Brent Yi

Hello! I'm a final-year CS PhD student at the Berkeley AI Research Lab at UC Berkeley, where I'm advised by Angjoo Kanazawa and Yi Ma.

I'm currently an intern at Amazon FAR. Before, I worked with Jeannette Bohg during an MS at Stanford and Pieter Abbeel during a BA at UC Berkeley. My PhD work is supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

GitHub / Twitter / Email

Research

I'm interested in practical machine learning for real-world systems. These days, I've been thinking about generative models for action^{1Flow Policy Gradients for Robot Control (2026),2Flow Matching Policy Gradients (2026),4Estimating Body and Hand Motion in an Ego-sensed World
(2025)} and spatial perception^{3Cameras as Relative Positional Encoding (2025),5Reconstructing People, Places, and Cameras (2025),6Canonical Factors for Hybrid Neural Fields (2023)}; I also enjoy building open-source research tools.

Feel free to reach out if you're interested in chatting!

Publications

Full list on Google Scholar!

[1]

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.

[2]

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.

[3]

Cameras as Relative Positional Encoding

NeurIPS 2025

Website Paper Code

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

→ proposes PRoPE, which you can also find in Hunyuan WorldPlay and SVSM!

[4]

Estimating Body and Hand Motion in an Ego-sensed World

CVPR 2025 (Highlight)

Website Paper Code Interactive Results

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

[5]

Reconstructing People, Places, and Cameras

CVPR 2025 (Highlight)

Website Paper Code

Lea Müller, Hongsuk Choi, Anthony Zhang, Brent Yi, Jitendra Malik, Angjoo Kanazawa.

[6]

Canonical Factors for Hybrid Neural Fields

ICCV 2023

Website Paper Code

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

[7]

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

I like thinking about tools and abstractions:

[8]

viser

Imperative, web-based 3D visualization for Python.

RSS 2026 Paper Docs Code

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

[9]

tyro

Type-safe CLI and config generation for Python.

Docs Code

Brent Yi.

[10]

jaxls

Solve sparse, non-Euclidean, and constrained nonlinear least squares problems in JAX.

Docs Code

Brent Yi.

→ used in projects like EgoAllo, PyRoki, and VideoMimic!

[11]

pyroki

Modular toolkit for inverse kinematics, trajectory optimization, and motion retargeting.

IROS 2025 Paper Docs Code

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

[12]

mjlab

Lightweight framework for GPU-accelerated robot learning.

arXiv Docs Code

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

[13]

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.

[14]

nerfstudio

Modular framework for neural radiance field development.

SIGGRAPH 2023 Paper Docs Code

Matthew Tancik*, Ethan Weber*, Evonne Ng*, Ruilong Li, Brent Yi, Justin Kerr, Terrance Wang, Alexander Kristoffersen, Jake Austin, Kamyar Salahi, Abhik Ahuja, David McAllister, Angjoo Kanazawa.

[15]

gsplat

Gaussian splatting CUDA kernels with Python bindings.

JMLR MLOSS 2025 Paper Code

Vickie Ye*, Ruilong Li*, Justin Kerr, Matias Turkulainen, Brent Yi, Zhuoyang Pan, Otto Seiskari, Jianbo Ye, Jeffrey Hu, Matthew Tancik, Angjoo Kanazawa.

Misc

I previously spent time on embedded systems and hardware design. Here's a miniature portfolio.

I'm from Milpitas, CA. Outside of research, I enjoy biking around the Bay Area and taking photos!