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Zeyu (Michael) Lai

/ˈzɛ.juː · laɪ/

Undergraduate Student interested in world action models, reinforcement learning, and test-time adaptation

Education

B.S. in Electrical Engineering & Data Science

2025 — 2029

UC San Diego

Experience

Robotics Infrastructure Engineer Intern

Jul 2026 — Sep 2026

CoCo Matrix — Shanghai

Led the in-context learning runtime and on-robot deployment for WRC. Built unified multi-robot infrastructure for the GR3, dual-PiPER-X, and Astribot S1 platforms, wiring policy serving, perception, teleoperation, and safety into modular Dora dataflow graphs. Implemented latency-aware asynchronous inference with action-chunk scheduling that overlaps inference with execution while holding control-rate stability.

Embodied AI Undergraduate Researcher

Mar 2026 — Present

Hao Su's AI Lab — UC San Diego

Developing dexterous teleoperation frameworks, sim-to-real pipelines, and predictive world models.

Undergraduate Researcher

Oct 2025 — May 2026

MURO Lab — UC San Diego

Developing multi-robot map-merging infrastructure for autonomous TurtleBot4 fleets.

Member — Perception & Planning

Oct 2025 — May 2026

Triton AI — UC San Diego

LiDAR–camera fusion for FTENTH and path planning for an autonomous go-kart.

Research & Publications

* Equal contribution·† Equal advising

DexFLEX: Contact-Aware Foundation Controller for Command-Guided Dexterity

Weikang Wan, Zeyu Lai, Jianyu Hou, Yuchen Zhou, Jiawei Fu, Henrik I Christensen†, Hao Su†

CoRL · 2026

A contact-aware foundation controller that turns upstream fingertip-motion drafts, from teleoperation or a learned policy, into contact-consistent joint commands. The same trained controller improves robustness without retraining, raising real-world teleoperation success from 29.2% to 78.3%.

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DexSeed: Scalable Physics-Grounded Demonstration Generation for Sim-to-Real Dexterous Manipulation

Weikang Wan, Jinqiu Wang, Jianyu Hou, Zeyu Lai, Henrik I Christensen†, Hao Su†

Preprint · 2026

A physics-grounded pipeline that converts a handful of human RGB-D videos into large-scale dexterous manipulation datasets under randomized layout, geometry, appearance, and physics. It improves simulated downstream policy success by 33.2% on average and reaches 45% zero-shot real-world success from only three human videos per task.

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Diving into the virtual realm: Exploring the mechanics of virtual reality figure

Diving into the virtual realm: Exploring the mechanics of virtual reality

Applied and Computational Engineering · 2024

This research explores the fundamental mechanics of virtual reality environments, focusing on computational engineering principles to enhance user immersion and system performance within virtual realms.

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