Boning Shao

Hi! I'm a final-year undergraduate student at The University of Hong Kong, majoring in Applied AI. Previously, I was a visiting student at BAIR at UC Berkeley, advised by Prof. Trevor Darrell. Prior to this, I was a research intern at the Visual AI Lab at The University of Hong Kong, advised by Prof. Kai Han. I'm broadly interested in robot learning and computer vision — currently, how robots can combine visual and tactile perception for dexterous manipulation.

Publications

* denotes equal contribution † denotes equal advising

T-Rex: Tactile-Reactive Dexterous Manipulation

Dantong Niu*, Zhuoyang Liu*, Zekai Wang*, Boning Shao, Zhao-Heng Yin, Anirudh Pai, Yuvan Sharma, Stefano Saravalle, Ruijie Zheng, Jing Wang, Ryan Punamiya, Mengda Xu, Yuqi Xie, Yunfan Jiang, Letian Fu, Konstantinos Kallidromitis, Matteo Gioia, Junyi Zhang, Jiaxin Ge, Haiwen Feng, Fabio Galasso, Wei Zhan, David M. Chan, Yutong Bai, Roei Herzig, Jiahui Lei, Fei-Fei Li, Ken Goldberg, Jitendra Malik, Pieter Abbeel, Yuke Zhu, Danfei Xu, Jim (Linxi) Fan, Trevor Darrell

CoRL, 2026

Project Page arXiv Code Dataset

DexTacWAM: A Visuo-Tactile World-Action Model for Dexterous Manipulation

DexTacWAM overview: three-stage training recipe, visuo-tactile world-action model architecture, and real-world results on six contact-rich tasks

Haoran Yuan‡, Zekai Wang, Boning Shao, Haoran Lu, Trevor Darrell, Ismini Lourentzou†, Wei Zhan†

arXiv preprint, 2026

Project Page arXiv Code Weights & Data

Contrastive Action-Image Pre-training for Visuomotor Control

Yuvan Sharma*, Dantong Niu*‡, Anirudh Pai*, Zekai Wang, Zhuoyang Liu, Baifeng Shi, Stefano Saravalle, Boning Shao, Ruijie Zheng, Jing Wang, Konstantinos Kallidromitis, Yusuke Kato, Fabio Galasso, Yuke Zhu, Danfei Xu, Linxi “Jim” Fan, Jitendra Malik†, Trevor Darrell†, Roei Herzig†

arXiv preprint, 2026

Project Page arXiv Model

Periodic Bootstrap Thompson Sampling for Periodically Non-Stationary Bandit Problems

Cumulative regret of Periodic Bootstrap Thompson Sampling versus traditional Thompson Sampling in four periodic environments: skewed (top) and balanced (bottom) rewards, over 2 cycles (left) and 10 cycles (right)

Boning Shao

DAI, 2025

arXiv

Experience

Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research

2026.01 ~ 2026.09

Berkeley, CA, USA

Research Intern

Host: Prof. Trevor Darrell; Mentor: Dantong Niu

Fudan University

2025.06 ~ 2025.07

Shanghai, China

Research Intern

Supervisor: Prof. Yanghua Xiao

The University of Hong Kong

2025.02 ~ 2025.03

Hong Kong SAR, China

Research Intern

Supervisor: Prof. Kai Han

Infinigence AI

2024.07

Shanghai, China

Product Manager Intern

Moore Threads Technology

2024.06

Shanghai, China

HSIO Intern

Education

The University of Hong Kong

2023.09 ~ 2027.06

Bachelor of Arts and Sciences in Applied AI

University of California, Berkeley

2026.01 ~ 2026.08

Visiting Student, Berkeley Global Access (BGA) Program