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Jiafei Duan is a Presidential Young Professor in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where he directs the MAGIC Lab. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Washington in 2026, with a Master of Science in the same field awarded in 2024. He was advised by Professors Dieter Fox and Ranjay Krishna. His undergraduate degree is a B.Eng. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Nanyang Technological University, completed in 2021 with Highest Distinction. Prior to his appointment at NUS, he served as a Research Scientist at A*STAR.
His research lies at the intersection of robotics and computer vision, with a focus on robotics foundation models. Specific emphases include scalable data collection and generation, grounding vision-language models in robotic reasoning, and improving robust generalization in robot learning. His research interests encompass embodied AI, robot learning, 3D vision, multimodal large language models reasoning, and robotics manipulation. Duan’s work has appeared in top venues including ICLR, ICML, RSS, CoRL, ECCV, IJCAI, CoLM, and EMNLP. Notable publications include MolmoAct: Action Reasoning Models that Reason in Space, SAM2Act: Integrating Visual Foundation Model with A Memory Architecture for Robotic Manipulation, AHA: A Vision-Language-Model for Detecting and Reasoning Over Failures in Robotic Manipulation, THE COLOSSEUM: A Benchmark for Evaluating Generalization for Robotic Manipulation, and Manipulate-Anything: Automating Real-World Robots using Vision-Language Models. His contributions have earned Best Paper awards at Ubiquitous Robots 2023, the CoRL RememberRL Workshop 2025, and multiple ICRA 2026 workshops, along with a Spotlight Award at ICLR 2024. He was named a finalist for the CVPR 2026 Rising Star in Spatial Intelligence and received the National Science Fellowship for his Ph.D. studies. His research has been featured in MIT Technology Review, GeekWire, VentureBeat, and Business Wire. In service to the academic community, he has served as an Area Chair for CoRL.
Explore NUS's new MAGIC Lab launch, led by Asst Prof Jiafei Duan, focusing on robot learning, 3D vision, and dexterous manipulation. Discover opportunities in Singapore's booming AI robotics higher education sector.
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