Hi there! This is Sikai Li ๆๆๆฅท. You can call me Sky or Skevin. I am currently a first-year CS Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, advised by Prof. Mingyu Ding. Previously, I worked as a research assistant with Prof. Dan Roth at the University of Pennsylvania, and with Prof. Christoforos Mavrogiannis and Prof. Nima Fazeli at the University of Michigan. Before that, I received my B.S. in Computer Science from University of Michigan under the supervision of Prof. Joyce Chai.
My primary research interest is to ground robots in the real world.
- Humanoid: Dexterous loco-manipulation
- Robot Learning: Reinforcement learning, imitation learning
๐ฅ News
- 2026.07: ย ๐๐ CoorDex was accepted by RSS 2026 WCBM Workshop.
- 2026.07: ย ๐๐ One paper was accepted by COLM 2026.
- 2026.05: ย ๐๐ I will work with Zhenjia Xu at Genesis AI as an intern!
- 2025.08: ย ๐๐ I will work with Professor Mingyu Ding at UNC - Chapel Hill as a Ph.D. student!
- 2025.01: ย ๐๐ One paper was accepted by ICRA 2025.
๐ Publications

CoorDex: Coordinating Body and Hand Priors for Continuous Dexterous Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
Sikai Li, Shuning Li, Zhenyu Wei, Yunchao Yao, Chenran Li, Mingyu Ding
- We introduce CoorDex, a learning pipeline that converts high-dimensional body and dexterous hand control into coordinated latent residual control, enabling high-DoF dexterous loco-manipulation on the move.

AnyBody: Free-Form Whole-Body Humanoid Control from Arbitrary Keypoint Guidance
Shuning Li, Sikai Li, Jiachen Li, Mingyu Ding
- We present AnyBody, a unified whole-body humanoid controller driven by an arbitrary subset of body keypoints chosen at deploy time.

DexCompose: Reusing Dexterous Policies for Multi-Task Manipulation with a Single Hand
Dihong Huang, Zhenyu Wei, Zhuxiu Xu, Yunchao Yao, Sikai Li, Mingyu Ding
- We propose DexCompose, a role-aware residual composition framework that reuses pretrained dexterous policies for multi-task manipulation through explicit finger-level action ownership.

SldprtNet: A Large-Scale Multimodal Dataset for CAD Generation in Language-Driven 3D Design
Ruogu Li, Sikai Li, Yao Mu, Mingyu Ding
- We introduce SldprtNet, a large-scale dataset comprising over 242,000 industrial parts, designed for semanticdriven CAD modeling, geometric deep learning, and the training/fine-tuning of multimodal models for 3D design.

Tactile Functasets: Neural Implicit Representations of Tactile Datasets
Sikai Li, Samanta Rodriguez, Yiming Dou, Andrew Owens, Nima Fazeli
- Rather than directly using raw tactile images, we propose neural implicit functions trained to reconstruct the tactile dataset, producing compact representations that capture the underlying structure of the sensory inputs.

Communication and Verification in LLM Agents towards Collaboration under Information Asymmetry
Run Peng*, Ziqiao Ma*, Amy Pang, Sikai Li, Zhang Xi-Jia, Yingzhuo Yu, Cristian-Paul Bara, Joyce Chai
- We study LLM agents in task collaboration, particularly under the condition of information asymmetry, where agents have disparities in their knowledge and skills and need to work together to complete a shared task.

Think, Act, and Ask: Open-World Interactive Personalized Robot Navigation
Yinpei Dai, Run Peng, Sikai Li, Joyce Chai
- We propose a new framework termed Open-woRld Interactive persOnalized Navigation (ORION), which uses Large Language Models to make sequential decisions to manipulate different modules for perception, navigation and communication.

Qi Zhou, Sikai Li, Jingbo Qu, Jin Wu, Haomiao Xu, Youyi Bi
- We propose an adaptive path planning approach for robot arm based on Inverse Kinematics and Deep Reinforcement Learning in a pick-and-place context.

Qi Zhou, Jin Wu, Boyan Li, Sikai Li, Bohan Feng, Jiangshan Liu, Youyi Bi
- An adaptive robot motion planning approach is proposed based on digital twin and reinforcement learning. The core idea is to adaptively select geometry-based or RL-based methods for robot motion planning through a real-time distance detection mechanism, which can reduce the complexity of RL model training and accelerate the training process.
๐ Educations
- 2025.08 - Now, Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
- 2022.08 - 2024.05, BSE in Computer Science & Engineering, University of Michigan.
- 2020.09 - 2025.08, BSE in Electrical & Computer Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
๐ป Internships and Research Experience
- 2026.05 - Now, Genesis AI. Mentored by Zhenjia Xu.
- 2024.09 - 2025.06, Cognitive Computation Group, University of Pennsylvania. Advised by Prof. Dan Roth, mentored by Siyi Liu.
- 2024.05 - 2024.09, Fluent Robotics Lab, University of Michigan. Advised by Prof. Christoforos Mavrogiannis.
- 2024.05 - 2024.09, MMint Lab, University of Michigan. Advised by Nima Fazeli.
- 2023.05 - 2024.07, SLED Lab, University of Michigan. Advised by Prof. Joyce Chai, mentored by Ziqiao Ma and Yinpei Dai.
- 2021.11 - 2023.02, DIDIS Lab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Advised by Prof. Youyi Bi.
- 2022.06 - 2022.09, Research and Development Center of Southwest Securities Co., LTD, Shanghai, China.
๐ Service
- Conference Reviewer for IROS, ICRA, WACV, ECCV, CoRL
- Teaching Assistant for COMP 790-192 Embodied and Agentic AI, UNC Spring 2026
๐ฅ Hobbies
- Travel: I love road trip๐ and National Parks, especially the wildlife๐ป. Iโve been to 32/63 National Parks in the United States. Recommend Mt. Rainier and Bryce Canyon!
- Sports: Love soccer (Liverpool๐ด๐).
- Gaming: League of Legendsโก๏ธApex Legends (Master in season 17 ^^)โก๏ธValorant (Ascendant๐ in EPISODE 7: ACT 3)
- Foods: I admire the Canton-style cuisine.