Runfa Blark Li 李润发

Ph.D. Candidate, Electrical and Computer Engineering, UC San Diego
Robotics · Embodiment Learning · Dexterous Manipulation · Exoskeleton · Computer Vision & Graphics
Former Qualcomm XR Deep Learning Researcher
Percussionist in UCSD Symphonic Orchestra, Drummer, Singer

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University of California, San Diego
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Contextual Robotics Institute (CRI) at UC San Diego. I am advised by Prof. Nikolay Atanasov in the UCSD Existential Robotics Laboratory (ERL), and Prof. Truong Nguyen in the UCSD Video Processing Lab (VPL). My research lies at the intersection of robotics, embodiment intelligence, and computer vision, with a focus on building perception and learning systems that enable robots to understand, reconstruct, and interact with huamn and the physical world.

My recent work focuses on dexterous manipulation, bimanual tool use, humanoid modeling, learning-based exoskeleton, visuomotor world model/VLA, and policy learning. I am particularly interested in how robots and human-assistive/augmentation systems can acquire complex physical skills from visual, geometric, and motion cues. More broadly, my research vision is to develop intelligent systems that can perceive dynamic 3D environments, predict future physical interactions, and execute skillful actions with human-like dexterity.

Previously, my work focused on 3D/4D computer vision on generation, neural scene representations, dynamic SLAM, 3D/4D Gaussian Splatting, neural implicit reconstruction, 3D scene flow estimation, human reconstruction and editing. These works studied how to reconstruct, track, generate, and reason about static/dynamic 3D scenes and human ourselves from monocular or RGB-D observations. This background in 3D/4D perception now forms the foundation for my current research on robot manipulation and embodied learning.

I received my M.S. degree from UC San Diego in 2021, with a specialization in Signal and Image Processing, ECE. I was a former Qualcomm XR deep learning researcher during 2021-2022, and summer 2024, where I worked on high-level tasks including dynamic visual rendering and SLAM for real-time XR devices equipped with Snapdragon chips, 3D body and hand modeling, tracking, reconstruction, and visual understanding, as well as low-level graphical Vulken engineering coding on Snapdragon.

Outside of research, I am the chief percussionist in UCSD Symphony Orchestra, I am also a drummer and a singer. I have trained in percussion since childhood and have performed with many orchestras and bands in both China and the United States. Music remains an important part of my life and also motivates my long-term interest in robots and wearable systems that can assist, teach, or augment complex human skills.

news

Jan 4, 2023 Join UCSD Symphonic Orchestra as a percussionist :drum: :drum: :drum: :smile: !!!
Jul 3, 2022 Paper got accepted by ECCV 2022!!!
Jun 21, 2021 Join Qualcomm R&D Computer Vision team as a Deep Learning Researcher !!!
Jun 12, 2021 Got my Master’s Degree from UCSD ECE !!!
May 20, 2021 Paper got accepted by ICIP !!!

selected publications

  1. DexFuture: Hierarchical Future-State Visuomotor Targeting for Bimanual Dexterous Tool Use
    Runfa Blark Li, Kuang-Ting Tu, Nikola Raicevic, Dwait Bhatt, Xinshuang Liu, Keito Suzuki, Ki Myung Brian Lee, Nikolay Atanasov, and Truong Nguyen
    Under review, 2026
  2. PhysGraph: Physically-Grounded Graph-Transformer Policies for Bimanual Dexterous Hand-Tool-Object Manipulation
    Runfa Blark Li, David Kim, Xinshuang Liu, Keito Suzuki, Dwait Bhatt, Nikola Raicevic, Xin Lin, Ki Myung Brian Lee, Nikolay Atanasov, and Truong Nguyen
    Under review, 2026
  3. SRIW-Flow: Score-Regularized Joint Sampling with Importance Weights for Flow Matching
    Xinshuang Liu, Runfa Blark Li, Shaoxiu Wei, and Truong Nguyen
    In The 42nd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 2026
  4. SplatSDF: Boosting Neural Implicit SDF via Gaussian Splatting Fusion
    Runfa Blark Li, Keito Suzuki, Bang Du, K. M. Brian Lee, Nikolay Atanasov, and Truong Nguyen
    In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2026
  5. HumanOrbit: 3D Human Reconstruction as 360deg Orbit Generation
    Keito Suzuki, Kunyao Chen, Lei Wang, Bang Du, Runfa Blark Li, Peng Liu, Ning Bi, and Truong Nguyen
    In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Findings 2026
  6. WaveletGaussian: Wavelet-Domain Diffusion for Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Object Reconstruction
    Hung Nguyen, Runfa Li, An Le, and Truong Nguyen
    In IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2026
  7. DynaGSLAM: Real-Time Gaussian-Splatting SLAM for Online Rendering, Tracking, Motion Predictions of Moving Objects in Dynamic Scenes
    Runfa Blark Li, Mahdi Shaghaghi, Keito Suzuki, Xinshuang Liu, Varun Moparthi, Bang Du, Walker Curtis, Martin Renschler, K. M. Brian Lee, Nikolay Atanasov, and Truong Nguyen
    In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2026
  8. OpenHuman4D: Open-Vocabulary 4D Human Parsing
    Keito Suzuki, Bang Du, Runfa Blark Li, Kunyao Chen, and Truong Nguyen
    In British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) (Oral, Top 3%) 2025
  9. From Coarse to Fine: Learnable Discrete Wavelet Transforms for Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting
    Hung Nguyen, An Le, Runfa Blark Li, and Truong Nguyen
    In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops 2025
  10. Open-Vocabulary Semantic Part Segmentation of 3D Human
    Keito Suzuki, Bang Du, Girish Krishnan, Kunyao Chen, Runfa Blark Li, and Truong Nguyen
    In 2025 International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV) 2025
  11. THP3D: Text-Driven Multi-granularity 3D Human Parsing
    Keito Suzuki, Bang Du, Kunyao Chen, Runfa Blark Li, and Truong Nguyen
    In Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) Workshops 2024
  12. MonoSelfRecon: Purely Self-Supervised Explicit Generalizable 3D Reconstruction of Indoor Scenes from Monocular RGB Views
    Runfa Li, Upal Mahbub, Vasudev Bhaskaran, and Truong Nguyen
    In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops 2024
  13. MonoPLFlowNet: Permutohedral Lattice FlowNet for Real-Scale 3D Scene Flow Estimation with Monocular Images
    Runfa Li, and Truong Nguyen
    In Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2022
  14. SM3D: Simultaneous Monocular Mapping and 3D Detection
    Runfa Li, and Truong Nguyen
    In IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) 2021