I am an Associate Professor at the School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Normal University.

Prior to this, I served as a Boya Postdoc at Peking University, working with Prof. Song-Chun Zhu. I received my PhD in Computer Science from the School of EECS at Peking University, where I was advised by Prof. Yizhou Wang, and I obtained my bachelor’s degree in Communication Engineering from Beijing Jiaotong University.

My research interests are embodied AI and multi-agent system, particularly in building cognition-inspired agents with physical and social common sense.

🔥 News

  • 2024.12: Serve as an Area Chair for ICML 2025.
  • 2024.11: Talk at PKU Workshop on Cognitive Reasoning 2024 in Beijing.
  • 2024.10: Tutorial on “Multi-agent reinforcement learning” at RLChina in Guanzhou, Video.
  • 2024.09  🎉🎉 Two papers were accepted to NeurIPS 24, with one selected as a highlighted paper.
  • 2024.07  🎉🎉 One paper about Embodied Visual Tracking was accepted by ECCV’24.
  • 2024.05  🎉🎉 One paper about Peer Adaption was accepted by ICML’24.
  • 2024.01  🎉🎉 One paper about Heterogeneous Multi-agent Cooperation was accepted by Neural Networks.
  • 2023.12  🎉🎉 One paper about Adaptive Multi-Agent Systems was accepted by AAAI 2024 CMASDL Workshop.
  • 2023.11: Siyuan and I organized a workshop on Multi-Agent Systems in Complex Environments at DAI 2023.
  • 2023.11: Guest lecture about Utility at PKU Cognitive Reasoning, hosted by Yixin Zhu.
  • 2023.11:  🎉🎉 One paper about Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation was accepted by IEEE T-PAMI.
  • 2023.10:  🎉🎉 Honored to receive the Tencent Rhino-Bird Outstanding Mentor Award.
  • 2023.07: Talk at ACM TURC 2023 Symposiums (SIGAI China) in Wuhan.
  • 2023.07:  🎉🎉 One paper was accepted by Machine Learning (Journal).
  • 2023.05: Talk at CVG group in ETH Zurich (Online).
  • 2023.04:  🎉🎉 One paper about Visual-audio Navigation was accepted by IEEE RA-L.
  • 2023.02:  🎉🎉 One paper about 3D Human Pose Prior was accepted by CVPR’23.
  • 2023.01:  🎉🎉 One paper about Proactive Multi-Camera Collaboration was accepted by ICLR’23.

📝 Publications

* : co-first author, ✉ : corresponding author

NeurIPS 2024
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Richelieu: Self-Evolving LLM-Based Agents for AI Diplomacy

Zhenyu Guan, Xiangyu Kong✉, Fangwei Zhong✉, Yizhou Wang

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024

Project, Paper

  • A LLM-based social agent that can solve the game of AI Diplomacy only by self-play, without fine-tuning or regularizing on human data.
ECCV 2024
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Empowering Embodied Visual Tracking with Visual Foundation Models and Offline RL

Fangwei Zhong*, Kui Wu*, Hai Ci, Churan Wang, Hao Chen

The 18th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024

Project, Paper

  • Significantly improved the training efficiency and generalization of embodied visual tracking with visual foundation models and offline RL.
ICML 2024
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Fast Peer Adaptation with Context-aware Exploration

Long Ma, Yuanfei Wang, Fangwei Zhong✉, Song-Chun Zhu, Yizhou Wang

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024

Project, Paper

  • Learn a context-aware policy with a peer identification reward to effectively explore and quickly adapt to unknown peers.
IEEE RA-L
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Learning Semantic-Agnostic and Spatial-Aware Representation for Generalizable Visual-Audio Navigation

Hongcheng Wang*, Yuxuan Wang*, Fangwei Zhong, Mingdong Wu, Yizhou Wang, Jianwei Zhang, Hao Dong

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2023

Paper, Demo

  • A brain-inspired plug-and-play method to learn a semantic-agnostic and spatial-aware representation for generalizable visual-audio navigation.
CVPR 2023
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GFPose: Learning 3D Human Pose Prior with Gradient Fields

