William Chen
verityw [AT] berkeley [DOT] edu | LinkedIn | GitHub | Twitter
I am a Computer Science PhD candidate at UC Berkeley's RAIL Lab,
advised by Dr. Sergey Levine.
My research focuses on Robots That Reason.
Previously, I received a M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, after having finished
my B.S. in the same department. I conducted my thesis work in the SPARK
Lab, where I investigated the use of language models to improve robots' abilities to understand their
environments under Dr. Luca Carlone and Jacob Andreas.
I was also a robotics intern at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Publications
Steerable Vision-Language-Action Policies for Embodied Reasoning and Hierarchical Control
William Chen, Jagdeep Bhatia, Catherine Glossop, Nikhil Mathihalli, Ria Doshi, Andy Tang, Danny
Driess, Karl Pertsch, Sergey
Levine
Paper · Website · Code
ECoT-Lite: Training Strategies for Efficient Embodied Reasoning
William Chen, Suneel Belkhale, Suvir Mirchandani, Oier Mees, Danny Driess, Karl Pertsch, Sergey
Levine
Paper · Website
This work was accepted at the CoRL 2025, where it was selected as an Oral Presentation.
ECoT: Robotic Control via Embodied Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Michał Zawalski, William Chen, Karl Pertsch, Oier Mees, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine
Paper · Website ·
Code · Models · Colab
This work was accepted at CoRL 2024. It was also featured in the 2024 State of AI report (slide 77). This work was co-first authored by me and Michał Zawalski.
PR2L: Vision-Language Models Provide Promptable Representations for Reinforcement Learning
William Chen, Oier Mees, Aviral Kumar, Sergey Levine
Paper · Website
This work was accepted to TMLR March 2025.
LITEN: Learning Affordances at Inference-Time for Vision-Language-Action Models
Ameesh Shah, William Chen, Adwait Godbole, Federico Mora, Sanjit A. Seshia, Sergey
Levine
Paper · Website
This work was accepted at ICRA 2026.
Indoor and Outdoor 3D Scene Graph Generation via Language-Enabled Spatial Ontologies
Jared Strader, Nathan Hughes, William Chen, Alberto Speranzon, Luca Carlone
Paper
LaMPP: Language Models as Probabilistic Priors for Perception and Action
Belinda Z. Li, William Chen, Pratyusha Sharma, Jacob Andreas
Paper
Organizing and Service
Workshops
- Panel Organizer for the Evaluation and Deployment Workshop at CoRL 2025
- Lead Organizer for the Workshop on Learned Robot Representations (RoboReps) at RSS 2025
- Panelist at the Third Workshop on Language and Robot Learning at CoRL 2024
Education
University of California, Berkeley
Ph.D. - Computer Science (June 2023 - Present)
Supported by the NDSEG Fellowship.
- Deep Reinforcement Learning
- Convex Optimization
- Artificial Intelligence Systems
- Machine Learning Evaluations
- Deep Neural Networks (TA, Fall 2024)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
M.Eng. - Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Feb 2022 - June 2023)
- Doing Things with Words (Language and Decision-Making AI Seminar)
- Deep Learning
- Advanced Sensorimotor Learning (Reinforcement Learning Seminar)
- Large Language Models and Beyond (Language AI Seminar)
B.S. - Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Aug 2019 - Feb 2022)
- Underactuated Robotics
- Computational Sensorimotor Learning
- Robot Manipulation
- Robotics: Science and Systems (TA, Spring 2021, Spring 2022)
- Advanced Natural Language Processing (TA, Fall 2022)
- Computational Cognitive Science
Bronx High School of Science
High School (Sept 2015 - June 2019)