PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Ruixuan Liu

Ruixuan Liu is a robotics researcher trained at Carnegie Mellon University who connects generative AI with robots that build with LEGO bricks. He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering there and began a PhD at the Robotics Institute in 2021, advised by Changliu Liu in the Intelligent Control Lab. In 2024, he led the author list of StableLego, a stability analysis for brick assemblies, and in 2025 he co-authored BrickGPT, whose paper on generating physically stable brick structures from text won the ICCV Best Paper Award (Marr Prize). His 2026 article Prompt-to-Product in IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine adds a bimanual robot system that builds the designs. He defended his thesis, Prompt-to-Product: Towards Robots that Imagine, Reason, and Build, in October 2026 and is now an alumnus of the Intelligent Control Lab.

Timeline

  1. 2021

    A robotics PhD at Carnegie Mellon

    He earns a bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering with a robotics minor at Carnegie Mellon, and works in Sebastian Scherer's AirLab on sensor fusion and 3D reconstruction for structural inspection. In 2021, he enters the Robotics Institute's PhD program, advised by Changliu Liu in the Intelligent Control Lab.

  2. 2022

    Handover demo for President Biden

    In January 2022, he and Rui Chen demonstrate human-robot handover on a FANUC industrial robot at Mill 19 in Pittsburgh during President Biden's visit. A camera-based digital twin tracks the human and the robot, and a safety controller moves the robot away when the human gets close.

  3. 2024

    The StableLego stability tool

    He leads the author list of StableLego, published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters in 2024 with Kangle Deng, Ziwei Wang and Changliu Liu. The tool analyzes the structural stability of block-stacking brick assemblies, and StableLego provides more than 50,000 assembly structures with stability inferences.

  4. May 2025

    First prize at ICRA 2025

    In May 2025, his team wins the $60k first prize in the What Bimanuals Can Do competition at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA).

  5. 2025

    BrickGPT: bricks from text

    He is a co-author of BrickGPT, which trains an autoregressive language model to predict the next brick to add and uses physics-aware rollback to prune unstable predictions. The ICCV 2025 paper comes with StableText2Brick, a dataset of over 47,000 brick structures made from more than 28,000 unique 3D objects.

  6. 2025

    A Marr Prize at ICCV

    The BrickGPT paper, which he co-authors with Ava Pun, Kangle Deng, Deva Ramanan, Changliu Liu and Jun-Yan Zhu, wins the Best Paper Award (Marr Prize) at ICCV in 2025.

  7. 2026

    The Prompt-to-Product system

    Prompt-to-Product appears in IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine in 2026, with him and Philip Huang as equal-contribution first authors. The system turns a natural-language prompt into a physically buildable LEGO brick design and builds it with a bimanual robotic system, and a user study shows that it lowers the barrier and reduces manual effort in creating assembly products. In March 2026, he also co-authors BrickSim, the first real-time physics-based simulator for interlocking brick assemblies.

  8. October 2026

    Thesis defense at Carnegie Mellon

    In October 2026, he defends his PhD thesis, Prompt-to-Product: Towards Robots that Imagine, Reason, and Build, at the Robotics Institute. Changliu Liu chairs the committee, which includes Oliver Kroemer, Jean Oh, Jun-Yan Zhu and Ken Goldberg of UC Berkeley. He is now an alumnus of the Intelligent Control Lab.

Career

  1. From 2021Carnegie Mellon University

Education

  1. 2026Carnegie Mellon UniversityBachelor's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering

From the biography.

  1. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Carnegie Mellon University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  2. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Carnegie Mellon University. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Carnegie Mellon University. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  4. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Carnegie Mellon University. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Ruixuan Liu yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Ruixuan Liu waynekyrie.github.io. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Student Ruixuan icontrol.ri.cmu.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. HRI Demo for President Biden icontrol.ri.cmu.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Unleashing Creativity with AI and Robots icontrol.ri.cmu.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. RI PhD Thesis Defense - Ruixuan Liu ri.cmu.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. Generating Physically Stable and Buildable Brick Structures from Text arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. ICCV 2025 Open Access Repository: Generating Physically Stable and Buildable Brick Structures from Text openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. The AI Tool That Could Make Manufacturing Faster and More Efficient — by Using Lego Bricks cmu.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  9. Alumni Ruixuan icontrol.ri.cmu.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.