Yihao Sun

Ph.D. Student in Computer Science at Mila - Quebec AI Institute & Université de Montréal. Advised by Prof. Pierre-Luc Bacon.

I have been a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Université de Montréal and Mila - Quebec AI Institute from May 2025 to present, advised by Prof. Pierre-Luc Bacon. Before starting my Ph.D., I completed my M.Sc. in the LAMDA Group at Nanjing University.

My research centers on reinforcement learning for general-purpose embodied intelligence, with a particular focus on world models and model-based reinforcement learning. I am interested in building generative world models for embodied environments and developing algorithms that use them for efficient policy learning, planning, and adaptation.

Portrait of Yihao Sun

Selected Publications

*: equal contribution, see Google Scholar for the full list

Placeholder illustration for the VLA-MBPO research paper

Towards Practical World Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models

Zhilong Zhang*, Haoxiang Ren*, Yihao Sun*, Yifei Sheng, Haonan Wang, Haoxin Lin, Zhichao Wu, Pierre-Luc Bacon, Yang Yu

ICML, 2026

paperproject page

VLA-MBPO integrates a series of pratical techniques to train VLAs in world models, including (i) adapting unified multimodal models (UMMs) for data-efficient world modeling; (ii) an interleaved view decoding mechanism to enforce multi-view consistency; and (iii) chunk-level branched rollout to mitigate error compounding.

Model-Bellman Inconsistency for Model-based Offline Reinforcement Learning

Yihao Sun*, Jiaji Zhang*, Chengxing Jia, Haoxin Lin, Junyin Ye, Yang Yu

ICML, 2023

papercode

MOBILE proposes a novel uncertainty quantification for uncertainty-driven model-based offline RL, which can better estimate the ideal uncertainty quantification, i.e., the Bellman error

Open Source Projects

VLARLKit logo

VLARLKit

github repository

A researcher-friendly PyTorch reinforcement-learning library for Vision-Language-Action models, with clean modular design and decoupled env denpendency.

OfflineRL-Kit logo

OfflineRL-Kit

github repository

An elegant PyTorch offline-reinforcement-learning library with clear, extensible implementations of model-free and model-based algorithms.