Zilin Dai

I am currently a graduate student in Computational Science and Engineering at Harvard University, supported by the Amazon Robotics Day One Fellowship. I conduct research on world models and VLAs under the supervision of Prof. Yilun Du.

Previously, I received my B.S. in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), where I worked as a research assistant at VISLab@WPI under the supervision of Prof. Ziming Zhang. I was also a research student at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center under the supervision of Prof. Feng Tian and summer research intern at Carnegie Mellon University Robotic Institute under supervision of Prof. Howie Choset. Earlier, I worked at the Robotic Materials Group at WPI under the supervision of Prof. Markus Nemitz, and at the Learning Sciences & Technologies Center with Prof. Jacob R. Whitehill.

My research interests include foundation model pretraining, efficient retrieval for large-scale datasets, and robot learning. I am particularly interested in combining world models with large foundation models to enable generalizable, efficient behavior and real-world deployment on robotic and autonomous systems.

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