Hai Ci, Mingdong Wu, Wentao Zhu, Xiaoxuan Ma, Hao Dong, Fangwei Zhong✉, Yizhou Wang

Proc. of the IEEE/CVF Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023

Project , Paper, Code code PWC

  • A versatile framework to model plausible 3D human poses in gradient fields for various applications.
ICLR 2023
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Proactive Multi-Camera Collaboration for 3D Human Pose Estimation

Hai Ci*, Mickel Liu*, Xuehai Pan*, Fangwei Zhong✉, Yizhou Wang

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023

Project , Paper

  • A novel MARL framework to solve proactive multi-camrea collaborations for 3D HPE in human crowds.
AAAI 2023
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RSPT: Reconstruct Surroundings and Predict Trajectories for Generalizable Active Object Tracking

Fangwei Zhong*, Xiao Bi*, Yudi Zhang, Wei Zhang, Yizhou Wang

Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2023 (Oral)

Project, Paper

  • A framework to form a structure-aware motion representation by Reconstructing Surroundings and Predicting the target Trajectory.
NeurIPS 2022
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TarGF: Learning Target Gradient Field to Rearrange Objects without Explicit Goal Specification

Mingdong Wu*, Fangwei Zhong*, Yulong Xia, Hao Dong

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022

Project , Paper, Code

  • A framework based on a target gradient field trained by score-matching to tackle object rearrangement without explicit goal specification.
NeurIPS D&B 2022
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MATE: Benchmarking Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in Distributed Target Coverage Control

Xuehai Pan*, Mickel Liu*, Fangwei Zhong✉, Yaodong Yang✉, Song-Chun Zhu, Yizhou Wang

Thirty-sixth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems Datasets and Benchmarks Track (NeurIPS D&B), 2022

Project , Paper, Code code

  • A gamification of the multi-camera multi-target target coverage problem, and an all-in-one multi-agent reinforcement learning benchmark
ICML 2022
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Disentangling Disease-related Representation from Obscure for Disease Prediction

Chu-Ran Wang, Fei Gao, Fandong Zhang, Fangwei Zhong✉, Yizhou Yu, Yizhou Wang

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022

Paper

  • A disentanglement learning strategy under the guidance of alpha blending generation in an encoder-decoder framework (DAB-Net).
ICLR 2022
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ToM2C: Target-oriented Multi-agent Communication and Cooperation with Theory of Mind

Yuanfei Wang*, Fangwei Zhong*, Jing Xu, Yizhou Wang

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2022

Paper, Code code

  • A Target-oriented Multi-agent Communication and Cooperation mechanism using Theory of Mind.
ICML 2021
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Towards Distraction-Robust Active Visual Tracking

Fangwei Zhong, Peng Sun, Wenhan Luo, Tingyun Yan, Yizhou Wang

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2021

Project, Paper, Code code, Environment code

  • A mixed cooperative-competitive multi-agent game: a target and multiple distractors form a collaborative team to play against a tracker.
  • A bunch of practical methods: a reward function for distractors, a cross-modal teacher-student learning strategy, and a recurrent attention module for the tracker.
NeurIPS 2020
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Learning Multi-Agent Coordination for Enhancing Target Coverage in Directional Sensor Networks

Jing Xu*, Fangwei Zhong*, Yizhou Wang

Thirty-fourth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2021

Project, Paper, Code code

  • a Hierarchical Target-oriented Multi-Agent Coordination (HiT-MAC), which decomposes the target coverage problem into two-level tasks: targets assignment by a coordinator and tracking assigned targets by executors.
AAAI 2020
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Pose-Assisted Multi-Camera Collaboration for Active Object Tracking

Jing Li*, Jing Xu*, Fangwei Zhong*, Xiangyu Kong, Yu Qiao, Yizhou Wang

Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2020

Project, Paper, Code code, Environment code, Demo

  • An efficient yet effective multi-camera collaboration system for collaborative multiCamera active object tracking.
IEEE TPAMI
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AD-VAT+: An Asymmetric Dueling Mechanism for Learning and Understanding Visual Active Tracking

