I am a 3rd-year Ph.D. student at HKUST and also a research intern affiliated with GEAR at NVIDIA Research, working with Scott Reed, Jim Fan, and Yuke Zhu. I am currently interested in scaling foundation models for humanoid robots. Previously, I was fortunate to be a member of OpenDriveLab led by Hongyang Li.

I will be on the job market for Mid 2026. Feel free to contact me!

Please find my up-to-date [Resume] to check my current status.

• Embodied AI: Generalist Robots, Learning from Web Data
• Generative AI: Video World Models, Open-Ended Learning

• AdaWorld: Learning Adaptable World Models with Latent Actions
  • Accepted by ICML 2025
• UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-Centric Latent Actions
  • Accepted by RSS 2025
• Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllability
  • Accepted by NeurIPS 2024
• Generalized Predictive Model for Autonomous Driving
  • Accepted by CVPR 2024 as Highlight (Top 2.8%)

I was born in the last year of the 20th century (May 17th, 2000). I hope to live until the 22nd century so that my life would span three centuries. The Chinese meanings of each word in my name (高深远) are "High", "Deep", "Far", respectively.

• Ph.D. in Electronic and Computer Engineering, 2022-2026 (expected)
  • Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, under the tutelage of Prof. Jun Zhang (IEEE Fellow)
• B.Eng. in Electronic Information Engineering, 2018-2022
  • Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Advanced Class (GPA 3.9/4.0, ranked 1st)

• RedBird PhD Scholarship
• Full Postgraduate Scholarship
• Outstanding Graduate
• Outstanding Graduation Thesis
• Outstanding Undergraduate in Terms of Academic Performance (Top 1%)
• National Scholarship (Top 2%)

• Academic Email: sygao@connect.ust.hk
• Personal Email: shenyuangao@gmail.com
• WeChat: gsycm0517
• QQ: 917547962