WHOAMI
Linji (Joey) Wang
CS Ph.D. student @ George Mason University · RobotiXX Lab, advised by Xuesu Xiao. Curriculum learning × reinforcement learning for robots.
robots that learn, one task at a timeTIMELINE
The path so far
2023 — now
Ph.D. Computer Science, George Mason
RobotiXX Lab · curriculum learning for robots
2025 summer
SDE Intern, AWS (RDS Proxy)
statistical performance-regression testing
2021 — 2023
M.S. Mechanical Engineering, CMU
3D perception · AR-guided robotics · GPA 3.94
2016 — 2021
B.S. Mechanical Engineering, U. Cincinnati
where the robots started
IROS 2025 · FIRST AUTHOR
GACL: Grounded Adaptive Curriculum Learning
A teacher generates training tasks from the robot's live performance, grounded in real-world task distributions. With Zifan Xu, Peter Stone, Xuesu Xiao.
- +6.8% success · wheeled navigation
- +6.1% success · quadruped locomotion
IROS 2025 · 🏆 1ST PLACE, 2025 BARN CHALLENGE (SIM)
Decremental Dynamics Planning
Full robot dynamics near the robot, progressively simpler along the horizon. Led by Yuanjie Lu; I'm 3rd author, with Tong Xu, Nick Hawes, and Xuesu Xiao.
- improved 3 planners overall
- won the 2025 BARN Challenge sim phase
TOOLBOX
Skills & stack
Curriculum Learning Reward Design PPO / SAC IsaacGym MuJoCo ROS PyTorch C++ / CUDA AWS
HARDWARE
Robot platforms
🛞 wheeled UGV — constrained navigation 🐕 quadruped — confined 3D spaces 🏔️ off-road vehicle — vertical terrain 🤖 humanoid — ongoing
🏆 1st place
2025 BARN Challenge, simulation phase — our DDP navigation system
now →
extending curriculum learning to humanoid robots: whole-body skills, one task at a time
“Start simple. Build competence. Master the complex.”
— every good curriculum