Kaifeng Zhang

Ph.D. Student, Columbia University

I am a Ph.D. student at Columbia, as part of the Columbia Core AI Lab (CAIL), advised by Yunzhu Li.

My main research interest is robot learning, with a focus on understanding the role of physics simulators and digital twins in learning-driven robotic pipelines, and leveraging real-to-sim-to-real methods to achieve scalable data collection, training, and evaluation of robot policies. I am currently a research intern at World Labs. Previously, I was a research intern at SceniX during the summer of 2025, working with Yunzhu Li and Changxi Zheng. My research is partially supported by the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship.

Before Columbia, I received my Bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University (Yao Class). I am fortunate to receive mentorship from Kris Hauser during my Ph.D. study, and Xiaolong Wang, Yang Gao, Li Yi during my undergrad.

Kaifeng Zhang

Publications

* indicates equal contribution. Representative papers are highlighted.