Bowen Li

Ph. D. student, Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, U.S.

About me

I am a second-year Robotics Ph.D student in the AirLab at Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science (SCS), CMU, advised by Prof. Sebastian Scherer. (I've been working with basti since RISS 2021). I also collaborate closely with Prof. Chen Wang and Alex Gray@IBM.

Prior to CMU, I obtined my B.ENG in Mechanical Engineering from Tongji University (TJU) with National Scholarship, and Shanghai Scholarship, where I focused on UAV tracking in Vision4robotics Group. I'm also fortunate to work with Prof. Hang Zhao in the MARS Lab at QiZhi Institute.

My past research were about Generalizable Object Perception in Challenging Environments, which have included the following topics:

Aerial tracking in dark environments (In ICRA'21)

Few-shot detection for exploration (In ECCV'22)

Latency-aware aerial tracking (In ICCV'23)

3D representation for instance recognition (In NeurIPS'23 SpotLight)

Now I'm actively working on Neural-Symbolic Reasoning for Interpretable, Safe, and Robust Robot Autonomy, where I'm quite open and willing to discussion and collaboration.

Education

Ph. D. in Robotics
Sept. 2022 -- present

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh
B.Eng. of Mechanical Engnieering
Sept. 2018 -- Jul. 2022

Tongji University, Shanghai
High School Student
Sept. 2015 -- Jun. 2018

No.1 Middle School Attached to Central China Normal University

News

10/2023: I am awarded Gibbons-Newell Graduate Fellowship!!
10/2023: I gave a talk at SONY Foundation AI Lab.
10/2023: I gave a talk at IBM NSAI.
09/2023: VoxDet is selected as NeurIPS'23 SpotLight!!
07/2023: After one year, PVT++ is finally accepted in ICCV2023!!
03/2023: Pypose is accepted at CVPR2023.
10/2022: I arrived at Tel-Aviv for ECCV2022, so exited!!
07/2022: One paper is accepted by ECCV2022!! Check it out here!!
07/2022: Two papers are accepted by IROS2022! See you in Kyoto!

Selected Publications

VoxDet: Voxel Learning for Novel Instance Detection
Bowen Li, Jiashun Wang, Yaoyu Hu, Chen Wang, Sebastian Scherer*
NeurIPS 2023 (Accepted as ★ SpotLight ★) [Paper] [Project] [Code, Data]
"A 3D-inspired framework for detecting ANY (Novel) specific instance in the wild."

PVT++: A Simple End-to-End Latency-Aware Visual Tracking Framework
Bowen Li^, Ziyuan Huang^, Junjie Ye, Yiming Li, Sebastian Scherer, Hang Zhao, Changhong Fu*
ICCV 2023 (Published) [Paper] [Project] [Code]
"A simple, general, and effective framework for end-to-end predictive tracking that largely compentes for onboard latency."

AirDet: Few-Shot Detection without Fine-tuning for Autonomous Exploration
Bowen Li, Chen Wang, Pranay Reddy, Seungchan Kim, Sebastian Scherer*
ECCV 2022 (Published) [Paper] [Project] [Code]
"Leverage class-agnostic relation to implement few-shot detection w/o fine-tuning, which enables fast and efficient robotic exploration."

ADTrack: Target-Aware Dual Filter Learning for Real-Time Anti-Dark UAV Tracking
Bowen Li, Changhong Fu*, Fangqiang Ding, Junjie Ye, Fuling Lin
ICRA 2021 (Published) [Paper] [Code] [Video]
"Explore image illuminance to learn dual filter regression for robust high-speed anti-dark aerial tracking."

All-Day Object Tracking for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
Bowen Li, Changhong Fu*, Fangqiang Ding, Junjie Ye, Fuling Lin
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (CCF A, IF=7.9, Published)
[Paper] [Code] [Video]
"Adapt to distinct light conditions for robust all-day UAV tracking."

Awards

Gibbons-Newell Graduate Fellowship 2023@RI, Carnegie Mellon University
National Scholarship (top 1%, twice) for Undergraduates
Shanghai Scholarship (top 2%) for Undergraduates
Robotics Institute Summer Scholar (RISS2021), Carnegie Mellon University
Excellent Student (top 1%), Tongji University
Academic Star Model of Tongji University (Ranking 1st)

Service

Academic Reviewer

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

Current and Past Affiliations

Mentors and Collaborators

Prof. Sebastian Scherer@CMU

Prof. Changhong Fu@Tongji

Prof. Hang Zhao@Tsinghua

Prof. Chen Wang@Buffalo

Yiming Li@NYU

Ziyuan Huang@NUS

Friends

Qinglin(Jessica) Feng is a master student@CMU, she is my sweetheart. I always feel lucky to have met such a dolce, considerate, and lovely gf.
Jinqi Luo is a Ph.D. student@UPenn, he's super helpful and nice!! We usually go to gym together.
Bingchen Zhao is a Ph.D. student@Edinburgh. We used to play board games a lot :).
Hanzhe Hu is a Ph.D. student@CMU, with numerous top publications. It is surprising that he has very broad interest in many things.
Tianyuan Zhang is a Ph.D. student@MIT, he has read so many papers that he never fails to recommend me papers no matter what I'm discussing with him. (He is also a wild rift lover, me too)
Jiashun Wang is a Ph.D. student@CMU. Different from me, he doesn't like going to gym :)
Shaozuo Yu is a Ph.D. student@CUHK. He was my advisor in Texas Hold'em :)
Haoyu Xiong is an MSR student@CMU. He is the first CMU friend that I met in person!
Junjie Ye is a Ph.D. student@USC, I usually call him "Jie Ge".
Ziyue Qiu is a Ph.D. student@CMU. She studies system, so is much smarter than a nerd like me :)
Shibo Zhao is a Ph.D. student@CMU, my senior bro at the airlab. We are also roommates :).
Xinyu Wang is an MSR student@CMU. She can cook many delicous dishes and is a gym lover like me :)

Contact

bowenli2@cs.cmu.edu
+1-412-608-2217
1723 Murray Ave, Robotics Institute SQH, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA