About

I am an AI and robotics researcher working on the PRIOR team and Robotics team at the Allen Institute for AI. I’m also a Master’s student at the University of Washington, Seattle. I am co-advised by Ranjay Krishna in the RAIVN lab and Dieter Fox in the RSE lab at UW.

My research focuses on robot learning and building internet-scale Robotics Foundation Models that can generalize to the real world. I explore a broad range of approaches to tackle robot generalization, including Action Reasnoning Models, Behavior Cloning, Reinforcement Learning for Non-prehensile Manipulation, and other techniques that bridge Simulation and Real-World deployment.

✨ Actively Seeking PhD Positions for Fall 2026 ✨

📑 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