Heng (Alfredo) Zhang
heng.zhang@iit.it

I am a third-year PhD student in Robotics and Intelligent Machines (DRIM) at Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), advised by Dr. Arash Ajoudani. Previously, I received a Master's degree in Control Engineering from Tongji University and a B.E degree in Automation from Northeast Electric Power University, China.

CV / Google Scholar / LinkedIn / ResearchGate / Twitter / Github

Research Interests

"Contact is the heart of robotic manipulation. To understand manipulation, you must understand contact."

My research focuses on robot learning, reinforcement learning. Specifically, My current research interest focuses on: I would be happy you want to discuss my research with me. I’m open to collaborations, please feel free to send me Email!

Career Goals

Short-term:

  • Complete PhD
  • Apply for a postdoc

Long-term:

  • To be a professor or:
  • Co-found a robotics startup

Outreach

Inspired by Shuijing Liu: For junior PhD, Master's, and undergraduate students as well as potential collaborators, I offer a 30-minute mentorship session. I am especially available to support students from underrepresented groups or those in need. Topics include, but are not limited to, AI, robotics, AI4Sci research, graduate school applications, career development, and life advice. If you'd like to chat, please fill out this form to schedule a meeting.

Note: I do check my email every weekday and respond promptly. Please feel free to send a follow-up email if you haven't received a reply.


News

Research

SRL-VIC Animation SRL-VIC: A variable stiffness-based safe reinforcement learning for contact-rich robotic tasks

Heng Zhang, Gokhan Solak, Gustavo JG Lahr, Arash Ajoudani
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2024
Paper  •   Video  •  


Exploration Policy with Safety and Generalization in contact-rich tasks using Safe Reinforcement Learning and VIC.

INTENTION Animation INTENTION: Inferring Tendencies of Humanoid Motion Through Physical Intuition and Grounded VLM

Jin Wang, Weijie Wang, Boyuan Deng, Heng Zhang, Rui Dai, Nikos Tsagarakis
IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Seoul, Korea, 2025
Paper  •   Website  •  


INTENTION is a framework that combines physical intuition and grounded VLM to infer humanoid motion tendencies, enabling robots to predict and adapt to human actions in dynamic environments.

aiXiv Animation aiXiv: A Next-Generation Open Access Ecosystem for Scientific Discovery Generated by AI Scientists

Pengsong Zhang, Heng Zhang, et al.
The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2026, under review
Paper  •   Code  •   Website  •  

aiXiv is a Preprint server for AI Scientists and Robot Scientists that leverages AI technologies to facilitate scientific discovery and collaboration among researchers.

HiBerNAC Animation HiBerNAC: Hierarchical Brain-emulated Robotic Neural Agent Collective for Disentangling Complex Manipulation

Hongjun Wu , Heng Zhang, Pengsong Zhang, Jin Wang, Cong Wang
under review
Paper  •   Code  •  


HiBerNAC: a Hierarchical Brain-emulated robotic Neural Agent Collective that combines: (1) multimodal VLA planning and reasoning with (2) neuro-inspired reflection and multi-agent mechanisms, specifically designed for complex robotic manipulation tasks.

passiveRL Animation Towards Passive Safe Reinforcement Learning: A Comparative Study on Contact-rich Robotic Manipulation

Heng Zhang, Gokhan Solak, Sebastian Hjorth, Arash Ajoudani
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) under review
Paper  •   Hugging Face  •  


Learning to be safe and stable both in training and deployment in real world.

Bresa Bresa: Bio-inspired Reflexive Safe Reinforcement Learning for Contact-Rich Robotic Tasks

Heng Zhang*, Gokhan Solak*, Arash Ajoudani， * equal contribution,
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) under review
Paper  •   Website  •   Video  •  


A Bio-inspired Reflexive Hierarchical Safe RL method inspired by biological reflexes operating at a higher frequency than the task solver.






AGS Scaling Laws in Scientific Discovery with AI and Robot Scientists

Pengsong Zhang*, Heng Zhang*, Huazhe Xu, Renjun Xu, Zhenting Wang, Cong Wang, Animesh Garg, Zhibin Li, Arash Ajoudani, Xinyu Liu, * equal contribution,
Nature Machine Intelligence in submission
Paper  •   Hugging Face  •   Github


Autonomous Generalist Scientist (AGS) combines agentic AI and embodied robotics to automate the entire research lifecycle.

Service