Cheng Chi's Homepage

About Me

I am currently a Researcher at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI). Previously, I served as the Perception Lead at IDRIVERPLUS, where I led research and development of real-world autonomous driving systems. I received my Ph.D. in 2020 from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), under the supervision of Prof. Xudong Zou, Zhen Lei and Stan Z. Li. My dissertation was recognized as an Excellent Doctoral Dissertation by the China Education Society of Electronics (CESE).

My research interests now lie in Embodied Intelligence — empowering robots with the ability to perceive, reason, and act in the physical world.

We are hiring on-site and remote research interns and full-time researchers/engineers specializing in embodied AI and VLM/VLA. Apply here.

Interested graduate and senior undergraduate students are encouraged to apply via email chicheng@baai.ac.cn.

News

• 06 / 2025: We release RoboOS 2.0 (cross-embodiment and multi-agent collaboration framework) & RoboBrain 2.0 (new generation open-source embodied VLM) at BAAI Conference 2025!
• 02 / 2025: Code-as-Monitor is accepted by CVPR 2025
• 10 / 2020: Obtain China Postdoctoral Science Foundation
• 09 / 2020: One paper is accepted by NeurIPS 2020 as Spotlight
• 06 / 2020: Our paper ATSS was nominated for Best Paper Award at CVPR 2020
• 05 / 2020: One paper is accepted by TPAMI
• 02 / 2020: One paper is accepted by CVPR 2020 as Oral
• 05 / 2020: One paper is accepted by ICML 2020

Selected Preprints

( *, †, ‡ indicates the equal contributions, corresponding author, project leader, respectively.)

RoboRefer: Towards Spatial Referring with Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Robotics

Enshen Zhou^*, Jingkun An^*, Cheng Chi^*^‡, Yi Han, Shanyu Rong, Chi Zhang, Pengwei Wang, Zhongyuan Wang, Tiejun Huang, Lu Sheng^†, Shanghang Zhang^†

Under Review

paper

project

RoboBrain 2.0 Technical Report

BAAI RoboBrain Team (I serve as project leader)

paper

project

RoboOS: A Hierarchical Embodied Framework for Cross-Embodiment and Multi-Agent Collaboration

Huajie Tan^*, Xiaoshuai Hao^*, Cheng Chi^*, Minglan Lin^*^‡, Yaoxu Lyu, Mingyu Cao, Dong Liang, Zhuo Chen, Mengsi Lyu, Cheng Peng, Chenrui He, Yulong Ao, Yonghua Lin, Pengwei Wang^‡, Zhongyuan Wang, Shanghang Zhang^†

Under Review

paper

project

Selected Publications

( *, †, ‡ indicates the equal contributions, corresponding author, project leader, respectively.)

Code-as-Monitor: Constraint-aware Visual Programming for Reactive and Proactive Robotic Failure Detection

Enshen Zhou^*, Qi Su^*, Cheng Chi^*^†, Zhizheng Zhang, Zhongyuan Wang, Tiejun Huang, Lu Sheng^†, He Wang^†

IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025

paper

project

RelationNet++: Bridging Visual Representations for Object Detection via Transformer Decoder

Cheng Chi, Fangyun Wei, Han Hu

Thirty-fourth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Spotlight, 2020

paper

code

RefineFace: Refinement Neural Network for High Performance Face Detection

Shifeng Zhang^*, Cheng Chi^*, Zhen Lei, Stan Z Li

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)

^*equal contribution

paper

Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection

Shifeng Zhang, Cheng Chi, Yongqiang Yao, Zhen Lei, Stan Z. Li

IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Oral, Best Paper Nomination, 2020

paper,

code

Relational Learning for Joint Head and Human Detection

Cheng Chi, Shifeng Zhang, Junliang Xing, Zhen Lei, Stan Z. Li, Xudong Zou

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2020

paper

PedHunter: Occlusion Robust Pedestrian Detector in Crowded Scenes

Cheng Chi, Shifeng Zhang, Junliang Xing, Zhen Lei, Stan Z. Li, Xudong Zou

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2020

paper

Selective Refinement Network for High Performance Face Detection

Cheng Chi, Shifeng Zhang, Junliang Xing, Zhen Lei, Stan Z. Li, Xudong Zou

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Oral, 2019

paper

code

Education

B.Eng. in College of Electrical and Information Engineering, Hunan University of China

Sep. 2011 - Jul. 2015

Ph.D. in Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Sep. 2015 - Jul. 2020

Postdoctor in Institute of Automation, Chinese Academic of Sciences

Sep. 2020 - Jul. 2022