Honglin He

I am a second-year CS PhD student at UCLA, advised by Prof. Bolei Zhou in the Vision and Autonomy Intelligence Lab (VAIL).

I received my M.S. (2024) in Automation from Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Yi Zhang and Prof. Shuo Feng, and my B.Eng. (2021) in Automation from Xiamen University.

My research spans Embodied AI, Urban Simulation, and Robot Navigation. I build scalable simulators and learned navigation policies that help robots move safely on urban sidewalks.

News

Sep 04, 2026	FlowPilot, SidewalkBench, and BridgeSim are accepted to CoRL 2026.
Mar 15, 2026	Our poster Solving Sidewalk Autonomy through Large-scale Urban Simulation is accepted to NVIDIA GTC 2026.
Feb 27, 2026	AURA is accepted to CVPR 2026.
Jan 30, 2026	MIMIC is accepted to ICRA 2026.
Jan 22, 2026	S2E and UrbanVerse are accepted to ICLR 2026.
Aug 20, 2025	I received the Amazon Trainium Fellowship.

Selected Publications

CoRL 2026

From Imitation to Alignment: Human-Preference Flow Policies for Long-Horizon Sidewalk Navigation

Honglin He, Zhizheng Liu, Yukai Ma, and Bolei Zhou

In Conference on Robot Learning, 2026

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CoRL 2026 Spotlight

SidewalkBench: Benchmarking Visual Navigation on Urban Sidewalks

Zhizheng Liu^* , Honglin He^*, Vivek Alumootil^*, Akshat Pandya, Brad Squicciarini, Wayne Wu, and Bolei Zhou

In Conference on Robot Learning (Spotlight), 2026

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ICLR 2026

From seeing to experiencing: Scaling navigation foundation models with reinforcement learning

Honglin He^*, Yukai Ma^*, Brad Squicciarini, Wayne Wu, and Bolei Zhou

In International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026

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ICLR 2026

UrbanVerse: Scaling Urban Simulation by Watching City-Tour Videos

Mingxuan Liu^* , Honglin He^*, Elisa Ricci, Wayne Wu, and Bolei Zhou

In International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026

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CVPR 2025 Highlight

Towards Autonomous Micromobility through Scalable Urban Simulation

Wayne Wu^* , Honglin He^* , Chaoyuan Zhang, Jack He, Seth Z. Zhao, Ran Gong, Quanyi Li, and Bolei Zhou

In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (Highlight), 2025

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ICLR 2025 Spotlight

MetaUrban: An Embodied AI Simulation Platform for Urban Micromobility

Wayne Wu^* , Honglin He^*, Jack He , Yiran Wang, Chenda Duan, Zhizheng Liu, Quanyi Li, and Bolei Zhou

International Conference on Learning Representations (Spotlight), 2025

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ICCV 2023

Orthoplanes: A novel representation for better 3d-awareness of gans

Honglin He^*, Zhuoqian Yang^* , Shikai Li, Bo Dai, and Wayne Wu

In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, 2023

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ICCV 2023

DNA-Rendering: A Diverse Neural Actor Repository for High-Fidelity Human-centric Rendering

Wei Cheng, Ruixiang Chen, Wanqi Yin, Siming Fan, Keyu Chen , Honglin He, Huiwen Luo, Zhongang Cai , Jingbo Wang, Yang Gao, and 1 more author

In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, 2023

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