Good morning everyone,
Further to the scheduled seminar by Associate Professor Zac Manchester at 10am, we have an additional seminar scheduled to begin at 11am.
Thank you.
Best regards,
Sabrina
Sabrina Asri | Senior Admin Officer
The University of Sydney
Faculty of Engineering, Australian Centre for Robotics
Rose Street Building J04 | The University of Sydney | NSW | 2006
+61 2 9351 7126 |
sabrina.asri@sydney.edu.au |
sydney.edu.au
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From: William Zhi <weiming.zhi@sydney.edu.au>
Sent: Monday, July 20, 2026 1:07 AM
To: everybody <everybody@acfr.usyd.edu.au>
Subject: [Everybody at ACFR] Monday 11am -- Xuning Yang (Nvidia) talk
Hi folks,
We have Xuning Yang from Nvidia visiting. She'll be giving a talk after Zac's talk. Her talk is from 11am-12 on Monday the 20th of July.
Cheers,
William
Below are the details:
Talk: How to Evaluate Real Robot Generalist Policies
Abstract:
Evaluating general-purpose robot policies rigorously remains one of robotics' hardest challenges, given that real-world evaluation is slow and costly while existing simulation
benchmarks suffer from high setup overhead and a persistent sim2real gap. In this talk, we discuss how to rigorously evaluate real-world generalist robot policies at scale, covering the key pitfalls in current benchmarking practice and our approach to addressing
them. We introduce principles for future-proofing evaluation, including embodiment-agnostic task design, scalable task generation, and diagnostic analysis tools, which are needed to build evaluations that keep pace with increasingly capable models.
Bio:
Xuning Yang is a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA's Seattle Research Lab. Her research interests include robot foundation models, particularly on evaluation methods, and
generalization capabilities, as well as a broad range of application scenarios from field robotics, indoor navigation, and robot manipulation. Prior to NVIDIA, she received her Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University,