I am a Ph.D. student at Purdue University, where my research focuses on robot learning. I earned my M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Columbia University in 2022, with a concentration in robotics and control. Before that, I received my bachelor’s degree in Aircraft Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

My Chinese name is 陈文玺. My given name combines the Chinese characters for literature (Wen 文) and an imperial jade seal (Xi 玺).

My research interests center on data-driven robot learning, with the long-term goal of helping advance physical intelligence toward human-level capabilities.

Portrait of Wenxi Chen
01

News

  • I will join Foundation Robotics in San Francisco, CA, this fall as a research intern.

  • Our IROS 2026 workshop on AthleticHumanoid is calling for paper submissions!

  • I was selected to give a lightning talk at the Midwest Machine Learning Symposium, presenting our recent position paper accepted at ICML 2026.

02

Publications

  • Vision-Language-Action Models
  • World Models
  • Humanoid Robotics
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Robot Safety
  • Uncertainty Quantification

Rethink Action Chunking in VLA Through Human Motor Control

Wenxi Chen, Yuejiang Liu, Zijian He, Shaoshuai Mou, Yan Gu

Under Review

Rethink Action Chunking paper overview

Grounded Vision–Language Motion Planning Framework for Collaborative Robot Inscription

Ruixiang Wang, Wenxi Chen, Zehui Lu, Yan Gu, Shaoshuai Mou

Under Review

Position: Modular Safety Guardrails Are Necessary for Foundation-Model-Enabled Robots in the Real World

Joonkyung Kim*, Wenxi Chen*, Davood Soleymanzadeh*, Yi Ding, Xiangbo Gao, Zhengzhong Tu, Ruqi Zhang, Fan Fei, Sushant Veer, Yiwei Lyu, Minghui Zheng, Yan Gu

ICML 2026 Position Paper Track Accepted

ICML 2026 position paper overview

Towards Versatile Humanoid Table Tennis: Unified Reinforcement Learning with Prediction Augmentation

Muqun Hu*, Wenxi Chen*, Wenjing Li*, Falak Mandali, Zijian He, Renhong Zhang, Praveen Krisna, Katherine Christian, Leo Benaharon, Dizhi Ma, Karthik Ramani, Yan Gu

IEEE ICRA 2026 Accepted

Model-agnostic Meta-learning for Adaptive Gait Phase and Terrain Geometry Estimation with Wearable Soft Sensors

Zenan Zhu*, Wenxi Chen*, Pei-Chun Kao, Janelle Clark, Lily Behnke, Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio, Holly Yanco, Yan Gu

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2026 Accepted

2026 IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters paper overview

Leveraging Perturbation Robustness to Enhance Out-of-Distribution Detection

Wenxi Chen, Raymond Yeh, Shaoshuai Mou, Yan Gu

CVPR 2025 Accepted

CVPR 2025 paper overview

ChatEMG: Synthetic Data Generation to Control a Robotic Hand Orthosis for Stroke

Jingxi Xu, Runsheng Wang, Siqi Shang, Ava Chen, Lauren Winterbottom, To-Liang Hsu, Wenxi Chen, Khondoker Ahmed, Pedro Leandro La Rotta, Xinyue Zhu, Dawn M. Nilsen, Joel Stein, Matei Ciocarlie

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2024 Accepted

Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation in Intent Inferral on a Robotic Hand Orthosis for Stroke

Pedro Leandro La Rotta, Jingxi Xu, Ava Chen, Lauren Winterbottom, Wenxi Chen, Dawn Nilsen, Joel Stein, Matei Ciocarlie

IEEE/RSJ IROS 2024 Accepted

03

Other Projects

OngoingUsing human demonstrations to train humanoid robots.

Purdue University

2025Built semantic navigation systemto find a room without a map.

Purdue University

2023Designed, printed, and taught a humanoid robot to walk.

Columbia University

2022Built a computer vision system for behavior analysis.

Columbia University Department of Psychiatry
Custom-built drone based on a blueprint

2021Built and controlled a drone from a blueprint.

Tsinghua University
04

Academic Activities

  • Teaching: Statics (Teaching Assistant, Purdue University, Spring 2024); Machine Design Lab (Teaching Assistant, Purdue University, Fall 2023); Robotics Studio (Course Assistant, Columbia University, Fall 2022).
  • Reviewer Service: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), and IEEE International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids).