Haisheng Su (苏海昇)

Currently, I am Co-Founder of Manifold AI(流形空间), focusing on interactive world model research and its applications in embodied systems. I obtained my Ph.D. degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, advised by Prof. Junchi Yan @ ReThinkLab. My research trajectory has evolved from autonomous driving to embodied intelligence and foundation world models — building AI that perceives dynamic environments, predicts future states, and enables reliable action in the real world.

From 2020 to 2025, I served as Senior Research Scientist / Manager at SenseTime(商汤科技), including at its intelligent automotive arm, SenseAuto(商汤绝影), leading R&D across intelligent connected L4 autonomy, V2X coordination, cloud data closed-loop, end-to-end autonomous driving, and multimodal VLA and world model systems. In addition to this role, I also served as the Chief Technical Adviser for projects involving Smart-Surveillance Systems, Intelligent Transportation and Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperation. At Manifold AI(流形空间), I play a leading role in interactive world model and the world-action model line of research.

My work has resulted in 30+ top-tier academic papers Google Scholar citations: 2602 and 30+ patents. Representative projects include:

  • Behavior Understanding: BSN (ECCV 2018), BSN++ (AAAI 2021), TCANet (CVPR 2021), MGFNet (TMM 2020)
  • Environmental Perception: FreqPDE (ICCV 2025), GeoFormer (ICCV 2025), UniMamba (CVPR 2025)
  • End-to-End Decision Planning: EgoFSD (ICRA 2026), DriveMamba (ICLR 2026), DriveMoE (CVPR 2026)
  • Embodied World Models: WorldScape (NeurIPS 2026), WorldScape Policy
  • Recursive Self-Improving Agent: WorldScape-R²SI
  • Embodied Benchmarks: RoboSense (CVPR 2025), WorldArena 1.0 (AI Open 2026) & 2.0, HandEdit (NeurIPS 2026), Bench2Dex

Research Interests: Interactive World Models, Embodied AI, Autonomous Driving, Vision-Language-Action (VLA), 3D Perception, Video Understanding.

If interested in collaboration or discussion, please email me.

Recently, I am looking for post-doctoral research opportunities!

News

  • Oct 2026 📢 We released WorldScape-R²SI, a self-improving agentic robotics system powered by a recursive agentic harness, achieving #1 🏆 on the RoboDojo Agent leaderboard! 🎉 [机器之心] NEW
  • Oct 2026 🎉 Recognized as a Top Reviewer at NeurIPS 2026.
  • Oct 2026 🎉 Recognized as an Outstanding Reviewer at CVPR 2026.
  • Sep 2026 🎉 Two papers accepted to NeurIPS 2026: HandEdit and WorldScape-MoE.
  • Jul 2026 📢 We released WorldScape Policy 2.0, which aims to empower steerable world action modeling with reasoning-augmented memory and in-context learning under multimodal control.
  • Jul 2026 📢 We released WorldScape-MoE, which is a unified mixture-of-experts world model for scalable heterogeneous action control!
  • Jul 2026 📢 We released the WorldArena 2.0 Challenge, expanding embodied world model evaluation with visuotactile modalities, interactive RL environments, and simulated-to-real robotic platforms.
  • Jun 2026 🎉 Received Ph.D. degree from SJTU and was honored as Shanghai Outstanding Graduate.
  • May 2026 📢 We released WorldArena 2.0 — an expanded benchmark that systematically broadens embodied world model evaluation across modality, functionality, and platform!
  • Feb 2026 📢 We released WorldArena — the first international unified benchmark for embodied world models, designed to evaluate whether world models truly understand physical laws, predict action consequences, and support robot training, policy evaluation, and action planning.
  • Feb 2026 📢 We released WorldScape Policy — a generalist robotic planner built on foundation world models, pioneering the World-Action Model paradigm.
  • Feb 2026 🎉 Paper accepted to CVPR 2026: DriveMoE.
  • Jan 2026 🎉 First-author papers accepted to ICLR 2026 (DriveMamba) and ICRA 2026 (EgoFSD).
  • Jul 2025 🧑‍💻 Co-founded Manifold AI and start leading the development of foundation world models and embodied AI systems.
  • Jul 2025 🧑‍💻 Completed tenure at SenseTime (2020–2025), after leading R&D across L4 autonomy, V2X, cloud data closed-loop, end-to-end driving, and multimodal VLA and world models.
  • Jun 2025 🎉 Two first-author papers accepted to ICCV 2025: FreqPDE and GeoFormer.
  • Feb 2025 🎉 Two first-author papers accepted to CVPR 2025: RoboSense and UniMamba.
  • Jun 2021 🎉 We won the first place 🏆 in the HACS Challenge, hosted by a CVPR workshop. Congratulations!
  • Apr 2020 🧑‍💻 Joined SenseTime as Research Scientist.
  • Mar 2020 🎉 Graduated with M.S. degree from SJTU and was honored as Shanghai Outstanding Graduate.

