Junxuan (Helen) Shen

Hi! I’m Junxuan, a PhD student in EECS at MIT advised by Professor Yilun Du. I work at the intersection of generative modeling, robot learning, and planning. I am particularly interested in developing compositional methods that improve robots’ physical reasoning abilities to solve long-horizon tasks.

Robot learning research

Hybrid Reasoning through Compositional Structural Energy Minimization
Junxuan Shen, Haonan Chen, Weirui Ye, Yilun Du
Under review.

Robot Learning with Visual Predicted Force
Haonan Chen*, Feiyang Wu*, Yuxiang Ma, Mustafa Mete, Pengfei Ye, Junxuan Shen, Cheng Zhu, Aurora Ruggeri, Kelvin Cheung, Jiayuan Mao, Edward Adelson, Jiajun Wu, Robert D. Howe, Yilun Du
* Equal contribution.
Preprint, 2026. Paper · Project page

See my papers and preprints for the full list.

Before robot learning

I received my MS in EECS from MIT in May 2026, advised by Professor Thodoris Lykouris. My master’s research focused on theoretical aspects of online decision-making and online learning, including learning-augmented scheduling and Bayesian optimal stopping.

Before MIT, I earned my BS in computer science and mathematics from Caltech in 2024. I was very fortunate to work with Professors Adam Wierman, Guannan Qu, Nicolas Christianson, and Adam Sheffer on learning-augmented algorithms, control, and extremal combinatorics.