I am a 3rd-year PhD student at EPFL and also working as a research assistant in the Robot Learning & Interaction group at Idiap, supervised by Dr. Sylvain Calinon and Prof. Colin Jones.

I aim to build intelligent robot assistants living together with humans at home. I am currently working on integrating task and motion planning with robot learning for multi-object manipulation tasks. My research interests include robot learning, multi-object manipulation planning, task and motion planning, and graph theory. My previous research experiences cover imitation learning, deep reinforcement learning, sim2real transfer, variable impedacne control, robot manipulators and legged robots. See Projects for more details.

I am glad to discuss with anyone for any potential collaboration or EPFL students for potential projects in our lab. Feel free to contact me!

Recent News

• 2024.08:  Our paper LogicLfD is accepted to IEEE RA-L!
• 2024.01:   Our paper Robot Distance Fields is accepted to ICRA 2024!

Selected Publications

Please visit the Publications page for more details.

Robustness-Aware Tool Selection and Manipulation Planning with Learned Energy-Informed Guidance

Yifei Dong*, Yan Zhang*, Sylvain Calinon, Florian T. Pokorny

Under review, arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.03362, 2025

[paper] [video]

Learn2Decompose: Learning Problem Decomposition for Efficient Sequential Multi-object Manipulation Planning

Yan Zhang, Teng Xue, Amirreza Razmjoo, Sylvain Calinon

Under review, arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.06843v2, 2025

[paper] [website]

Logic Learning from Demonstrations for Multi-step Manipulation Tasks in Dynamic Environments

Yan Zhang, Teng Xue, Amirreza Razmjoo, Sylvain Calinon

In IEEE RA-L 2024.

[paper][website] [code]

Representing Robot Geometry as Distance Fields: Applications to Whole-body Manipulation

Yiming Li, Yan Zhang, Amirreza Razmjoo, Sylvain Calinon

In Proc. IEEE ICRA 2024.

[paper][website] [code]