About

I am a Master’s student at the University of Washington, Seattle advised by Professor Dieter Fox in the RSE lab and Ranjay Krishna in the RAIVN lab. I am also a student researcher at Allen Institute for AI on the PRIOR and Robotics team where I led the development of MolmoAct, the first Action Reasoning Model that grounds actions in physical and 3D space.

My research focuses on robot learning, foundation models for robotics and reinforcement learning. Specifically, I am interested in scalable data-centric approaches that ground Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in reasoning and enabling Robotics Foundation models to generalize in the real-world.

✨ Actively Seeking PhD Positions for Fall 2026 and other oppportunities ✨

📑 Selected Publications

* Equal Contribution as First Authors    † Core Contributors

MolmoAct: Action Reasoning Models that can Reason in Space
Jason Lee*^†, Jiafei Duan*^†, Haoquan Fang*^†, Yuquan Deng^† , Shou Liu^†, Boyang Li^†, Jieyu Zhang^† Yi Ru Wang^†, Sangho Lee, Winson Han, Wilbert Pumacay, Angelica Wu, Rose Hendrix, Karen Farley, Eli Vanderbilt, Ali Farhadi, Dieter Fox^†, Ranjay Krishna^†

BranchOut: Capturing Realistic Multimodality in Autonomous Driving Decisions
Hee Jae Kim, Zekai Yin, Lei Lai, Jason Lee, Eshed Ohn-Bar
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2025

* Equal Contribution as First Authors    † Equal Contribution as Second Authors    ‡ Equal Contribution as Advisors

PointArena: Probing Multimodal Grounding Through Language-Guided Pointing
Long Cheng*, Jiafei Duan*, Yi Ru Wang^† , Haoquan Fang^† , Boyang Li^†, Yushan Huang, Elvis Wang, Ainaz Eftekhar, Jason Lee, Wentao Yuan, Rose Hendrix, Noah A. Smith, Fei Xia, Dieter Fox, Ranjay Krishna
arXiv 2025

Research Experience

• Allen Institute for AI, Jan 2025 - Present
  PRIOR Team and the Robotics Team
  • Working on Action Reasoning Models and large scale data generation for non-prehensile manipulation

• University of Washington, Jun 2024 - Present
  RAVIN Lab with Ranjay Krishna
  RSE Lab with Dieter Fox

• Boston University, Aug 2022 - Jun 2024
  H2X Lab with Eshed Ohn-Bar
  • Worked on Autonomous Driving in Simulation

Professional Services

• Conference Reviewer
  • Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2025 Workshop
• Workshop Organizer
  • Workshop on 3D Vision Language Models for Robotic Manipulation Robo-3DVLM at CVPR 2025

Education

• University of Washington, Sep 2024 - Jun 2026 (Expected)
  Masters in Computer Engineering
  • Advised by Ranjay Krishna and Dieter Fox
• Boston University, Sep 2020 - May 2024
  Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science
  Cum Laude
  Dean’s List 2020 - 2024
  • Advised by Eshed Ohn-Bar

Teaching

• Teaching Assistant, Sep 2021 - Jan 2023
  • CS210: Computer Systems