Xinlei Chen | 陈鑫磊

I am currently an Associate Professor with the Tsinghua University SIGS. I received my Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Prof. Pei Zhang. I am committed to using multi-agent collaborative strategies to solve real problems in smart cities and industries on a city-level large-scale AIoT platform.

Research interests: Cyber Physical System, Artificial Internet of Things, Multi-agent System, Ubiquitous Computing, Mobile Computing, Smart Sensing, Wireless Communication and Network.

Email  /  Google Scholar  /  CV (2024.10.28)

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News

  • [2025.12] New! Our survey on event camera based mobile embodied perception is accepted by ACM Computing Surveys! Congrats to Haoyang!
  • [2025.11] New! Two works (AirCopBench & DIMM) are accepted by AAAI 2026! Congrats to Jirong and Yuxuan!
  • [2025.10] New! Aerial shepherds is accepted by IEEE TMC! Congrats to Haoyang!
  • [2025.09] New! Count Every Rotation is accepted by ACM SenSys 2026! Congrats to Xuecheng and Jingao!
  • [2025.09] New! Balanced Token Pruning is accepted by NeurIPS 2025! Congrats to Kaiyuan and Xiaoyue!
  • [2025.07] New! Three works (AirScape, Embodied-R, Open3D-VQA) are accepted by ACM MM 2025! Congrats to Baining, Rongze, Mingyuan, Ziyou, Jianjie, Weichen, Zile, and Xin!
  • [2025.06] New! PRE-Mamba is accepted by ICCV 2025! Congrats to Ciyu and Ruishan!
  • [2025.05] New! Our research project has won Sliver Prize at 50th International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva!
  • [2025.05] New! Three works (Context-Aware Sentiment Forecasting, CityNavAgent, Urbanvideo-Bench) are accepted by ACL 2025! Congrats to Fanhang, Baining, and Weichen!
  • [2025.04] New! MR-COGraphs is accepted by IEEE RA-L! Congrats to Qiuyi and Zhaocheng!
  • [2025.04] New! CatUA is accepted by IEEE TMC! Congrats to Nan, Yuxuan, and Haoyang!
  • [2025.04] New! SmartSpr is accepted by IEEE TMC! Congrats to Ji!
  • [2025.01] Our work mmE-Loc is conditionally accepted by ACM SenSys 2025! Congrats to Haoyang!
  • [2024.11] I'm honored to be invited as a Technical Program Committee Member for ACM SenSys 2025!
  • [2024.10] Our work AirTouch received all four badges from ACM Artifact Evaluation! Congrats to Chenyu and Ciyu!
  • [2024.06] Our work DDL is accepted by IEEE JSTSP! Congrats to Xuecheng and Haoyang!
  • [2024.06] Our work AirTouch is conditionally accepted by ACM MobiCom 2024! Congrats to Chenyu and Ciyu!
  • [2024.05] Our work on estimating and modeling spontaneous mobility changes is accepted by Humanities and social sciences communications ! Congrats to Baining!
  • [2024.04] Our work SOScheduler is accepted by IEEE IOT-J! Congrats to Xuecheng!
  • [2024.03] Our work MobiAir is accepted by ACM MobiSys 2024! (Acceptance ratio: 16.3%)! Congrats to Yuxuan and Haoyang!
  • [2023.12] Three works (TransformLoc, QUEST, BlueKey) are accepted by IEEE INFOCOM 2024! (Acceptance rate: 19.5%)! Congrats to Haoyang, Zuxin, and Yawen!

Project Highlights

1. Neuromorphic Perception

[ACM Sensys 2026] Count Every Rotation and Every Rotation Counts: Exploring Drone Dynamics via Propeller Sensing

Contactless Drone Sensing: Drone Dynamics Inversion via Propeller Speed.

[ACM MobiCom 2025 Poster] Skyshield: Event-Driven Submillimetre Thin Obstacle Detection

Rapid Detection of Submillimeter Thin Wire Obstacles.

[ACM MobiCom 2025 Demo] HawkEye: Practical In-Flight Obstacle Avoidance with Event Camera and LiDAR Fusion

High-speed Reaction Drone - Indoor Obstacle Avoidance.

[ACM MobiCom 2025 Demo] HawkEye: Practical In-Flight Obstacle Avoidance with Event Camera and LiDAR Fusion

High-speed Reaction Drone - Outdoor High-speed Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance.

