Portrait of Jiankai Sun

Jiankai Sun

Email:  jksun [at] stanford [dot] edu

Google Scholar | GitHub | LinkedIn | Twitter

I am a final-year Ph.D. candidate and Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow at Stanford University, advised by Mac Schwager. I am currently a Student Researcher at Google DeepMind. I am also affiliated with the Stanford Center for AI Safety. Before Stanford, I received my M.Phil. from the Multimedia Laboratory at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, advised by Bolei Zhou, and my B.S. in Computer Science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, advised by Cewu Lu. Previously, I spent time at Meta Superintelligence Lab and Microsoft Research.

I am a final-year Ph.D. candidate and Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow at Stanford University, working with Mac Schwager. I am a student researcher at Google DeepMind. I am also affiliated with the Stanford Center for AI Safety. I have spent time at Meta Superintelligence Lab and Microsoft Research.

Research Vision

My research advances general-purpose physical intelligence by developing AI systems that build predictive multimodal world representations, reason efficiently over long horizons, and act reliably under physical constraints and uncertainty.

To this end, I develop principled foundation-model architectures, predictive multimodal world models, and compositional learning methods for long-horizon agentic systems. My goal is to create efficient, adaptable agents that learn from broad experience while remaining grounded in physical dynamics, uncertainty, and human needs.

Research Interests:

News

Publications (Google Scholar)

(* and † indicate equal contribution or alphabetical order)

Experience

Talks

  • [2026/03] Talk @ Amazon, Vision, Reasoning, and Embodied Intelligence
  • [2026/01] Talk @ NVIDIA, Understanding the Mixture-of-Experts with Nadaraya-Watson Kernel
  • [2025/12] Talk @ Cohere Labs, Understanding the Mixture-of-Experts with Nadaraya-Watson Kernel
  • [2025/10] Talk @ Ling Team, Ant Group, Understanding the Mixture-of-Experts with Nadaraya-Watson Kernel
  • [2024/03] Talk @ Meta, Egocentric Human Trajectory Forecasting With a Wearable Camera and Multi-Modal Fusion
  • [2021/10] Talk @ Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Localization and recognition of human action in 3D using transformers

Selected Honors

  • RA-L Best Paper Award
  • Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Finalist
  • AAAI Doctoral Consortium
  • Ant InTech Technology Scholarship
  • Meshy Fellowship
  • NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Finalist
  • Honorable Mention for the HRI Pioneers
  • Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship (SIGF)
  • ICRA 2024 Best Paper Award
  • ICRA 2024 Best Student Paper Finalist, Best Manipulation Paper Finalist Awards
  • CoRL 2023 Best Paper/Best Student Paper Awards Finalist, and Best Systems Paper Award Finalist
  • CoRL 2022 Best Paper Nomination
  • The World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) Yunfun Award
  • Stanford Min Zhu and Susan Xu Engineering Fellowship
  • NeurIPS Top 10% of High-scoring Reviewer
  • National Scholarship × 3 years

Press

  • Emerging Cyber Attack Risks of Medical AI Agents was covered by South China Morning Post.
  • Decoder-Hybrid-Decoder Architecture for Efficient Reasoning with Long Generation was covered by Microsoft.

Tech for Good & Space for @ll © 2021 - 2026