I’m Xijia Polina Zhang, a Robotics Ph.D. student at Georgia Institute of Technology advised by Prof. Zsolt Kira . My research is problem-driven: I want to make real-world commercial deployment of robotics possible. Yes, it’s a hard and broad problem, especially since we haven’t even agreed on the concrete settings to deploy robots in. But that’s why I think it’s worth looking into! This goal has driven me to explore downstream adaptation of embodied foundation models and cost-efficient distillation in the past. Looking ahead, I’m interested in agentic robotics and fine-grained behavior distillation from general-purpose large language models.

I publish under the name Zhang Xi-Jia, similar to the convention followed by Li Fei-Fei . In many Asian cultures, lastnames are common and not reliable as personal identifiers. My lastname Zhang, for example, is shared by over 100 million people worldwide.

Download my resumé . View my papers .