CV - Ying-Chun Lee

Education

M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of Washington, Seattle, WA

Sep 2025 — Mar 2027 (Expected)

GPA: 3.95 / 4.0

B.S. in Electrical Engineering

Yuan Ze University, Taoyuan, Taiwan

Sep 2020 — Jun 2024

GPA: 3.73 / 4.0 · Major: 3.94 / 4.0

Experience

Amazon — Seattle, WA

with Jiafei Duan and collaborators from Ai2 PRIOR

Contributed to robot-learning research associated with MolmoAct2, MolmoB0T, TOPReward, and MolmoSpaces (RSS 2026); built infrastructure for real-robot policy deployment, teleoperation, evaluation, and control tooling
Set up real-time imitation-learning deployment infrastructure on 3 robot platforms (Franka FR3, SO-100/SO-101 via LeRobot, YAM), improving 100-episode rollout throughput from ~4 hours to ~100 minutes
Fine-tuned and ran VLA and imitation-learning policies including π₀, π_0.5, π₀-FAST, ACT, SmolVLA, and Diffusion Policy on real hardware; added joint-position/velocity action support and real-time FR3 inference
Built platform tooling around calibration, recording, validation, and LeRobot-compatible conversion to make policy deployment and evaluation reproducible
Implemented GELLO teleoperation for Franka FR3 and YAM, plus Meta Quest 2 Cartesian-delta control through Polymetis and direct SDK integrations

University of Washington — Seattle, WA

Built a distributed pipeline over 400K+ GitHub repositories, cutting collection time by 87% (5 hours to 40 minutes) with GraphQL/REST, Redis, Celery, and multi-token rotation
Added a validation layer for raw API data, including HTTP 451 legal blocks and metric inconsistencies affecting ~2% of the dataset
Built a tiered scoring system and React interface with instant filtering (<100ms), client-side pagination, and URL state persistence

Husky Robotics Team, University of Washington — Seattle, WA

Delivered a real-time perception stack for an autonomous Mars rover, enabling pose-aware navigation and ~90% object-detection accuracy by integrating OpenCV, ArUco solvePnP, and OWL-ViT
Built a fine-tuning pipeline for OWL-ViT to accurately detect three designated objects in the University Rover Challenge (URC), improving recall on domain-specific targets
Integrated Intel RealSense depth sensing into the perception stack, enabling the rover to estimate object distance in real time for autonomous approach and manipulation
Architected camera calibration and perception-to-navigation integration in C++ for low-latency real-time control

Chang Chun Group — Information Center, Taipei, Taiwan

Built an imitation-learning training platform for the ALOHA VX300S arm, reaching 100% grasp success in simulation across a 35-65 cm workspace
Developed a ROS2-Isaac Sim digital twin and Transformer-based ACT++ control pipeline with a three-stage trajectory planner
Added automated conversion to standard ACT++ HDF5 datasets for repeatable training runs

Shoulder ultrasound medical image segmentation — guidance from Prof. Yih-Kuen Jan (UIUC DRES Lab) & Prof. Chih-Yang Lin

Led first-author research on soft-tissue segmentation in shoulder ultrasound medical images, implementing U-Net, Mask R-CNN, and DeepLab V3+; published in IEEE Access
Developed a deep learning model combining VGG and ANN for spinal cord injury (SCI) classification from shoulder ultrasound medical images
Selected as Scholarship Recipient through Taiwan Ministry of Education Overseas Internship Program (2022 & 2023)

Projects

ROS & Gazebo — Yuan Ze University

Built and tested an autonomous four-wheeled delivery robot in ROS Noetic and Gazebo with C++ and LiDAR
Used gmapping, amcl, and costmap for SLAM, localization, path planning, and obstacle avoidance

Raspberry Pi 4 & Flask — Yuan Ze University

Built a web-controlled door lock system with Raspberry Pi 4, an RFID reader, and Flask
Fixed electromagnetic lock overheating by adding auto-lock behavior to prevent prolonged current flow

Computer Vision — Yuan Ze University

Built a real-time gesture recognition and background replacement system with 99% accuracy across five gestures
Extracted 522 body landmarks with MediaPipe and compared four classifiers, including Random Forest and Gradient Boosting

Teaching

Yuan Ze University

Helped manage coursework, grading, and exam logistics
Supported students one-on-one with LC3 assembly, two's complement, and binary operations

Yuan Ze University

Taught Arduino development and C++ fundamentals to university students and conducted workshops for high school students

Publications

Haoquan Fang, Jiafei Duan, Donovan Clay, Sam Wang, Shuo Liu, ..., Winson Han, Ying-Chun Lee, ..., Ali Farhadi, Dieter Fox, and Ranjay Krishna, "MolmoAct2: Action Reasoning Models for Real-world Deployment," arXiv:2605.02881, 2026. arXiv | Project | Code
Abhay Deshpande, Maya Guru, Rose Hendrix, Snehal Jauhri, Ainaz Eftekhar, ..., Ying-Chun Lee, ..., Georgia Chalvatzaki, Dhruv Shah, and Ranjay Krishna, "MolmoB0T: Large-Scale Simulation Enables Zero-Shot Manipulation," arXiv:2603.16861, 2026. arXiv | Code
Shirui Chen, Cole Harrison, Ying-Chun Lee, Angela Jin Yang, Zhongzheng Ren, Lillian J. Ratliff, Jiafei Duan, Dieter Fox, and Ranjay Krishna, "TOPReward: Token Probabilities as Hidden Zero-Shot Rewards for Robotics," arXiv preprint, 2026. arXiv | Code
Yejin Kim, Wilbert Pumacay, Omar Rayyan, Max Argus, Winson Han, ..., Ying-Chun Lee, ..., Ali Farhadi, Dieter Fox, and Ranjay Krishna, "MolmoSpaces: Large-Scale Open Ecosystem for Robot Manipulation and Navigation," RSS 2026. arXiv | Code
Ying-Chun Lee, Chih-Yang Lin, Chia-Chun Hsiao, Pu-Chun Mo, Jiaqi Guo, and Yih-Kuen Jan, "Using Deep Learning-Based Methods for Automated Segmentation of Soft Tissues from Shoulder Ultrasound Images," IEEE Access, Vol. 12, pp. 111,481-111,492, July 2024. DOI

Awards

Selected to conduct research at UIUC

Yuan Ze University

Yuan Ze University — 1st out of 10 in Finals

Taiwan — 8th out of 36 teams

Skills

Programming

Python C C++ JavaScript HTML CSS SQL MATLAB

Robotics / VLA / AI

VLA Robot Learning Reinforcement Learning Reward Modeling Imitation Learning LeRobot ROS2 Polymetis NVIDIA Isaac Sim PyTorch TensorFlow OpenCV OWL-ViT Diffusion Policy

Software Systems

React Node.js Flask Docker Kubernetes AWS GCP Redis Celery GitHub GraphQL/REST

Data & Analysis

pandas NumPy SciPy Matplotlib Jupyter Git