About Me

I am a PhD student at Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) and a visiting researcher at FAIR, advised by Jitendra Malik. In the early years of my PhD, I had the fortune of being mentored by Alexei Efros, who not only guided my academic growth but also cultivated my culinary, literary, and cultural taste.

Previously, I obtained my BSc and MEng from MIT EECS, under the supervision of Phillip Isola and Antonio Torralba. Before transferring to MIT, I was an undergraduate student at The University of Tokyo. I have interned at NVIDIA GEAR group (2024), DeepMind (2021, 2019), Facebook (2018), and Google (2017, 2016).

Research Interests

My research focuses on developing real-world robotic systems capable of generalizable dexterous manipulation and robust whole-body control through end-to-end learning, leveraging data from both the real world and simulation.

Learning Methods reinforcement learning, imitation learning, sim-to-real, generative models

Hardware Systems bimanual arms with dexterous hands, humanoids

Publications

Emergent Active Perception and Dexterity of Simulated Humanoids from Visual Reinforcement Learning
Zhengyi Luo*, Chen Tessler*, Toru Lin, Ye Yuan, Tairan He, Wenli Xiao, Yunrong Guo, Gal Chechik, Kris Kitani, Linxi "Jim" Fan, and Yuke Zhu.
arXiv2025.

Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Dexterous Manipulation on Humanoids
Toru Lin, Kartik Sachdev, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Jitendra Malik, and Yuke Zhu.
arXiv 2025.

HOVER: Versatile Neural Whole-Body Controller for Humanoid Robots
Tairan He*, Wenli Xiao*, Toru Lin, Zhengyi Luo, Zhenjia Xu, Zhenyu Jiang, Jan Kautz, Changliu Liu, Guanya Shi, Xiaolong Wang, Linxi "Jim" Fan†, and Yuke Zhu†.
ICRA 2025.

Learning Visuotactile Skills with Two Multifingered Hands
Toru Lin, Yu Zhang*, Qiyang Li*, Haozhi Qi*, Brent Yi, Sergey Levine, and Jitendra Malik.
ICRA 2025.

Twisting Lids Off with Two Hands
Toru Lin*, Zhao-Heng Yin*, Haozhi Qi, Pieter Abbeel, and Jitendra Malik.
CoRL 2024.

MIMEx: Intrinsic Rewards from Masked Input Modeling
Toru Lin and Allan Jabri.
NeurIPS 2023.

Learning to Ground Multi-Agent Communication with Autoencoders
Toru Lin, Minyoung Huh, and Phillip Isola.
NeurIPS 2021.

Geometry-Aware Modeling of Rigid Body Physics
Toru Lin*, Kexin Yi*, and Phillip Isola.
ICML 2020, Workshop on Object-Oriented Learning.

Visual Grounding of Learned Physical Models
Yunzhu Li, Toru Lin*, Kexin Yi*, Daniel Bear, Daniel LK Yamins, Jiajun Wu, Joshua B Tenenbaum, and Antonio Torralba.
ICML 2020.

Model-Based Planning with Energy-Based Models
Yilun Du, Toru Lin, and Igor Mordatch.
CoRL 2019.

Teaching

I served as a teaching / lab assistant for the following courses.

UC Berkeley CS 294-277 Robots That Learn (Fall 2024)
MIT 6.819/6.869 Advances in Computer Vision (Spring 2021)
MIT 6.036 Introduction to Machine Learning (Fall 2019)
MIT 6.863/9.611 Natural Language Processing (Spring 2018)

Miscellaneous

I speak English, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese and Singlish natively.
Outside of research, I enjoy reading philosophy, learning physics, and making art.