Hongjia (Alex) Huang

My name is 黄泓嘉 (Hongjia Huang), also known as Alex. I am a master’s student in the MSR program at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, where I work in the Robotic Caregiving and Human Interaction (RCHI) Lab with Professor Zackory Erickson. Before CMU I completed my B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics at New York University Shanghai, graduating summa cum laude (GPA 3.93/4.0).

I want to build AI systems that are physically grounded — models that understand, simulate, and reason about the world as it actually works, from molecular dynamics to robot manipulation. Two questions organize the work. The first is representational: pixels are what we record, but 3D structure and motion are what transfer across embodiments, viewpoints, and scenes, so I look for physical constraints — from atomic-scale interactions to macroscopic motion — that can act as inductive biases for representations that are stable, interpretable, and generalizable. The second is interactive, and it is what I work on at RCHI: how a person’s intent reaches a learned manipulation policy at the moments that matter, and what supplying it costs the person.

At NYU Shanghai I worked with Professor Shengjie Wang and Professor Tianyi Zhou on efficient training of graph neural networks for molecular force field prediction, using submodular data selection and geometry-aware latent representations. I continue to work with them on video-diffusion world-action models, asking what training-time auxiliary structure buys a frozen video-diffusion policy — particularly for spatial out-of-distribution generalization. At UMD I spent the summer of 2025 with Professor Furong Huang on TraceGen, which models the world in a compact 3D trace-space rather than in pixels so that a policy can learn from cross-embodiment, cross-environment video. I now work with Professor Huang and Professor Zhou on physics-informed vision-language-action models, integrating trajectory planning into action prediction.

My interest in physics traces back to competing in the Chinese Physics Olympiad (CPhO) in high school, which first made me think seriously about how to model the real world computationally.