[ACM SenSys 2025] Ultra-High-Frequency Harmony: mmWave Radar and Event Camera Orchestrate Accurate Drone Landing

Low-latency Precision Sensing Technology for High-speed Reliable Landing.

[ICCV 2025] PRE-Mamba: A 4D State Space Model for Ultra-High-Frequent Event Camera Deraining

4D state-space modeling for event camera deraining.

2. Embodied Intelligence

[IEEE RA-L 2025] MR-COGraphs: Communication-efficient Multi-Robot Open-vocabulary Mapping System

Efficient Multi-Robot Collaboration and Open Semantic Understanding based on 3D Scene Graphs.

[NeurIPS 2025] VolleyBots: A Testbed for Multi-Drone Volleyball Game Combining Motion Control and Strategic Play

Deep Reinforcement Learning-based Quadrotor Drone Volleyball Technology.

3. Neuromorphic Cognition

[ACM MM 2025] AirScape: Aerial Generative World Model with Motion Controllability

Motion-intent world model that predicts future drone views under full 6-DoF control.

[ACM MM 2025] Embodied-R: Activating Embodied Spatial Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

Slow-thinking embodied reasoning by coupling VLM perception with LM planning via RL.

Large-scale Outdoor Drone Target Search.

[ACL 2025] CityNavAgent: Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation with Hierarchical Semantic Planning and Global Memory

Efficient Target Search in Indoor Small-scale Environments.

Conference Publications (*: Co-primary authors; †: Corresponding author)

For all publications, please refer to Google Scholar for the most updated list.

AirCopBench: A Benchmark for Multi-drone Collaborative Embodied Perception and Reasoning

Jirong Zha*, Yuxuan Fan*, Tianyu Zhang, Geng Chen, Yingfeng Chen, Chen Gao, Xinlei Chen†

[AAAI 2026] The 40th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2026.

DIMM: Decoupled Multi-hierarchy Kalman Filter via Reinforcement Learning

Jirong Zha, Yuxuan Fan, Kai Li, Han Li, Chen Gao, Xinlei Chen†, Yong Li

[AAAI 2026] The 40th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2026.

Count Every Rotation and Every Rotation Counts: Exploring Drone Dynamics via Propeller Sensing

Xuecheng Chen*, Jingao Xu*, Wenhua Ding, Haoyang Wang, Xinyu Luo, Ruiyang Duan, Jialong Chen, Xueqian Wang, Yunhao Liu, Xinlei Chen†

[ACM SenSys 2026] Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, 2026.

Balanced Token Pruning: Accelerating Vision Language Models Beyond Local Optimization

Kaiyuan Li*, Xiaoyue Chen*, Chen Gao, Yong Li, Xinlei Chen†

[NeurIPS 2025] Thirty-Eighth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025.

AirScape: An Aerial Generative World Model with Motion Controllability

Baining Zhao*, Rongze Tang*, Mingyuan Jia*, Ziyou Wang*, Fanhang Man, Xin Zhang, Yu Shang, Weichen Zhang, Wei Wu, Chen Gao, Xinlei Chen†, Yong Li

[ACM MM 2025] Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Multimedia.

Open3D-VQA: A Benchmark for Embodied Spatial Concept Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Model in Open Space

Weichen Zhang*, Zile Zhou*, Xin Zeng*, Liu Xuchen, Jianjie Fang, Chen Gao, Jinqiang Cui, Yong Li, Xinlei Chen†, Xiao-Ping Zhang

[ACM MM 2025] Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Multimedia.

Embodied-R: Collaborative Framework for Activating Embodied Spatial Reasoning in Foundation Models via Reinforcement Learning

Baining Zhao*, Ziyou Wang*, Jianjie Fang*, Chen Gao, Fanhang Man, Jinqiang Cui, Xin Wang, Xinlei Chen†, Yong Li, Wenwu Zhu

[ACM MM 2025] Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Multimedia.

PRE-Mamba: A 4D State Space Model for Ultra-High-Frequent Event Camera Deraining

Ciyu Ruan*, Ruishan Guo*, Zihang Gong, Jingao Xu, Wenhan Yang, Xinlei Chen†

[ICCV 2025] Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, 2025.

