Selected Publications

Bilevel Learning for Bilevel Planning
Bowen Li, Tom Silver, Sebastian Scherer, Alexander Gray
RSS 2025 [Paper] [Project] [Code]
"A bilevel learning framework that invents neural predicates for long-horizon hybrid planning."
KinDER: A Physical Reasoning Benchmark for Robot Learning and Planning
Yixuan Huang*, Bowen Li*, Vaibhav Saxena*, et, al. Tom Silver,
RSS 2026 [Paper] [Project] [Code]
"A task suite and benchmark for long-horizon, embodied, and physical reasoning."
SLAP: Shortcut Learning for Abstract Planning
Isabel Liu, Bowen Li, Benjamin Eysenbach, Tom Silver,
ICLR 2026 [Paper] [Code]
"A general framework for automated shortcut physical option discovery on provided hierarchical planners."
LogiCity: Advancing NeSy AI with Abstract Urban Simulation
Bowen Li, Zhaoyu Li, Qiwei Du, Jinqi Luo, Wenshan Wang, Yaqi Xie, Simon Stepputtis, Chen Wang, Katia Sycara, Pradeep Ravikumar, Alexander Gray, Xujie Si, Sebastian Scherer*
NeurIPS 2024 D&B Track [Project] [Paper] [Code, Data]
"A flexible First-Order Logical abstraction-based multi-agent urban simulator, where LLMs fail."
VoxDet: Voxel Learning for Novel Instance Detection
Bowen Li, Jiashun Wang, Yaoyu Hu, Chen Wang, Sebastian Scherer*
NeurIPS 2023 (★ SpotLight ★) [Paper] [Project] [Code, Data]
"A 3D-inspired framework for detecting ANY (Novel) specific instance in the wild."
Fast Task Planning with Neuro-Symbolic Relaxation
Qiwei Du, Bowen Li, et, al. Chen Wang,
RA-L 2026 [Paper] [Project]
"A general framework for learning-based ultra-fast task planning."
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 [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 [Paper] [Project] [Code]
"Leverage class-agnostic relation to implement few-shot detection w/o fine-tuning, which enables fast and efficient robotic exploration."

Selected Pre-Prints

Unifying Deep Predicate Invention with Pre-trained Foundation Models
Qianwei Wang*, Bowen Li*, Zhanpeng Luo, Yifan Xu, Alexander Gray, Tom Silver, Sebastian Scherer Katia Sycara, Yaqi Xie,
[Paper] [Project]
"An LLM-in-the-loop agentic framework for discovering and optimizing deep predicates on real images."
Recover, Discover, Plan: Learning Skills and Concepts from Robot Failures
Bowen Li, Mayank Mishra, Isabel Liu, Stone Tao, Nishanth Kumar, Alexander Gray, Ruwan Wickramarachchi, Jonathan Francis, Sebastian Scherer, Tom Silver
[Paper] [Project]
"An online failure recovery reinforcement learning approach for joint skill and concept synthesis."

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

  • International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
  • International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
  • Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
  • IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
  • IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
  • European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)
  • IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
  • International Journal on Robotics Research (IJRR)
  • IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
  • IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

Area Chair

  • ICRA 2025 Workshop on Foundation Models and Neural-Symbolic AI for Robotics (FMNS)

Current and Past Affiliations

Mentors and Collaborators

Prof. Sebastian Scherer@CMU

Prof. Tom Silver@Princeton

Dr. Alexander Gray@Centaur AI

Prof. Chen Wang@Buffalo

Prof. Changhong Fu@Tongji

Prof. Hang Zhao@Tsinghua

Contact

  • bowenli2@cs.cmu.edu
  • +1-412-608-2217
  • 1723 Murray Ave, Robotics Institute SQH, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15217, USA