Brent Yi

Hello! I'm a final-year PhD student at UC Berkeley, where I'm advised by Prof. Angjoo Kanazawa and Yi Ma. My work is supported by the NSF Fellowship.

I'm currently an intern at Amazon FAR. Before the PhD, I worked with Jeannette Bohg during my MS at Stanford, and Pieter Abbeel during my BA at UC Berkeley.

GitHub / Twitter / Email

Research

Full list on Google Scholar!

Flow Policy Gradients for Robot Control

arXiv 2026 [Website] [Paper]

Brent Yi*, Hongsuk Choi*, Himanshu Gaurav Singh, Xiaoyu Huang, Takara E. Truong, Carmelo Sferrazza, Yi Ma, Rocky Duan, Pieter Abbeel, Guanya Shi, Karen Liu, Angjoo Kanazawa.

Flow Matching Policy Gradients

ICLR 2026 [Website] [Paper] [Code]

David McAllister*, Songwei Ge*, Brent Yi*, Chung Min Kim, Ethan Weber, Hongsuk Choi, Haiwen Feng, Angjoo Kanazawa.

Cameras as Relative Positional Encoding

NeurIPS 2025 [Website] [Paper] [Code]

Ruilong Li*, Brent Yi*, Junchen Liu*, Hang Gao, Yi Ma, Angjoo Kanazawa.

Estimating Body and Hand Motion in an Ego-sensed World

CVPR 2025 (Highlight) [Website] [Paper] [Code]

Brent Yi, Vickie Ye, Maya Zheng, Yunqi Li, Lea Müller, Georgios Pavlakos, Yi Ma, Jitendra Malik, Angjoo Kanazawa.

Canonical Factors for Hybrid Neural Fields

ICCV 2023 [Website] [Paper] [Code]

Brent Yi, Weijia Zeng, Sam Buchanan, Yi Ma.

Quasi-direct Drive for Low-Cost Compliant Robotic Manipulation

ICRA 2019 [Website] [Paper] [Code]

David Gealy, Stephen McKinley, Brent Yi, Philipp Wu, Phillip Downey, Greg Balke, Allan Zhao, Menglong Guo, Rachel Thomasson, Anthony Sinclair, Peter Cuellar, Zoe McCarthy, Pieter Abbeel.

Software

viser

Imperative, web-based 3D visualization for Python. [Docs] [arXiv] [Code]

Brent Yi, Chung Min Kim, Justin Kerr, Gina Wu, Rebecca Feng, Anthony Zhang, Jonas Kulhanek, Hongsuk Choi, Yi Ma, Matthew Tancik, Angjoo Kanazawa.

tyro

Type-safe CLI and config generation for Python. [Docs] [Code]

Brent Yi.

jaxls

Solve sparse, non-Euclidean, and constrained nonlinear least squares problems in JAX. [Docs] [Code]

Brent Yi.

pyroki

Modular toolkit for robot kinematic optimization. [Docs] [IROS 2025] [Code]

Chung Min Kim*, Brent Yi*, Hongsuk Choi, Yi Ma, Ken Goldberg, Angjoo Kanazawa.

mjlab

Lightweight framework for GPU-accelerated robot learning. [Docs] [arXiv] [Code]

Kevin Zakka, Qiayuan Liao, Brent Yi, Louis Le Lay, Koushil Sreenath, Pieter Abbeel.

holosoma

Humanoid robotics framework for RL training, deployment, and motion retargeting. [Code]

Pieter Abbeel, Juyue Chen, Rocky Duan, Alejandro Escontrela, Manan Gandhi, Samuel Gundry, Xiaoyu Huang, Angjoo Kanazawa, Tomasz Lewicki, Jiaman Li, Karen Liu, Clay Rosenthal, Younggyo Seo, Carlo Sferrazza, Guanya Shi, Linda Shih, Jonathan Tseng, Zhen Wu, Lujie Yang, Brent Yi, Yuanhang Zhang.

Misc

I previously spent time on robot hardware design. Here's a miniature portfolio!