Context-Aware Sentiment Forecasting via LLM-based Multi-Perspective Role-Playing Agents

Fanhang Man, Huandong Wang, Jianjie Fang, Zhaoyi Deng, Baining Zhao, Xinlei Chen†, Yong Li

[ACL 2025] The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

CityNavAgent: Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation with Hierarchical Semantic Planning and Global Memory

Weichen Zhang, Chen Gao, Shiquan Yu, Ruiying Peng, Baining Zhao, Qian Zhang, Jinqiang Cui, Xinlei Chen†, Yong Li

[ACL 2025] The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

UrbanVideo-Bench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Embodied Intelligence with Video Data in Urban Spaces

Baining Zhao, Jianjie Fang, Zichao Dai, Ziyou Wang, Jirong Zha, Weichen Zhang, Chen Gao, Yue Wang, Jinqiang Cui, Xinlei Chen†, Yong Li

[ACL 2025] The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Ultra-High-Frequency Harmony: mmWave Radar and Event Camera Orchestrate Accurate Drone Landing

Haoyang Wang, Jingao Xu, Xinyu Luo, Xuecheng Chen, Ting Zhang, Ruiyang Duan, Yunhao Liu, Xinlei Chen†

[ACM SenSys 2025] 23rd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (Acceptance ratio: 46/245=18.7%).

[Website homepage]

Foes or Friends: Embracing Ground Effect for Edge Detection on Lightweight Drones

Chenyu Zhao*, Ciyu Ruan*, Jingao Xu†, Haoyang Wang, Shengbo Wang, Jirong Zha, Jiaqi Li, Zheng Yang, Yunhao Liu, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Xinlei Chen†

[ACM MobiCom 2024] ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking.

Distill Drops into Data: Event-based Rain-Background Decomposition Network

Ciyu Ruan, Chenyu Zhao, Chenxin Liang, Xinyu Luo, Jingao Xu, Xinlei Chen†

[ACM MobiCom 2024] Proceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking.

MobiAir: Unleashing Sensor Mobility for City-scale and Fine-grained Air-Quality Monitoring with AirBERT

Yuxuan Liu*, Haoyang Wang*, Fanhang Man, Jingao Xu, Fan Dang, Yunhao Liu, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Xinlei Chen†

[ACM MobiSys 2024] 22nd ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (Acceptance ratio: 43/263 = 16.3%).

Physics-informed Neural ODE for Post-disaster Mobility Recovery

Jiahao Li*, Huandong Wang*, Xinlei Chen†

[KDD 2024] 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.

TransformLoc: Transforming MAVs into Mobile Localization Infrastructures in Heterogeneous Swarms

Haoyang Wang, Jingao Xu, Chenyu Zhao, Zihong Lu, Yuhan Cheng, Xuecheng Chen, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Yunhao Liu, Xinlei Chen†

[IEEE INFOCOM 2024] IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (Acceptance ratio: 256/1307=19.5%).

QUEST: Quality-informed Multi-agent Dispatching System for Optimal Mobile Crowdsensing

Zuxin Li, Fanhang Man, Xuecheng Chen, Susu Xu, Fan Dang, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Xinlei Chen†

[IEEE INFOCOM 2024] IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (Acceptance ratio: 256/1307=19.5%).

BlueKey: Exploiting Bluetooth Low Energy for Enhanced Physical-Layer Key Generation

Yawen Zheng, Fan Dang, Zihao Yang, Jinyan Jiang, Xu Wang, Lin Wang, Kebin Liu, Xinlei Chen, Yunhao Liu

[IEEE INFOCOM 2024] IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (Acceptance ratio: 256/1307=19.5%).

StreamingTag: A Scalable Piracy Tracking Solution for Mobile Streaming Services

Xinqi Jin, Fan Dang, Qi-An Fu, Lingkun Li, Guanyan Peng, Xinlei Chen, Kebin Liu, Yunhao Liu

[ACM MobiCom 2022] Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking.

LSync: A Universal Event-Synchronizing Solution for Live Streaming

Yifan Xu, Fan Dang, Rongwu Xu, Xinlei Chen, Yunhao Liu

[IEEE INFOCOM 2022] IEEE Conference on Computer Communications.

