Qiayuan Liao

I'm a third-year Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, advised by Koushil Sreenath and Pieter Abbeel.

Previously, I was a research intern at Boston Dynamics, where I was fortunate to work with Scott Kuindersma on reinforcement-learning control for the E-Atlas.

I'm a true full-stack roboticist dedicated to creating general-purpose humanoid systems. Toward this goal, I focus on (a) agile and robust whole-body loco-manipulation and (b) co-design of data, hardware, and control.

Scholar      Github      LinkedIn     

SuperMimic is out, and will be presented as an oral at CoRL 2026!
Workhorse preprint is out!
BeyondMimic is published in Science Robotics!
MuJoCo Playground got ★ Best Demo Paper Award, RSS 2025 ★
Four papers were accepted to RSS 2025, many thanks to my collaborators...

SuperMimic: Scaling Humanoid Whole-Body Control with One Differentiable World Model

Qiayuan Liao, Yiyang Shao*, Junfeng Long*, Kevin Zakka, Roberto Horowitz, Pieter Abbeel†, Koushil Sreenath†
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2026 (Oral)
Webpage  •   Paper  •   Video

Workhorse: Learning Robust Whole-Body Humanoid Loco-Manipulation from Human Data

Songbo Hu*, Qiayuan Liao*, Yufeng Chi, Kevin Zakka, Yakun Sophia Shao, Pieter Abbeel, Koushil Sreenath
Webpage  •   Paper  •   Video

BeyondMimic: From Motion Tracking to Versatile Humanoid Control via Guided Diffusion

Qiayuan Liao*, Takara E. Truong*, Xiaoyu Huang*, Yuman Gao, Guy Tevet, Koushil Sreenath†, C. Karen Liu†
Science Robotics, 2026
Webpage  •   Paper  •   Code

MuJoCo Playground

Kevin Zakka*, Baruch Tabanpour*, Qiayuan Liao*, Mustafa Haiderbhai*, Samuel Holt*, Jing Yuan Luo, Arthur Allshire, Erik Frey, Koushil Sreenath, Lueder A. Kahrs, Carmelo Sferrazza, Yuval Tassa, Pieter Abbeel
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2025
★ Best Demo Paper Award, RSS ★
Webpage  •   Paper  •   Code

Berkeley Humanoid A Research Platform for Learning-based Control

Qiayuan Liao, Bike Zhang, Xuanyu Huang, Xiaoyu Huang, Zhongyu Li, Koushil Sreenath
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025
Webpage  •   Paper  •   Code

Walking in Narrow Spaces: Safety-critical Locomotion Control for Quadrupedal Robots with Duality-based Optimization

Qiayuan Liao, Bike Zhang, Xuanyu Huang, Xiaoyu Huang, Zhongyu Li, Koushil Sreenath
International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023
Paper  •   Code

I develop open-source projects used widely in both industry and academia, spanning model-based and data-driven control libraries, and robot platforms. I value rigorous, reproducible research and solid engineering—If these code doesn't work as advertised, feel free to publicly roast me.
whole_body_tracking - Scalable whole body motion tracking training for humanoid robots
legged_control - NMPC, WBC, state estimation, and sim2real framework for legged robots based on OCS2 and ros-controls Retired
mjlab - Combines Isaac Lab's proven API with best-in-class MuJoCo physics to provide lightweight, modular abstractions for RL robotics research and sim-to-real deployment
Berkeley-Humanoid-Lite - sub-$5,000 humanoid robot
MuJoCo Playground - Train and deploy robot skills in minutes with GPU-accelerated MuJoCo Retired
“If you fail to abide by the terms of this license, then your conscience
will haunt you for the rest of your life.” — System Enhancement Associates, ARC shareware license (1985)