Research

Papers and ongoing work.

KeyFlow overview: an agent refines keypoints and a retrieval flow field through self-play, then generalizes to new scenes

KeyFlow: Agentic Policy Adaptation with Episodic Memory

Yifan Kang*, Ben Zandonati*, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling  (*equal contribution; co-first authors)

CoRL 2026 Workshop Learn@Deploy

A coding agent adapts a manipulation policy by revising semantic 3D keypoints and retrieval programs from simulated play, without new demonstrations or weight updates. KeyFlow reaches 62.6% held-out success across 13 RoboCasa tasks and improves a base VLA by 37.2 percentage points across six IsaacSim tasks.

Generalized Planning Interfaces: behavior specifications, agent feedback, and graph synthesis for robot execution

Generalized Planning Interfaces for Agentic Robotics

Ben Zandonati, Yifan Kang, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling

CoRL 2026 Workshop on Agentic Robotics

ENCORE teaser

ENCORE: Few-Shot Agentic Discovery of Manipulation Strategies

Yifan Kang, Zihan Wang, Zhiwen Fan, Bangya Liu

NeurIPS 2026 Robot Learning Workshop (Oral, 6/43)  ·  CoRL 2026 Workshop on Agentic Robotics

A coding agent reads three demonstrations, writes an executable policy program, and repairs it from its own execution traces.

Interpretability pipeline for diffusion language models

Interpreting Diffusion Language Models Over Denoising Time

Jingcheng Yang*, Shangtong Wu*, Yifan Kang, Tianhu Xiong, Mingyuan Wu, Haozhen Zheng, Alex Schwing, Klara Nahrstedt  (*equal contribution)

CoLM 2026 Workshop on Non-Autoregressive Language Models

Sparse autoencoders and cross-layer transcoders for diffusion LLMs, with timestep-aware tracing and causal interventions.

Doodle Agent

Doodle Agent: Exploring Freeform Visual Generation with Multimodal LLMs

Dingning Cao*, Yifan Kang*, Yael Vinker, Antonio Torralba  (*equal contribution)

ICCV 2025 Workshop on AI for Visual Arts (AI4VA)

A drawing agent that turns natural-language prompts into drawing actions, iteratively choosing brushes, colors, and coordinates.

CNOT circuits under a topological constraint

CNOT-Optimal Circuit Synthesis

Yifan Kang

Top 5 Paper, Research Science Institute (RSI), 2023

Synthesizing CNOT circuits under directed topological constraints, with hardness results for minimizing circuit size.