DeliverSense: Efficient Delivery Drone Scheduling for Crowdsensing with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Xuecheng Chen, Haoyang Wang, Zuxin Li, Wenbo Ding, Fan Dang, Chengye Wu, Xinlei Chen†

Best Paper Award (1 out of all submissions)

[ACM UbiComp CPD 2022] ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing CPD Workshop.

DrunkWalk: Collaborative and Adaptive Planning for Navigation of Micro-Aerial Sensor Swarms

Xinlei Chen, Aveek Purohit, Carlos Ruiz Dominguez, Stefano Carpin, Pei Zhang†

[ACM SenSys 2015] The 13th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems.

Journal Publications (*: Co-primary authors; †: Corresponding author)

For all publications, please refer to Google Scholar for the most updated list.

Event Camera Meets Mobile Embodied Perception: Abstraction, Algorithm, Acceleration, Application

Haoyang Wang, Ruishan Guo, Pengtao Ma, Ciyu Ruan, Xinyu Luo, Wenhua Ding, Tianyang Zhong, Jingao Xu, Yunhao Liu, Xinlei Chen†

[ACM CSUR] ACM Computing Surveys.

Aerial Shepherds: Enabling Hierarchical Localization in Heterogeneous MAV Swarms

Haoyang Wang, Jingao Xu, Chenyu Zhao, Yuhan Cheng, Xuecheng Chen, Chaopeng Hong, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Yunhao Liu, Xinlei Chen†

[IEEE TMC] IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2025.

A Novel Integrated Sensing and Communication Scheme in UAVs-Enabled Vehicular Networks with MARL-Driven Adaptive Control

Ziyuan Wang, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Wenbo Ding, Yuhan Dong, Xinlei Chen

[IEEE TMC] IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2025.

BlueKey: Exploiting Bluetooth Low Energy for Enhanced Physical-Layer Key Generation

Yawen Zheng, Fan Dang, Zihao Yang, Jinyan Jiang, Xu Wang, Lin Wang, Kebin Liu, Xinlei Chen, Yunhao Liu

[IEEE TMC] IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2025.

MR-COGraphs: Communication-efficient Multi-Robot Open-vocabulary Mapping System via 3D Scene Graphs

Qiuyi Gu*, Zhaocheng Ye*, Jincheng Yu, Jiahao Tang, Tinghao Yi, Yuhan Dong, Jian Wang, Jinqiang Cui, Xinlei Chen†, Yu Wang

[IEEE RA-L] IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2025.

SmartSpr: A Physics-informed Mobile Sprinkler Scheduling System for Reducing Urban Particulate Matter Pollution

Ji Luo, Zijian Xiao, Zuxin Li, Xuecheng Chen, Chaopeng Hong, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Xinlei Chen†

[IEEE TMC] IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2025. (CCF-A, SCI Q1, IF:7.7)

CatUA: Catalyzing Urban Air Quality Intelligence through Mobile Crowd-sensing

Nan Zhou*, Yuxuan Liu*, Haoyang Wang*, Fanhang Man, Jingao Xu, Fan Dang, Chaopeng Hong, Yunhao Liu, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Xinlei Chen†

[IEEE TMC] IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2025. (CCF-A, SCI Q1, IF:7.7)

DDL: Empowering Delivery Drones With Large-Scale Urban Sensing Capability

Xuecheng Chen*, Haoyang Wang*, Yuhan Cheng, Haohao Fu, Yuxuan Liu, Fan Dang, Yunhao Liu, Jinqiang Cui, Xinlei Chen†

[IEEE J-STSP] IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 2024.

SOScheduler: Toward Proactive and Adaptive Wildfire Suppression via Multi-UAV Collaborative Scheduling

Xuecheng Chen, Zijian Xiao, Yuhan Cheng, ChenChun Hsia, Haoyang Wang, Jingao Xu, Susu Xu, Fan Dang, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Yunhao Liu, Xinlei Chen†

[IEEE IoT-J] IEEE Internet of Things Journal.

BEANet: An Energy-efficient BLE Solution for High-capacity Equipment Area Network

Yifan Xu, Fan Dang, Kebin Liu, Zhui Zhu, Xinlei Chen, Xu Wang, Xin Miao, Haitian Zhao

[ACM TOSN] ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, 2024.

LSync: A Universal Timeline-Synchronizing Solution for Live Streaming

Fan Dang, Yifan Xu, Rongwu Xu, Xinlei Chen, Yunhao Liu

[IEEE TON] IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2024.

