PKU-PsiBot Embodied Dexterous Manipulation Joint Laboratory

The PKU-PsiBot Embodied Dexterous Manipulation Joint Laboratory is a research collaboration between Peking University and Proto-Sentient Intelligence (灵初智能), a company focused on vision-language-action (VLA) models and reinforcement learning for general-purpose embodied intelligence . Yaodong Yang, an assistant professor at Peking University's Institute for Artificial Intelligence, serves as the lab's chief scientist .

The lab has gained recognition for work at the intersection of multimodal AI and robotics control. In July 2025, Yang's team won an ACL Best Paper award—one of only two Chinese teams to do so that year—alongside DeepSeek's Wenfeng Liang . The collaboration also produced Align-DS-V, a multimodal extension of DeepSeek-R1 developed with Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, which the lab is using to advance VLA model training where multimodal reasoning capabilities drive the "brain" side of robot control systems while reinforcement learning techniques refine the "cerebellum" controller . Psi R0, an earlier end-to-end reinforcement learning embodied model from this research lineage, demonstrated dexterous bimanual manipulation for long-horizon tasks like e-commerce packing .