Tsinghua Yao Class Instructor Mengdi Xu: Scaling Alone is Not Enough for General Robots
量子位 · wechat · 2026-08-29
Tsinghua IIIS Assistant Professor Mengdi Xu has become a head teacher for the 2026 Yao Class. With a PhD from CMU under Ding Zhao, her research focuses on robot learning and safety. Xu argues that building general robots cannot rely solely on the Scaling Law, as real-world tasks are infinite and cannot be fully covered by training sets. In her dissertation, she proposed that robots must possess adaptation capabilities, including rapid adjustment via few-shot demonstrations (Prompting Decision Transformer), discovering shared structures across tasks, and leveraging LLM knowledge for physical problems (RoboTool). Her vision for "next-generation intelligence" aims to enable robots to adapt quickly in unfamiliar environments beyond their training data.
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