Fengze Jia
Mathematics undergraduate at The Ohio State University, graduating May 2027. My current research asks why a compressed robot policy that passes offline evaluation can still fail in closed loop, and what repairs it.
Applying to MS programs in robotics and machine learning for Fall 2027.
Anatomy of a Closed-Loop Collapse: A Causal Case Study of a Compressed VLA Policy
Poster at the IROS 2026 Workshop on Building Scalable Infrastructure for Robot Learning (ScaleInfra), Pittsburgh, October 1, 2026.
I distilled Octo-Base, a 12-layer generalist robot policy, into an 8-layer student. The student passes the offline validation checks its model family provides, then succeeds in 0 of 72 closed-loop trials of a simulated WidowX pick-and-place task, where the teacher succeeds in 40.
Four standard fixes fail under matched controls. Replacing half of each training batch with successful teacher rollouts from the deployment environment restores parity with the teacher on held-out episodes: 18 of 36 against 17 of 36.
Cite this paper
@misc{jia2026anatomy,
title = {Anatomy of a Closed-Loop Collapse: A Causal Case
Study of a Compressed VLA Policy},
author = {Jia, Fengze},
year = {2026},
eprint = {2609.23048},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
primaryClass = {cs.RO},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23048}
}Other research
- Directed topology and linear programming, with Prof. Sanjeevi Krishnan (Ohio State Mathematics), since 2025.
- Perception for the SAE/GM AutoDrive Challenge II with Buckeye AutoDrive, advised by Prof. Wei-Lun Chao: a traffic-light and speed-sign dataset and detector, both on Hugging Face.
- Reinforcement learning: PPO baselines and a multi-policy-gradient variant in custom environments, with Prof. Maria Han Veiga (Ohio State Mathematics), summer 2025.
Talks and posters
- Talk: “Linear Programming for Directed Cycle Detection.” Young Mathematicians Conference, The Ohio State University, July 30 to August 1, 2025 (abstract in the conference program).
- Poster: “Application of Denoising Potential on MNIST Dataset.” OSU Mathematics CYCLE program, 2025; co-first author with Chunyu Gu, with Daniel Tcheurekdjian.
Service
Reviewer, IROS 2026 ScaleInfra Workshop.