CV

Basics

Name Yifan Kang
Label Undergraduate researcher, MIT
Email 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

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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

  • 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.
  • 2026.01 - 2026.01

    Quant Invitational
    Citadel Securities
    One of 24 students invited nationwide to a quantitative trading competition.
  • 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.
  • 2021.01 - 2023.12

    Researcher
    MIT PRIMES
    Three years of mentored research on NUMA-aware concurrent data structures, alongside advanced mathematics.

Education

  • 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)
  • 2020.09 - 2024.06

    Andover, MA

    High School Diploma
    Phillips Academy Andover
    High School

Publications

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