Professor Li, Hongyang
PhD The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Assistant Professor
Email: hongyang@hku.hk
Homepage: https://lihongyang.info/
Hongyang Li is an Assistant Professor at The University of Hong Kong and has led OpenDriveLab since 2021. His research focus is on autonomous driving and embodied AI. He led the end-to-end autonomous driving project, UniAD and won the IEEE CVPR 2023 Best Paper Award. UniAD has a tremendous impact both in academia and industry, including the recent rollout to customers by Tesla in FSD V12. He created the first large-scale real robot ecosystem, AgiBot World, that systematically investigated the scaling law principles for robotic manipulation and won IROS 2025 Best Paper Finalist. He proposed the bird's-eye-view perception work, BEVFormer, that won Top 100 AI Papers in 2022. He served as Area Chair for CVPR, NeurIPS (including 2023 Notable AC), ICLR, ICCV, ICML, RSS, referee for Nature, Science Robotics, Guest Editor at Automotive Innovations. He is the Working Group Chair for IEEE Standards P3474 under Vehicular Technology Society. He is the Senior Member of IEEE, CCF and CSIG. He is the recipient of China AI Wu Wen Jun Early Career Award 2024.
Research Interests
Embodied AI, Autonomous Driving, Robotic Manipulation, Humanoids, VLA and World Models
Selected Publications
[1] Yihan Hu, Jiazhi Yang, Li Chen, Keyu Li, Chonghao Sima, Xizhou Zhu, Siqi Chai, Senyao Du, Tianwei Lin, Wenhai Wang, Lewei Lu, Xiaosong Jia, Qiang Liu, Jifeng Dai, Yu Qiao, Hongyang Li. ‘Planning-Oriented Autonomous Driving.’ IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2023); 17853-17862. Best Paper Award, Project lead.
[2] Chonghao Sima, Katrin Renz, Kashyap Chitta, Li Chen, Hanxue Zhang, Chengen Xie, Jens Beißwenger, Ping Luo, Andreas Geiger, Hongyang Li. ‘DriveLM: Driving with Graph Visual Question Answering.’ European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2024); 256-274. Project Lead. Oral (1.5% rate)
[3] Zhiqi Li, Wenhai Wang, Hongyang Li, Enze Xie, Chonghao Sima, Tong Lu, Qiao Yu, Jifeng Dai. ‘BEVFormer: Learning Bird’s-Eye-View Representation From LiDAR-Camera via Spatiotemporal Transformers.’ IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis & Machine Intelligence (IEEE TPAMI 2025); 47(03): 2020-2036. Co-first author. The 100 Most Cited AI Papers, Co-first author.
[4] Qingwen Bu, Yanting Yang, Jisong Cai, Shenyuan Gao, Guanghui Ren, Maoqing Yao, Ping Luo, Hongyang Li. ‘UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actions.’ Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS 2025). Project lead.
[5] Qingwen Bu, Agibot-world Team, Hongyang Li. ‘AgiBot World Colosseo: A Large-scale Manipulation Platform for Scalable and Intelligent Embodied Systems.’ IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2025) Best Paper Finalist. Project lead.