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Jiageng Mao

Jiageng Mao is a researcher in robot learning and physical-world artificial intelligence who earned a PhD in computer science at the University of Southern California and is now a research scientist at Google DeepMindGoogle DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry.

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Key facts

September 2021Publishing the Voxel Transformer Paper

In September 2021, he submitted a paper to arXiv as first author proposing VoTr, a voxel-based Transformer backbone for 3D object detection from point clouds; according to his personal website, the paper was published at ICCV 2021.⁠[1][2]

2023Proposing a Language Agent for Autonomous Driving

Working with Yue Wang, Marco Pavone and others, he was first author of the paper “A Language Agent for Autonomous Driving,” which explores using a language agent toward human-level driving; his personal website says the work (Agent-Driver) was accepted to COLM 2024.⁠[3][2]

2025PhysBench Selected for an ICLR Oral

He was second author of PhysBench, a benchmark for evaluating and improving vision-language models’ understanding of the physical world, which was listed as an oral paper at ICLR 2025.⁠[4]

According to his personal website, DreamDrive, a project he worked on, was accepted to ICRA 2025 in the same year.⁠[2]

December 4, 2025Receiving the NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship

On December 4, 2025, NVIDIA announced its 2026–2027 graduate fellowship recipients, which included him as a PhD student at the University of Southern California, with his research summarized as using priors from internet-scale data to solve physical AI problems.⁠[5]

NVIDIA’s fellow profile page names Prof. Yue Wang as his advisor; according to his personal website, he had earlier received the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship in 2024.⁠[6][2]

March 2026Co-Authoring the Humanoid Foundation Model Ψ₀

In March 2026, he was one of the co-authors of Ψ₀ (Psi-Zero), an open foundation model for humanoid loco-manipulation tasks; his personal website says the paper was accepted to RSS 2026.⁠[7][2]

As of October 2026: Research Scientist at Google DeepMind

According to his personal website, he has completed a PhD in computer science at the University of Southern California, where he studied how robots can learn from everyday images and videos; he is now a research scientist at Google DeepMind, working on teaching Gemini to build and interact with the physical world through code.⁠[2]

His personal website also states that he was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2026.⁠[2]

Related Organizations, Websites, and Public Accounts

University of Southern California: Official website: https://www.usc.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[6]

Google DeepMind: Official website: https://deepmind.google/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

Personal website: Public link: https://jiageng.me/ (opens in a new window)⁠[6]

X: Public account: https://x.com/PointsCoder (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/PointsCoder (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jiageng-mao-778096146 (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

Sources

  1. Voxel Transformer for 3D Object Detection (opens in a new window)
  2. Jiageng Mao (opens in a new window)
  3. A Language Agent for Autonomous Driving (opens in a new window)
  4. PhysBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Vision-Language Models for Physical World Understanding (opens in a new window)
  5. NVIDIA Awards up to $60,000 Research Fellowships to PhD Students (opens in a new window)
  6. Jiageng Mao (opens in a new window)
  7. Ψ₀: An Open Foundation Model Towards Universal Humanoid Loco-Manipulation (opens in a new window)