CV
Basics
| Name | Yifan Kang |
| Label | Undergraduate researcher, MIT |
| yifank@mit.edu | |
| Url | https://yifank.github.io/ |
| Summary | Junior at MIT studying AI (6-4) and Mathematics (18), advised by Leslie Kaelbling. Interested in robots that learn efficiently at deployment time, and in combining coding agents with robot foundation models. |
Work
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2026.06 - Present Research Intern
2077AI
Agentic systems for few-shot robot manipulation.
- Encore: a coding agent turns three demonstrations into an executable policy program and repairs it from its own execution traces. Oral, NeurIPS 2026 Robot Learning Workshop.
- Deployed coding agents on robots to perform bimanual tasks in the real world.
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2025.06 - 2025.08 Student Researcher
MIT
With Prof. Antonio Torralba, on visual generation with multimodal LLMs.
- Co-first author of Doodle Agent: Exploring Freeform Visual Generation with Multimodal LLMs (Accepted to ICCV 2025 AI4VA Workshop), a drawing agent for open-ended visual creation using LLMs and structured prompting.
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2025.06 - Present Student Researcher
MIT
With Prof. Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Learning & Intelligent Systems group.
- KeyFlow (CoRL 2026 Workshop Learn@Deploy): a coding agent adapts a manipulation policy by rewriting how a few demonstrations are represented and retrieved, with no retraining.
- 62.6% mean held-out success on 13 RoboCasa tasks, against 47.8% for a VLA fine-tuned on ten times more demonstrations.
Selected programs
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2026.04 - 2026.04 Explore HRT — Algorithm Development (Quantitative Research) track
Hudson River Trading
Invite-only program. Implemented a limit order book and an arbitrage strategy from scratch; ranked 4th of 15 by PnL.
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2026.01 - 2026.01 Quant Invitational
Citadel Securities
One of 24 students invited nationwide to a quantitative trading competition.
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2023.06 - 2023.08 RSI Scholar
Research Science Institute (RSI)
Authored CNOT-Optimal Circuit Synthesis under the mentorship of Henry Ma (MIT); selected as a top-5 paper out of 100.
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2021.01 - 2023.12 Researcher
MIT PRIMES
Three years of mentored research on NUMA-aware concurrent data structures, alongside advanced mathematics.
Education
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2024.09 - Present Cambridge, MA
B.S.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Mathematics and Computer Science
- Discrete Probability and Stochastic Processes (18.619)
- Fundamentals of Probability (6.7700)
- Advanced Algorithms (6.5210)
- Deep Learning (6.7960)
- Machine Learning (6.7900)
- Natural Language Processing (6.4610)
- Robotics: Science and Systems (6.4200)
- Computer Graphics (6.4400)
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2020.09 - 2024.06 Andover, MA
Awards
- 2026.02.01
MIT CSAIL Agentic AI Hackathon — Winner (Jane Street Award)
For Fireroad.ai, an AI course planner for MIT students. Award included presenting the project at Jane Street in New York.
Publications
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2026.10.01 KeyFlow: Agentic Policy Adaptation with Episodic Memory
CoRL 2026 Workshop Learn@Deploy
First-listed co-first author (equal contribution with Ben Zandonati). A coding agent adapts a manipulation policy by rewriting how a few demonstrations are represented and retrieved, beating a VLA fine-tuned on ten times more data.
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2026.10.01 Generalized Planning Interfaces for Agentic Robotics
CoRL 2026 Workshop on Agentic Robotics
Second author. Ben Zandonati, Yifan Kang, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling.
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2026.10.01 ENCORE: Few-Shot Agentic Discovery of Manipulation Strategies
NeurIPS 2026 Robot Learning Workshop (Oral)
A coding agent reads three demonstrations, writes an executable policy program, and repairs it from its own execution traces.
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2026.09.01 Interpreting Diffusion Language Models Over Denoising Time
CoLM 2026 Workshop on Non-Autoregressive Language Models
Sparse autoencoders and cross-layer transcoders for diffusion LLMs, with timestep-aware tracing and causal interventions.
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2025.10.01 Doodle Agent: Exploring Freeform Visual Generation with Multimodal LLMs
ICCV 2025 AI4VA Workshop
Co-first author. A drawing agent for open-ended visual creation using LLMs and structured prompting. Accepted to ICCV 2025 AI4VA Workshop.
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2023.08.01 CNOT-Optimal Circuit Synthesis
Research Science Institute
Authored under the mentorship of Henry Ma (MIT). Selected as the top 5 paper at RSI out of 100 candidates.
Skills
| Programming Languages | |
| Python | |
| C++ | |
| Java | |
| Rust | |
| LaTeX |
| Machine Learning | |
| Deep Learning | |
| Computer Vision | |
| Natural Language Processing | |
| Robotics | |
| Generative Models |
| Tools & Frameworks | |
| PyTorch | |
| LeRobot | |
| RoboCasa | |
| IsaacSim | |
| SAM2 | |
| ROS2 | |
| Weights & Biases |
Languages
| English | |
| Native |
| Chinese | |
| Bilingual Proficiency |
| Japanese | |
| JLPT N1 |
Interests
| Research | ||||||
| Machine Learning | ||||||
| Computer Vision | ||||||
| Robotics | ||||||
| Natural Language Processing | ||||||
| Quantum Computing | ||||||
| Mathematics | |||||||
| Combinatorics | |||||||
| Algebra | |||||||
| Topology | |||||||
| Coding Theory | |||||||
| Game Theory | |||||||
| Representation Theory | |||||||