Gloria X. Wang

I am a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Shenlong Wang and Prof. Nancy Amato. I am supported by the NSF GRFP.

My research focuses on enabling robots to actively perceive, reason about, and interact with the physical world. I am interested in how robots can develop structured spatiotemporal memory to enable long-horizon decision-making and skill acquisition.

During my undergrad, I co-founded SIGRobotics.

Publications

* Equal Contribution

Robot arm making coffee with a pitcher, cup, and coffee machine

CoRL 2026

BoxWAM: Box Trajectories as Compact State Representations for World Action Models

Qinxi Yu, Wenzhou Ding, Gloria X. Wang, Albert J. Zhai, Shenlong Wang

website paper code

CoRL 2025

Human-like Navigation in a World Built for Humans

Bhargav Chandaka*, Gloria X. Wang*, Haozhe Chen, Henry Che, Albert J. Zhai, Shenlong Wang

website paper code

CVPR 2024

NeRF2Physics: Physical Property Understanding from Language-Embedded Feature Fields

Albert J. Zhai, Yuan Shen, Emily Y. Chen, Gloria X. Wang, Xinlei Wang, Sheng Wang, Kaiyu Guan, Shenlong Wang

website paper code

TMLR 2023

Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models

The BIG-Bench Team

paper code

NEJLT 2023

NL-Augmenter: A Framework for Task-Sensitive Natural Language Augmentation

The NL-Augmenter Team

paper code

Experience

Jul 2025 – Dec 2025 SDE Intern

Amazon Robotics Manipulation

VLA fine-tuning and closed-loop policy learning infrastructure

Jun 2024 – Aug 2024 Data Analyst Intern

Capital One Small Business Banking

Customer acquisition analytics and conversion modeling

May 2023 – Aug 2023 AI/ML Intern

General Motors Advanced Analytics

NLP for warranty claim classification, shipped to production

Awards

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP)2026
Supplemental CS Ph.D. Fellowship, UIUC2026
NSF CISE Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU)2026
Engineering Visionary Scholarship, UIUC2025
DaRin Butz Foundation Research Scholarship, UIUC2024
Illinois Engineering Enhanced Scholarship, UIUC2022
Window Glare Suppression System, US-20250135849-A12026

Misc.

Outside of research, I like to travel, take photos, and eat/cook (find me on Beli: @gxyw). And occasionally watch people design tiny apartments on YouTube.