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Zhijin Meng
PhD Researcher
Autonomous Agents and Robotics Research Group
UNSW Sydney, Australia

Address
School of Computer Science and Engineering
Ainsworth Building (J17) - Desk 510-20
Kensington Campus
UNSW Sydney
NSW 2052, Australia

Contact
Phone: +61 04 1547 0186
Email: zhijin.meng@unsw.edu.au

Research interests

  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Human-Robot Interaction, Cognitive Robotics
  • Vision Language Action (VLA) / World Action Model (WAM)

Useful links

Short bio: I am a PhD student at UNSW working in embodied AI and robotics, with a focus on multimodal perception and learning-based robotic systems. My research investigates how robots can perceive, reason, and act in complex real-world environments using Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, multimodal sensor fusion, and world models for prediction and decision-making.

In parallel with my research, I develop real-world robotic systems and embodied AI pipelines, including immersive teleoperation with Quest 3 and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), CVAE-based robotic manipulation, and VLA-based control policies. I also work on multimodal human–robot interaction and the efficient deployment of deep learning models on edge robotic platforms such as Jetson AGX and Orin using CUDA and TensorRT.

Selected Publications Web
Meng, Z., Althubyani, M., Xie, S., Razzak, I., Sandoval, E. B., Bamdad, M., & Cruz, F. (2025, November). PERCY: Personal emotional robotic conversational system. In Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (pp. 466-478). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.
Althubyani, M., Meng, Z., Xie, S., Cruz, F., Razzak, I., Prasad, M., ... & Kocaballi, B. (2025, October). MERCI: A Multimodal Dataset for Personalised and Emotionally-Aware Dialogues. In International Conference on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI), (pp. 1-7). IEEE.
Xie, S., Meng, Z., Bamdad, M., & Cruz, F. (2024, October). Contextual Recognition Network: Combining DDPG and Contextual Affordances for Robotic Safe Grasping. In Companion of the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, (pp. 41-45).