Highlighted Projects

WorldScape-R²SI framework overview

WorldScape-R²SI

Recursive Self-Improving Agent · 2026

A two-layer robot agent whose inner Robot Agent acts through Skills while its outer Recursion Agent improves those Skills and trains the reactive model, achieving #1 overall on the RoboDojo Agent leaderboard.

WorldScape Policy 2.0 overview

WorldScape Policy 2.0

Embodied World Model · 2026

A controllable World Action Model that combines short-term visual dynamics, long-term event memory, latent subgoal reasoning, and event-grounded pretraining for long-horizon robotic manipulation.

WorldScape-MoE Fig. 1 overview

WorldScape-MoE

Embodied World Model · NeurIPS 2026

A unified mixture-of-experts world model for scalable heterogeneous action control across locomotion, manipulation, and egocentric hand-action generation.

WorldScape Policy teaser figure

WorldScape Policy

Embodied World Model · 2026

A generalist robotic planner finetuned from the WorldScape foundation world model. Converts world-model predictions into executable actions — a new World-Action Model paradigm for distribution-robust robot control.

WorldArena teaser figure

WorldArena 1.0 & 2.0

Benchmark · 2026

A unified benchmark evaluating embodied world models across perceptual fidelity and functional utility — as synthetic data engines, policy evaluators, and action planners. WorldArena 2.0 further expands evaluation with visuotactile modalities, interactive RL environments, and simulated-to-real robotic platforms across multiple embodiments.

RoboSense teaser figure

RoboSense

Benchmark · CVPR 2025

Large-scale dataset and benchmark for egocentric robot perception and navigation in crowded, unstructured environments.

Multi-View 3D Perception teaser figure

Multi-View 3D Perception

3D Perception · ICCV 2025

FreqPDE — frequency-aware positional depth embedding for multi-view 3D object detection transformers.

LiDAR 3D Perception teaser figure

LiDAR 3D Perception

3D Perception · CVPR & ICCV 2025

UniMamba — unified spatial-channel representation learning with group-efficient Mamba for LiDAR-based 3D object detection; GeoFormer — geometry point encoder with graph-based Transformer for 3D object detection from point clouds.

DriveMamba framework overview (Figure 2)

End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Autonomous Driving · 2026

Efficient end-to-end autonomous driving via scalable state-space models (DriveMamba), a fully sparse ego-centric paradigm with uncertainty denoising (EgoFSD), and mixture-of-experts vision-language-action planning (DriveMoE).

BSN Family teaser figure

BSN Family

Video Understanding · 2018–2021

Boundary Sensitive Network and successors (BSN++, TCANet) for temporal action proposal generation — foundational work with 2,200+ collective citations and ActivityNet Challenge wins.

Publications

My publications span innovative methods for embodied world models, autonomous driving, 3D perception, and video understanding — including first-author works at CVPR, ICCV, ICLR, ICRA, AAAI, and TMM, as well as embodied benchmarks and technical reports. To date, my work comprises 30+ papers, Google Scholar citations: 2602 , and an h-index of 17. Representative works are listed in Selected Publications.