Fangwei Zhong, Peng Sun, Wenhan Luo, Tingyun Yan, Yizhou Wang

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (IEEE TPAMI), 2021

Paper, Code code, Environment code

  • Employ more advanced environment augmentation technique and two-stage training strategies to improve the performance of the tracker in the case of challenging scenarios such as obstacles.
  • Analyze the target’s behaviors as the training proceeds and visualize the latent space of the tracker for a better understanding.
ICLR 2019
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AD-VAT: An Asymmetric Dueling mechanism for learning Visual Active Tracking

Fangwei Zhong, Peng Sun, Wenhan Luo, Tingyun Yan, Yizhou Wang

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2019

Paper, Code code, Environment code

  • A novel adversarial RL method which adopts an Asymmetric Dueling mechanism (tracker vs. target) for robust active visual tracking
CVPR 2019
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CRAVES: Controlling Robotic Arm with a Vision-based, Economic System

Yiming Zuo*, Weichao Qiu*, Lingxi Xie, Fangwei Zhong, Yizhou Wang, Alan L Yuille

Proc. of the IEEE/CVF Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019

Project, Paper, Code code, Controller code, Environment code

  • A vision system for low-cost arm control: trains a vision model in virtual environment, and applies it to real-world images after domain adaptation (a semi-supervised approach).
  • One virtual environment for collection data and reinforcement learning.
  • Two real-world datasets for evaluation.
IEEE TPAMI
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End-to-end Active Object Tracking and Its Real-world Deployment via Reinforcement Learning

Wenhan Luo*, Peng Sun*, Fangwei Zhong*, Wei Liu, Tong Zhang, Yizhou Wang

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (IEEE TPAMI), 2020

Paper, Code code, Environment code

  • Deploy End-to-end active object tracker trained in virtual environment in real-world robot.
ICML 2018
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End-to-end Active Object Tracking via Reinforcement Learning

Wenhan Luo*, Peng Sun*, Fangwei Zhong, Wei Liu, Tong Zhang, Yizhou Wang

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2018

Project, Paper, Training code, Gym-tvizdoom, Gym-unrealcv

  • An end-to-end active objet tracking solution via deep reinforcement learning, where a ConvNet-LSTM function approximator is adopted for the direct frame-to-action prediction.
WACV 2018
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Detect-SLAM: Making Object Detection and SLAM Mutually Beneficial

Fangwei Zhong, Sheng Wang, Ziqi Zhang, Chen Zhou, Yizhou Wang

IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2018

Paper, Video

  • A robotic vision system which integrates SLAM with a deep neural network-based object detector to make the two functions mutually beneficial.
ACM MM 2017
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Unrealcv: Virtual worlds for computer vision

Weichao Qiu, Fangwei Zhong, Yi Zhang, Siyuan Qiao, Zihao Xiao, Tae Soo Kim, Yizhou Wang, Alan Yuille

ACM Multimedia Open Source Software Competition, 2017

Project, Paper, Code code,

  • An open-sourced project to help computer vision researchers build virtual worlds using Unreal Engine 4 (UE4).

🎖 Selected Honors and Awards

  • 2023.10 Tencent Rhino-Bird Outstanding Mentor Award.
  • 2021.09 ACM China SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award.
  • 2021.06 China National Postdoctoral Program for Innovative Talents.
  • 2021.06 Outstanding Graduate in Peking University and Beijing.
  • 2021.05 Top 10 Outstanding Research Award in the School of EECS, Peking University.
  • 2016.08 The Second Place in DJI RoboMasters Summer Camp Competition (2/10).

📖 Educations

  • 2016.09 - 2021.07, Peking University, Ph.D. in Computer Science.
  • 2012.09 - 2016.07, Beijing Jiaotong University, B.S. in Communication Engineering.

💻 Professional Service

  • Journal Reviewer: Nature Machine Intelligence, IJRR, ACM Computing Surveys, IEEE TIP, IEEE TVT, IEEE TIV,IEEE RA-L, ACM TOMM, Sensors, IEEE Access, RAS
  • Conference Reviewer: ICML 2020~2024, NeurIPS 2020~2024, ICLR 2020~2024, CVPR 2020~2024, ICCV 2019~2023, ECCV 2020~2024, ACCV 2020, WACV 2021~2025
  • PC Member: AAAI 2020~2025