As a student who never took homework seriously during my undergraduate years, I somehow found myself taking my graduation project seriously. Perhaps I had suddenly realized that life is a series of journeys. It feels like only yesterday that I lowered my arm to pull a suitcase onto the Shenzhen University campus; when I raise it again, four years have passed, and I am preparing to wave goodbye to undergraduate life. I only feel the urge to write when I am deeply moved. Clearly, these four years have given me that urge.
Before university, I had always been an unreliable student: my grades were not outstanding, I was not composed, and I lacked confidence. Looking back, perhaps this was because I could only concentrate on things that interested me. That might be a good quality, but it was difficult to bring out within an exam-oriented education. I spent a long time doubting myself and handled relationships poorly. For that period, I want to thank my parents and my high-school teachers, including Zhiwei Liu and Shaoyan Chen, for encouraging me and never giving up on me.
After stumbling through the tunnel of twelve years of schooling, I ended up with a result that was neither good nor bad. Almost without thinking, I put computer science at Shenzhen University as my second choice; my first was Peking University. As expected, I came to Shenzhen University, a place I will be grateful to for the rest of my life. I have somewhat forgotten why I did not choose one of the Project 985 universities I could have entered. I put it down to some mysterious affinity.
As soon as I arrived, I joined the university badminton team, releasing a passion for badminton that had been suppressed for a long time. Even though I was the weakest player there, everyone's enthusiasm for the sport was something I had never encountered in exam-driven middle and high school. It gave me a strong sense of belonging. Unfortunately, after three weeks of intense training, I developed a TFCC injury in my right wrist—a cartilage injury sometimes described as a “cancer that doesn't kill.”
For the next two years, I could barely hold a racket or bend my wrist. I even joined a support group of nearly a thousand people and found that many of them had been living with the injury for almost ten years.
The injury felt like a plot twist carefully arranged by fate, forcing me to quietly recalibrate the direction of my life. After leaving the team and being told not to use my right arm, I was able to settle down and explore academic work. Then, one evening in my third year, the pain mysteriously disappeared. Recently, I have finally been able to pick up a racket again.
This was my first lesson: trust that the dots will connect. The meaning of an event often cannot be seen in the moment; it reveals itself when we look back. The deeper meaning of life's script is always hidden on the next page. We are both the actors and the critics who arrive late.
My first academic compass was the ACM-ICPC programming competition. The senior students I met there later became outstanding people, and each gave me courage in some way. I remember becoming obsessed with programming because I wanted to join the ACM team. The thrill of getting one problem after another accepted now sounds a little like sparse rewards in reinforcement learning, guiding me ever closer to a medal.
I still remember the 2022–2023 season. The lab was lively, and the team members were cheerful and positive. I was even happy to sleep in the lab every day: wake up and solve problems, sleep on a folding bed when tired, and walk ten minutes with my teammates to McDonald's when hungry. Those were some of the happiest days of my undergraduate life.
My competitive-programming journey ended with a purple Codeforces (CF) handle and a rating of 2000, an ACM-ICPC silver medal, a national gold medal in the Group Programming Ladder Tournament, a gold medal in the provincial contest, and a national first prize in the Lanqiao Cup. Most of these awards are not particularly important, but they met the expectations I had set at the beginning.
My only regret was winning three bronze medals in a row during my final season in my third year, despite all three members of our team having CF ratings of 2000+. This was my second lesson: learn to bear pressure and accept life's uncertainty. For this part of the journey, I want to thank every member and coach of our ACM training team, and I sincerely hope the team continues to grow stronger.
Perhaps because I hoped to take on leadership roles in the future, I actively accepted positions in groups of all sizes: captain of the training team, class monitor, and leader of several innovation projects. I had both successes and failures, but these experiences substantially strengthened my decision-making and leadership skills, which now directly help me in research and entrepreneurship. I want to thank everyone who trusted me or supported my work.
I am also someone who loves expressing himself. Thanks to platforms such as Lizhuo, I had dozens of opportunities to speak on stage during university. Through them, I went from someone with severe stage fright to a speaker who knows how to vary his delivery and organize a story.
For those opportunities and the development of my speaking skills, I owe enormous thanks to the school's student affairs office, especially to Jianghai Liao for his support. To find our value and place in the world, perhaps we should begin by learning to tell our own stories well. It was also Mr. Liao's guidance that helped me understand this.
Creating content online has been interesting, too. In one year, I grew my social-media accounts from zero to a combined audience of more than ten thousand followers. I started because I wanted new experiences. Along the way, there was recognition, disagreement, and even attacks for no reason. Learning to be tolerant and accept different opinions was another important lesson.
As I finally entered the world of research, I want to give special thanks to my senior colleague Yao Mu; Professor Ping Luo; my senior colleagues Zhixuan Liang and Mengkang Hu; my senior fellow student Junting Chen; my junior fellow student Zanxin Chen; Professors Jie Chen and Ruizhen Hu; and all my colleagues and senior fellow researchers at Shanghai AI Lab and HKU MMLab.
It is relatively easy for people to exchange benefits; building deep trust is far more precious. When I had no research experience or evidence of my abilities, they were willing to trust me and treat me as an independent researcher. That was crucial to the development of my research independence.
The research ideas of every close collaborator have deeply influenced me, adding together like vectors to form who I am today. In one way or another, I now reflect the people who lifted me up.
I especially want to thank HKU MMLab. I will soon begin my PhD there—something both unexpected and, in a way, part of the plan. The group offers tremendous freedom, and perhaps I will be able to do influential work that reflects my own qualities.
As for ideals, whether something ultimately succeeds does not matter to me. Everything that happens in the world is a sample drawn from a distribution, full of uncertainty. But when individual resolve becomes collective resolve, events are no longer independently sampled by one person.
In embodied intelligence, I hope to join this wave and use my own resolve to do things that I believe can move the field forward. I also hope to bring more people's resolve together into a collective force advancing technology in China. That was my original motivation for leading the Embodied-AI-Guide (Technical Guide to Embodied Intelligence) and the Lumina embodied-intelligence community.
Looking back on this journey, every turning point shines with the kindness of others. As I prepare to begin my PhD, I hope to retain a pilgrim's reverence for the temple of scholarship, while also remembering to cherish the reeds and moonlight beside life's lake—and to keep passing my own strength on to others.