Zexi "Jesse" Zhang     张泽西

I am a Master of Research (MRes) student in AI & Machine Learning at Imperial College London. Currently, I am a member of the Safe Whole-body Intelligent Robotics Lab (SWIRL), advised by Prof. Stephen James. My research focuses on humanoid loco-manipulation and reinforcement learning.

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News

[Jan 2026] One co-first author paper was accepted to ICRA 2026, focusing on end-to-end VLMs for Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks. Looking forward to meeting fellow researchers and robots in Vienna! 🎉

Research

My research focuses on enabling intelligent agents, particularly humanoid robots, to perceive, reason, and physically interact with the world.

TagaVLM TagaVLM: Topology-Aware Global Action Reasoning for Vision-Language Navigation
Jiaxing Liu*, Zexi Zhang*, Xiaoyan Li, Boyue Wang, Yongli Hu, Baocai Yin
ICRA 2026
arXiv / project page / code

We propose an end-to-end VLM for Vision-Language Navigation that integrates topology-aware spatial reasoning with global action decision, achieving competitive performance on R2R benchmarks with models as small as 0.5B parameters.

Software

I enjoy the craft of bringing ideas to life with code, especially through front-end development. I frequently share my thoughts and projects on my blog.

Gemini Voyager

An all-in-one enhancement suite for Google Gemini - timeline navigation, folder management, prompt library, and chat export in one powerful extension.

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Experience
Imperial College London
2025.09 - Present

M.Res. in AI & Machine Learning
Advisor: Prof. Stephen James
Beijing University of Technology
2021.09 - 2025.06

B.Eng. in Artificial Intelligence
High School Affiliated to Peking University
2018.09 - 2021.06

Work Experience
PonyAI Inc.
2024

Software Engineer Intern
Developed data annotation pipelines & trained models for LLMs integration.

Awards and Honors

Silver Medal (Top 3.63%), Kaggle LLM Prompt Recovery, 2024

Misc

Teaching (Undergraduate TA):

  • TA for Python Programming (2024.09 - 2025.01).
  • TA for Natural Language Processing (2025.02 - 2025.06). Built the entire experimental framework on Kaggle for the course labs.

Hobbies: Bouldering, swimming, badminton, tennis, and FPS games (CS2, Overwatch, etc.). I was a Top 500 player in Overwatch 2!

Contact

Email: j3ssezhang102 [at] gmail [dot] com

Community: If you have ADHD and need someone to talk to, I'm happy to schedule a 30-minute chat every month. Feel free to reach out.


Template adapted from Jon Barron.