Photo of Yonggen Ling

Yonggen Ling

凌永根

Tencent Robotics X

Biography

I joined Tencent in 2017 immediately upon graduation and currently serve as the Team Leader of the Multimodal Perception Group at the Robotics X Lab. My research focuses on Embodied AI and the multi-modal understanding of the dynamic (4D) physical world. My goal is to enable robots to perceive, reason, and interact seamlessly with complex environments and humans.

I obtained my Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute at HKUST in 2017, advised by Prof. Shaojie Shen. My doctoral research centered on robust state estimation, including visual odometry, 3D mapping, and SLAM. Prior to this, I honed my engineering skills at DJI, developing vision systems for UAVs, and conducted research on multimedia signal processing at MTrec under IEEE Fellow Prof. Oscar C. Au.

My technical roots lie in competitive programming (ACM-ICPC), which instilled in me a rigorous approach to problem-solving. Today, I combine that algorithmic discipline with deep learning to solve the next generation of challenges in robotic perception and interaction.

Research Interests

Embodied AI Multi-modal Understanding Robotic Perception Robot Learning Human-Robot Interaction

We are looking for exceptional talent — Ph.D. and Master’s students who are self-motivated and eager to define the future of robotics. If you are interested in joining us to work on ground-breaking research, please feel free to contact me via email.

Selected Publications

(*equal contribution, ✉ corresponding author)

  1. Kehan Chen, Dong An, Yan Huang, Rongtao Xu, Yifei Su, Yonggen Ling, Ian Reid, and Liang Wang
    Shot Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments
    IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence TPAMI, 2025
  2. Junning Qiu, Minglei Lu, Fei Wang, Yu Guo, and Yonggen Ling✉
    Leveraging Global Stereo Consistency for Category-Level Shape and 6D Pose Estimation from Stereo Images
    in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition CVPR, 2025
  3. Yifei Su, Dong An, Kehan Chen, Weichen Yu, Baiyang Ning, Yonggen Ling, Yan Huang, Liang Wang
    Learning Fine-Grained Alignment for Aerial Vision-Dialog Navigation
    in AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI, 2025
  4. Chuanrui Zhang*, Yonggen Ling*✉, Minglei Lu, Minghan Qin and Haoqian Wang
    Category-level Object Detection, Pose Estimation and Reconstruction from Stereo Images
    in European Conference on Computer Vision ECCV, 2024
  5. Zhaoliang Wan, Yonggen Ling✉, Senlin Yi, Lu Qi, Minglei Lu, Wangwei Lee, Sicheng Yang, Xiao Teng, Peng Lu, Xu Yang, Ming-Hsuan Yang, and Hui Cheng
    VinT-6D: A Large-Scale Object-in-hand Dataset from Vision, Touch and Proprioception
    in International Conference on Machine Learning ICML, 2024
  6. Kaspar Althoefer*, Yonggen Ling*, Xinyuan Qian, Wang Wei Lee, Peng Qi and Wanlin Li
    A Miniaturised Camera-based Multi-Modal Tactile Sensor
    in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation ICRA, 2023
  7. Boxiang Zhang, Zunran Wang, Yonggen Ling, Yuanyuan Guan, Shenghao Zhang and Wenhui Li
    Mx2M: Masked Cross-Modality Modeling in Domain Adaptation for 3D Semantic Segmentation
    in AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI, 2023
  8. Shifeng Lin, Zunran Wang, Shenghao Zhang, Yonggen Ling, Chenguang Yang
    Deep Fusion for Multi-Modal 6D Pose Estimation
    IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering TASE, 2023
  9. Haoxian Zhang* and Yonggen Ling*✉
    HVC-Net: Unifying Homography, Visibility, and Confidence Learning for Planar Object Tracking
    in European Conference on Computer Vision ECCV, 2022
  10. Shifeng Lin, Zunran Wang, Yonggen Ling, Yidan Tao and Chenguang Yang
    E2EK: End-to-End Regression Network Based on Keypoint for 6D Pose Estimation
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters RAL, 2022
  11. Hanzhong Liu, Bidan Huang, Qiang Li, Yu Zheng, Yonggen Ling, Wang Wei Lee, Yi Liu, Ya-Yen Tsai and Chenguang Yang
    Multi-Finger Tactile Servoing for Grasping Adjustment under Partial Observation
    in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems IROS, 2022
  12. Yajing Chen, Fanzi Wu, Zeyu Wang, Yibing Song, Yonggen Ling and Linchao Bao
    Self-Supervised Learning of Detailed 3D Face Reconstruction
    IEEE Transactions on Image Processing TIP, 2020
  13. Yonggen Ling and Shaojie Shen
    Real-time Dense Mapping for Online Processing and Navigation
    Journal of Field Robotics JFR, 2019
  14. Fanzi Wu, Linchao Bao, Yajing Chen, Yonggen Ling, Yibing Song, Songnan Li, King N. Ngan and Wei Liu
    MVF-Net: Multi-View 3D Face Morphable Model Regression
    in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition CVPR, 2019
  15. Yonggen Ling, Linchao Bao, Zequn Jie, Fengming Zhu, Ziyang Li, Shanmin Tang, Yongsheng Liu, Wei Liu and Tong Zhang
    Modeling Varying Camera-IMU Time Offset in Optimization-Based Visual-Inertial Odometry
    in European Conference on Computer Vision ECCV, 2018
  16. Yonggen Ling, Kaixuan Wang and Shaojie Shen
    Probabilistic Dense Reconstruction from a Moving Camera
    in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems IROS, 2018
  17. Zequn Jie, Pengfei Wang, Yonggen Ling, Bo Zhao, Jiashi Feng and Wei Liu
    Left-Right Comparative Recurrent Model for Stereo Matching
    in IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition CVPR, 2018
  18. Yonggen Ling and Shaojie Shen
    Building Maps for Autonomous Navigation Using Sparse Visual SLAM Features
    in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems IROS, 2017
  19. Yonggen Ling and Shaojie Shen
    High-Precision Online Markerless Stereo Extrinsic Calibration
    in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems IROS, 2016
  20. Yonggen Ling, Tianbo Liu and Shaojie Shen
    Aggressive Quadrotor Flight Using Dense Visual-Inertial Fusion
    in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation ICRA, 2016

Selected Awards

Research Travel Grant
HKUST, 2014, 2015, 2016
Postgraduate Scholarship
HKUST, Sep. 2012 - Aug. 2016
National Scholarship
China, 2009, 2010, 2011
Google Excellence Scholarship
Google, 2011
Top Ten Students
South China University of Technology, 2011
First Prize, 10th Guangdong Collegiate Programming Contest
Guangdong, 2012
First Prize, 9th Guangdong Collegiate Programming Contest
Guangdong, 2011
Silver Medal, 35th ACM-ICPC Asia Regional (Harbin)
ACM, 2010
Silver Medal, 35th ACM-ICPC Asia Regional (Fuzhou)
ACM, 2010

Previous Work Experience