Ziyu (Charlotte) Zhang

I am a second-year PhD student at the GrUVi Lab at Simon Fraser University, advised by Prof. Xue Bin (Jason) Peng. My research interests are in character animation, robotics, and RL.

Previously, I received a B.A.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto, where I was fortunate to complete my undergraduate thesis under the supervision of Prof. Tim Barfoot.

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Research

* indicates equal contribution

Physics-Based Motion Imitation with Adversarial Differential Discriminators
Ziyu Zhang*, Sergey Bashkirov*, Dun Yang, Yi Shi, Michael Taylor, Xue Bin Peng
SIGGRAPH Asia, 2025
project page / arXiv / code

ADD uses a differential discriminator to automatically turn raw errors into effective training rewards for a wide variety of tasks, including motion imitation.

Prepared for the Worst: A Learning-Based Adversarial Attack for Resilience Analysis of the ICP Algorithm
Ziyu Zhang, Johann Laconte, Daniil Lisus, Timothy D. Barfoot
ICRA, 2025
arXiv

A novel method for assessing the resilience of the ICP algorithm via learning-based, worst-case attacks on lidar point clouds.

Pointing the Way: Refining Radar-Lidar Localization Using Learned ICP Weights
Daniil Lisus, Johann Laconte, Keenan Burnett, Ziyu Zhang, Timothy D. Barfoot,
CRV, 2025
arXiv

A deep-learning-based approach to improve localizing radar measurements against lidar maps.


Based off of Jon Barron's academic website.