19/02/2026 10:28 AM - SURE Applicants
19/02/2026 10:28 AM - SURE Applicants
Wei Liu weiliutb@umich.edu Robotics
My favorite. Reached out directly, was easy to talk to, has some relevant experience, is a robotics undergrad. Would be helpful in working with SNU on robotic arm stuff.
Should discuss with Jason about the robotic arm stuff.
Previous projects:
Leia stirling project. Hard to define clear goal.
How did you figure out what research to do?
Inspiriation from 204. Motivated by Astro. Navigation using open language command. Noticed that ambiguous commands (calling them implicit commands).
Used foundation models. Which?
How was the scene graph represented? Cosine similarity to what? What would need to change to pass the embeddings in directly.
Couldn't put whole scene graph into LLM.
Met him at the potluck.
Wants to work in embodied intelligence. Ask if he wants to do closed loop clarification.
Use multiple different models to verify each other.
What is your experience with language models?
What is your experience with VLAs?
What projects do you want to highlight for me?
What software engineering experience do you have?
Have you used HuggingFace Transformers before?
Used openAI api for LLM. Used gpt 4o mini. Used low temperature.
Say I want the model to output in a specific format, say JSON. Do you have an idea of how to do that? Practically with libraries or theoretically would suffice.
If I have to load a large model with limited RAM, what techniques would I use to do that?
Have you used simulation environments before?
Mostly Gazebo. Trying with Isaccsim. Used Isaccsim for generating occupancy grid. Used pybullet for courses.
Say I give you the pth/safetensors file for a model that can clarify,
Why do you want to work with us? What experience do you wish to gain?
Talk about Jason.
Anything you want to ask me?
- [ ] @TODO Ask jason if undergrads will come to lab meetings.
Machine learning training:
Rob320 did theoretical background in optimization problems.
Wants to go to grad school. SUGS for 1 year and then PhD in robotics. Worked at Carnegie melon for schema learning. NLP. Predict the supply chain disruption in industry. Did data collection and cleaning.
Representation of knowledge is a core idea. Semantic mapping and navigation and embodiment. Better understand the world and environment.
- [ ] @TODO Has done SURE before. Criteria on website saying SURE is for exploring research.
xinyuan wang