I am an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), University at Buffalo (UB).
At the intersection of perception, spatial reasoning, and decision-making, we are committed to advancing mobile robots toward human-level autonomy by developing algorithms and systems that can efficiently and robustly:
- Perceive and interpret various sensory inputs such as images, point clouds, and proprioceptive data.
- Integrate neural and symbolic memory representations to capture spatial common sense and semantic knowledge.
- Reason, plan, and act in real time to navigate in, interact with, and adapt within unstructured and dynamic environments.
A central paradigm we advocate is imperative learning (IL), a unified neuro-symbolic learning framework for robot autonomy that promotes data-efficient learning through structured reasoning. IL is inherently self-supervised, modular, and end-to-end learnable with symbolic reasoning grounded in physical laws and logical rules.
We are also leading the development of PyPose, an open-source library for differentiable robotics on manifolds. Notably, PyPose has accumulated over 160,000 downloads in 2025, according to PyPi Stats.
Experience & Education
- Assistant Professor, University at Buffalo (UB), USA, 2022 - Present
- Postdoctoral Fellow, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, 2019 - 2022
- Ph.D., Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, 2014 - 2019
- Bachelor, Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), China, 2010 - 2014
Awards
- UB CSE Excellence in Research Award, 2024
- Sony Research Award, 2024
- Cisco Research Award, 2023
Services
- Associate Editor for Top Journals
- IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), Jan. 2026 - Present
- International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), Jan. 2023 - Present
- IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), Aug. 2021 - Aug 2024
- Area Chair for Top Conferences
- IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023 - Present
- Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024 - Present
- IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025 - Present
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Leading Guest Editor for IJRR Special Issue on Foundation Models and Neuro-Symbolic AI for Robotics
- Associate Co-chair for IEEE RAS Technical Committee for Computer & Robot Vision, Dec. 2022 - Present
Information
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Work Email: chenw@sairlab.org
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School Email: cwx@buffalo.edu
Selected Publications
Selected publications highlighting key contributions in neuro-symbolic robot autonomy, including framework development, system design, and foundations in learning and representation. Full publication list is here.
Representative Works
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Imperative Learning: A Self-supervised Neuro-Symbolic Learning Framework for Robot Autonomy.International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), 2025. -
Resilient Odometry via Hierarchical Adaptation.Science Robotics, vol. 10, no. 109, 2025.
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PyPose: A Library for Robot Learning with Physics-based Optimization.IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 22024–22034, 2023.
Neuro-Symbolic Robot Autonomy
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Fast Task Planning with Neuro-Symbolic Relaxation.IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 3684–3691, 2026.
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iWalker: Imperative Visual Planning for Walking Humanoid Robot.IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pp. 2865–2872, 2025. -
PhysORD: A Neuro-Symbolic Approach for Physics-infused Motion Prediction in Off-road Driving.IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pp. 11670–11677, 2024. -
iPlanner: Imperative Path Planning.Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2023.
Adaptive Learning for Robotic Systems
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Spatially-Enhanced Recurrent Memory for Long-Range Mapless Navigation via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning.International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), 2025.
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AirSLAM: An Efficient and Illumination-Robust Point-Line Visual SLAM System.IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), vol. 41, pp. 1673–1692, 2025.
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Unsupervised Online Learning for Robotic Interestingness with Visual Memory.IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 2446–2461, 2021.
Foundations in Learning and Representation
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SuperPC: A Single Diffusion Model for Point Cloud Completion, Upsampling, Denoising, and Colorization.IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 16953–16964, 2025.
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iMatching: Imperative Correspondence Learning.European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), pp. 183–200, 2024. -
Lifelong Graph Learning.IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 13719–13728, 2022. -
Visual Memorability for Robotic Interestingness via Unsupervised Online Learning.European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), pp. 52–68, 2020.
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Kervolutional Neural Networks.IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 31–40, 2019.