CS PhD Student / Embodied AI

Hanxin Zhang / 张含鑫

I am a second-year CS PhD student at the University of Leicester, advised by Dr Daniel Zhou Hao and Professor Hongbiao Dong FREng, affiliated with DANiLab in the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences.

Previously, I completed both my bachelor's and master's studies at the University of Science and Technology Beijing (USTB), receiving a master's degree in Computer Technology. During my undergraduate studies, I was also a professional Chinese University Basketball Association (CUBA) player on the USTB basketball team.

Research

I am interested in robotic brains, including vision-language-action (VLA) models, world action models (WAM), and human-robot interaction (HRI), toward advancing embodied intelligence.

Publications

ICML 2026 International Conference on Machine Learning

Embodied Interpretability: Linking Causal Understanding to Generalization in Vision-Language-Action Models

Hanxin Zhang, Mingshuo Xu, Abdulqader Dhafer, Shigang Yue, Hongbiao Dong, Zhou Daniel Hao

website paper pdf

IROS 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

Intent-Handover: Grounding Language in Human-Usage Regions for Trustworthy Robot-to-Human Handovers

Hanxin Zhang, Abdulqader Dhafer, Hongbiao Dong, Zhou Daniel Hao

website pdf

IROS 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

R2HandoverSim: A Simulation Framework and Benchmark for Robot-to-Human Object Handovers

Hanxin Zhang, Abdulqader Dhafer, Hongbiao Dong, Zhou Daniel Hao

website pdf