A Wearable Low-power Collaborative Sensing System for High-quality SSVEP-BCI Signal Acquisition

Rui Na, Dezhi Zheng, Ying Sun, Mingzhe Han, Shuai Wang, Shuailei Zhang, Qianxin Hui, Xinlei Chen†, Jun Zhang, Chun Hu

[IEEE IoT-J] IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2021.

Ultralow-power Sensing Framework for Internet of Things: A Smart Gas Meter as a Case

Ziteng Wang, Chun Hu, Dezhi Zheng, Xinlei Chen†

[IEEE IoT-J] IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2021.

Adaptive Hybrid Model-enabled Sensing System (HMSS) for Mobile Fine-Grained Air Pollution Estimation

Xinlei Chen, Susu Xu, Xinyu Liu, Xiangxiang Xu, Hae Young Noh, Lin Zhang, Pei Zhang

[IEEE TMC] IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2020.

H-DrunkWalk: Collaborative and Adaptive Navigation for Heterogeneous MAV Swarm

Xinlei Chen, Carlos Ruiz, Sihan Zeng, Liyao Gao, Aveek Purohit, Stefano Carpin, Pei Zhang

[ACM TOSN] ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, 2020.

PAS: Prediction-based Actuation System for City-scale Ridesharing Vehicular Mobile Crowdsensing

Xinlei Chen, Susu Xu, Jun Han, Haohao Fu, Xidong Pi, Carlee Joe-Wong, Yong Li, Lin Zhang, Hae Young Noh, Pei Zhang

[IEEE IoT-J] IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2020.

iLocus: Incentivizing Vehicle Mobility to Optimize Sensing Distribution in Crowd Sensing

Susu Xu*, Xinlei Chen*, Xidong Pi, Carlee Joe-Wong, Pei Zhang, Hae Young Noh

[IEEE TMC] IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2019.

Design Experiences in Minimalistic Flying Sensor Node Platform through SensorFly

Xinlei Chen, Aveek Purohit, Shijia Pan, Carlos Ruiz, Jun Han, Zheng Sun, Frank Mokaya, Patric Tague, Pei Zhang

[ACM TOSN] ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, 2017.

Selected Awards

  • [2025] Sliver Prize, the 50th International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva
  • [2023] Best Paper Award, ACM UbiComp CPD Workshop.
  • [2022] National Overseas Early Career Award, National Science Foundation of China.
  • [2017] Best Poster Award, ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN).
  • [2016] Best Demo Award, ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys).
  • [2016] Best Poster Runner Up Award, ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys).
  • [2013] Dean Fellowship, Carnegie Mellon University.
  • [2012] Excellent Master Thesis Award, Tsinghua University.

Professional Activities

  • TPC Member, The 23rd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, 2025
  • TPC Member, The 11th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation, 2024
  • TPC Member, The 25th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, 2024
  • TPC Member, The 19th International Conference on Mobility, Sensing and Networking, 2023
  • Leading Guest Editor, Sensors (Special Issue: New Trends in Artificial Intelligence of Things), 2023
  • Leading Guest Editor, Applied Sciences (Special Issue: Information Fusion and Its Applications for Smart Sensing), 2023
  • General Chair, The 4th TBSI Workshop on Learning Theory, 2022
  • TPC Member, The 27th IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 2021
  • TPC Co-Chair of CPD Workshop, The 23th ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, 2021
  • Competition Co-chair, Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet-of-Things Week, 2020
  • TPC Co-Chair of CPD Workshop, The 22th ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, 2020
  • TPC Member, The 29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2020
  • TPC Co-Chair of CPD Workshop, The 21th ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, 2019
  • TPC Member, The 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2019
  • TPC Member, The 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2019
  • TPC Co-Chair of CPD Workshop, The 20th ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, 2018
  • Web Chair, The 16th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, 2018
  • Web Chair, The 5th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Built Environments, 2018

Teaching Experience

    Instructor

  • Introduction to AIoT, 2023-2024 Fall, Tsinghua University
  • Data Visualization, 2022-2025 Spring, Tsinghua University
  • Urban low altitude messenger, 2024-2025 Spring, Tsinghua University
  • Data Mining: Theory & Algorithms, 2022 Fall, Tsinghua University