Academic Service

Conference Reviewer

  • The Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) — Outstanding Reviewer, 2026
  • International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
  • European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)
  • Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) — Top Reviewer, 2026
  • International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
  • The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)

Journal Reviewer

  • IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)
  • International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV)
  • IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS)
  • IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP)
  • IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT)
  • IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM)
  • IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (TAI)

Mentoring & Team Leadership

  • 2020 – 2025 Led 20+ person R&D team on autonomous driving and mentored 20+ interns at SenseTime; co-authored 10+ papers at CVPR, ICCV, ICLR, and ICRA; 20+ granted Chinese national invention patents
  • 2025 – Present Building research team at Manifold AI as Co-Founder on embodied foundation models

Contests

  • 2022
    Runner-up 🥈, UG2+ Challenge: Semi-supervised Action Recognition in the Dark Track

    IEEE CVPR UG2+ Challenge · Leaderboard

  • 2021
    Winner 🏆, HACS Challenge Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization

    IEEE CVPR HACS Challenge - Weakly Supervised Learning Track · Leaderboard

  • 2021
    Runner-up 🥈, HACS Challenge Temporal Action Localization

    IEEE CVPR HACS Challenge — Supervised Learning Track · Leaderboard

  • 2020
    Second Prize 🥈, National Post-Graduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling (NPMCM)

    Huawei Cup NPMCM

  • 2018
    Winner 🏆, ActivityNet Challenge Temporal Action Localization Track

    IEEE CVPR ActivityNet Challenge · Leaderboard

  • 2018
    Runner-up 🥈, ActivityNet Challenge Temporal Action Proposal Track

    IEEE CVPR ActivityNet Challenge · Leaderboard

  • 2018
    Third Prize 🥉, Baidu Star Developer Competition

    Rank 5/1371

  • 2016
    Third Prize 🥉, RoboMaster Competition

    National College Student Robot Competition

  • 2014
    Third Prize 🥉, National English Competition for College Students (NECCS)

    Organizing Committee of National English Competitions for College Students

Awards & Honors

  • 2026
    Outstanding Graduate of Shanghai (Ph.D.)

    Highest honor for postgraduates in Shanghai, Ministry of Education

  • 2020
    Outstanding Graduate of Shanghai (M.S.)

    Highest honor for postgraduates in Shanghai, Ministry of Education

  • 2018
    National Scholarship for Postgraduate

    Highest honor for undergraduates in China - Top 1% nationwide

  • 2018
    Excellent Graduate Student Scholarship

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University — Top 10% in Automation Department

  • 2015
    National Scholarship

    Highest honor for undergraduates in China - Top 1% nationwide

Experience

  • 2025 – Present
    Co-Founder · Manifold AI

    Leading embodied foundation model research, including embodied world model benchmark and world-action model for generalizable robotic policy learning.

  • 2022 – 2025
    Senior Research Manager · SenseTime

    Intelligent Automotive Group (SenseAuto). Led a 20+ person R&D team on V2X-MEC and L4 autonomy (RoboBus, RoboSweeper) project delivery; co-authored 10+ top-tier conference papers and filed 20+ patents.

  • 2020 – 2022
    Research Scientist · SenseTime

    Smart City Group (SCG). Developed key video understanding algorithms for anomaly action detection in security & surveillance scenarios.

  • 2018 – 2020
    Research Intern · SenseTime

    SenseTime Research, Shanghai. Worked on temporal action localization and video analysis during M.S. studies at SJTU.

Education

  • 2023 – 2026
    Ph.D. in Computer Science · Shanghai Jiao Tong University

    Advisor: Prof. Junchi Yan · Shanghai Outstanding Graduate · Research Interest: Autonomous Driving, Embodied AI, World Models.

  • 2017 – 2020
    M.S. in Control Science and Engineering · Shanghai Jiao Tong University

    Advisor: Prof. Xu Zhao · National Scholarship (Top 1%) · GPA: 3.72/4.0 · Shanghai Outstanding Graduate · Research Interest: Deep Learning and Video Analysis.

  • 2013 – 2017
    B.S. in Automation · Central South University

    National Scholarship (Top 1%) · First-class Scholarship (Top 5%) · GPA: 91/100 (Rank: 2/170).