
PhD Student @UW | PhD Fellow @Google | Multi-Modal & Spatial AI | Building edge models for next gen interaction | Previously @NVIDIA @Meta @NUSingapore
Seattle, WA
Joined December 2021
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Hope to connect! Just starting to actually use X.
I’m Mingfei (PhD @UW, ex @NVIDIA & @Meta). Researching how to make machines see, hear, and understand the 3D world so they can run privately in real time on everyday devices.
There’s still a huge gap here. If you care about these directions, feel free to reach out.
Definitely recommend @NVIDIARobotics and Seattle Robotics Lab! Good vibe, open research and beautiful Seattle summer views!
A decent not-so-frontier LLM with some context from X should be able to predict this post or fill in the blanks.
I'm heading to Austin for #CoRL2027, Looking forward to meeting.... 🤖🍖
If you're looking for PhD internships @NVIDIARobotics or just want to chat about robot learning, DM me and let's meet!
Love the demos! Social aware interaction is important while overlooked field for robotics. Glad to see there are 40+ such papers accepted in CoRL. In the long term, spatial intelligence for dynamics scenes, human understanding, real time interaction and Omni modal (audio visual text etc) are all going to play big role in this field and drive amazing killing application scenarios for humans.
Automatically and cost saving annotate, eval and post train improving with our raw ego captures! This seems to be a good start point.
Cool!
Introducing RoboColosseum
An open robot eval initiative by @huggingface @BitRobotNetwork @eaic_sg @DJiafei
Access:
- 100+ robots (@UnitreeRobotics G1s, @LeRobotHF SO-101s, YAMs, Franka and more)
- 140+ in-the-wild scenes
- Open rollout data
- 10,000 FREE eval hrs
Thread ↓
Be able to define a GOOD problem is more critical now. Working on such problems usually makes you away from what is popular and convenient now. It is never an easy thing to work for future rather than right now. But that is what we believe and make us live as a true expert that can’t be replaced quickly.
我觉得现在很多做 AI 的 PhD,正处在一个非常尴尬的历史交界点。
一边是工业界几乎每隔几个月就发生一次技术范式的变化,模型能力、研究方向、工程方法,甚至整个行业对人才的需求,都在快速重构。
另一边是大学里依然运转着一套几十年前建立的博士培养体系。
每年发一两篇 Paper,花几个月做一个 Benchmark 上提升几个百分点的工作,开组会,写 Proposal,等 Reviewer,等导师批准毕业。
然后期待这些积累在四五年之后,能够自然地兑换成一份体面的工作和一个更好的未来。
但最残酷的地方在于,这两套系统对时间的定价,已经完全不同了。
在学校里,一篇 Paper 可能是你过去一年的全部成果。
但在工业界,你花一年精心设计的算法,可能因为一次模型更新,就失去了大部分实际意义。
你引以为傲的工程技巧,可能下一代 Coding Agent 已经能够自动完成。
你研究了两年的问题,可能一家 Frontier Lab 用几周的 Scaling Experiment 就给出了更好的解决方案。
当然,我并不认为长期科研没有价值。真正重要的科学问题,往往需要十几年甚至几十年的积累。
但问题是,现在有多少 PhD 真正在研究那些值得花五年时间解决的问题?
又有多少人只是在导师的研究方向、毕业要求和论文评价体系里,反复寻找一个足够小、足够安全、足够容易发表的增量?
我自己也在读 PhD,所以对这种割裂感有很深的体会。
最让人焦虑的,其实不是看到工业界进步得太快。
而是你明明知道外面的世界正在发生什么,却依然需要把大量精力投入一套未必能让你跟上变化的评价体系。
博士原本应该是训练一个人探索未知、独立判断和创造新知识的过程。
但在很多地方,它逐渐变成了一个漫长的资格认证流程。
而 AI 正在以前所未有的速度,降低这个流程中许多可量化成果的稀缺性。
我们可能是第一代,在博士还没读完的时候,就需要重新思考博士学位究竟意味着什么的人。
我不觉得读 PhD 是错误的选择。
但如果一个人五年下来,最大的成长只是更熟练地迎合 Reviewer、更精确地优化 Benchmark、更擅长把有限的研究增量包装成论文。
那真正值得担心的,不是 AI 会不会取代他的工作。
而是当整个世界已经改变,他还在等待旧世界给自己颁发一张通行证。
一个博士最珍贵的五年,不应该只用来证明自己符合五年前制定的标准。
While we celebrate weight-space programming, I took a closer look at the logs. Qwen’s 7.9→48.1% gain seems largely driven by fixing reasoning loops with 0.016% of weights. This is an especially promising signal for LLM-guided mechanistic debugging and targeted model improvement rather than signal of replacing training yet.
We asked GPT-6 Astra to edit Qwen3.5-0.8B weights to improve math.
It directly changed only 0.016% of weights, fixing 0.8B's reasoning loops & improving math up to 6x and even instruction following 3x, without gradients or training.
We call this Weight-Space Programming: frontier LLMs can now natively read/write neural network weights! 🧵
Blog: rikiyat.github.io/blog/weigh…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
LLM was given weights explicitly as text in prompt and used code/forward passes (per authors' logs) to ablate Qwen looping direction, a known thinking-mode issue per model card. Primarily fixed repetition in that mode, not general 'natively' improving weights/math.
rikiyat.github.io/blog/weight-sp…
github.com/RikiyaT/lm_und…
huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-0…
huggingface.co/RikiyaT/Qwen3.…
Based on my interaction-aware robot nav research, this demo shows clear pitfalls: this dynamic avoidance plan will actually make robots oscillate & freeze in deployment. Better to just stop! And humans naturally yield while robots or others getting close. True human aware robot interaction needs to learn from humans, not just pure task goals.
At first I thought we would soon run out of new data to learn from. Then I realized the truth is that most new user questions and verified solutions now flow straight into the top two or three coding agents like Codex and Claude. Over twenty years of open internet data gave people a real chance to evolve with new tools. Now it feels like that open era is closing again.
Exciting! I can imagine how SAM3 can be helpful for spatial interaction and memory tracking on device
The next generation of interaction is multimodal and spatial. Frontier labs are pushing large-scale agentic AI through the cloud, but what AI can actually do on everyday devices is still a massive gap.









