Yixun Hu

Hi! I am Yixun Hu, a first-year Ph.D. student in ECE Department at Princeton University advised by Prof. Christine Allen-Blanchette. I am fortunate to work with Prof. Dhruv Shah and Prof. Tom Silver on robot learning and planning at Princeton.

I am a born scientist (love math, physics, and philosophy) and a trained engineer (interested in software and hardware systems). My goal is to understand the fundamental principles of nature and leverage existing technologies to serve society.

Prior to Princeton, I obtained a bachelor’s degree (B.Eng in EE) from Tsinghua University in 2025, where I worked with Prof. Chen Jiang. I also had a great summer working with Prof. Zhenan Bao at Stanford in 2024.

contact: yh4742 at princeton dot edu

Selected Publications

RAVEN: Long-Horizon Reasoning & Navigation with a Visuo-Spatio-Temporal Memory

Yixun Hu, Zhicheng Zheng, Lihan Zha, Chunwei Xing, Rajdeep Singh, Omar Hossain, Antonio Loquercio, and Dhruv Shah

Preprint, 2026

Abs arXiv Code Website

We propose RAVEN, an agentic memory system for long-horizon robotic question answering and navigation. RAVEN stores visual embeddings with pose and time in a vector database, grounds retrieval in a spatial map to answer queries and navigate to goals, and operates directly on visual embeddings to enable accurate semantic, spatial, and temporal retrieval at scale.
Neural Field Thermal Tomography: A Differentiable Physics Framework for Non-Destructive Evaluation

Tao Zhong, Yixun Hu, Dongzhe Zheng, Aditya Sood, and Christine Allen-Blanchette

Preprint, 2026

Abs arXiv Website

We propose NeFTY, a framework that enables accurate 3D thermal tomography by combining continuous neural fields with a differentiable physics solver to recover subsurface defects from surface temperature data.
OJID

A Photo-Synaptic Pixel Circuit for Artificial Retina With Organic Thin-Film Transistors

Yixun Hu, Yishen Sun, Yilun Zhong, Jian Zhao, Chenxin Zhu, and Chen Jiang

IEEE Open Journal on Immersive Displays, 2024

DOI PDF