

Submitted my thesis "Embodied Visual Control Policy Learning for Robotic Mobile Manipulation"!

2024

Our paper SpatialPIN got accepted into NeurIPS 2024!

2024

Our paper GenRob got accepted into IROS 2024!

2024

Our paper DynCatch got accepted into ICRA 2024!

2023

Successfully defended my Confirmation of Status viva (Examiners: Prof. Niki Trigoni, Prof. Ioannis Havoutis).

2023

Two papers Multi-Body SE(3) Equivariance and DynPoint got accepted into NeurIPS 2023!

2023

Our paper DecoupSkill got accepted into ICRA 2023!

2022

Started my internship at vLAR group, Hong Kong Polytechnique University.

2022

Successfully defended my Transfer of Status viva (Examiners: Prof. Niki Trigoni, Prof. Alessandro Abate).

2021

Completed three assessment work for Transfer (one hardest-level course, one survey, and one term paper).

2020

Started my D.Phil. journey at University of Oxford.

2020

Received my B.Eng. degree with honor from Tsinghua University.