About Us

VU Lab is a research group in the Department of Computer and Data Sciences at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, Ohio, led by Prof. Yu Yin.

We study visual understanding and spatial intelligence for robust embodied systems. We focus on perception, spatial reasoning, and decision-making methods that help intelligent agents interpret complex environments and act reliably in the real world.

Our work spans scene understanding, 3D perception, language-guided reasoning, and spatial intelligence. This homepage now provides direct entry points to the lab team and research overview.

Highlights

GSMem: 3D Gaussian Splatting as Persistent Spatial Memory for Zero-Shot Embodied Exploration and Reasoning

We utilize 3DGS serves as a persistent spatial memory for embodied navigation, enabling the agent to ''hallucinate'' optimal views for high-fidelity Vision-Language Model (VLM) reasoning.

Spatial Intelligence in Vision-Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey

A comprehensive survey addressing how VLMs currently lack spatial intelligence, covering recent advances, taxonomies, and evaluations toward building spatially intelligent AI.

BARD-GS: Blur-Aware Reconstruction of Dynamic Scenes via Gaussian Splatting

BARD-GS is a novel approach for robust dynamic scene reconstruction that effectively handles blurry inputs and imprecise camera poses.

Visual Understanding Benchmark for Open-World Scenes

Our lab offers a diverse range of benchmarks, including YesBut, Nebular, Viva, and Causal 3D, focused on advancing open-world visual understanding and robotic interaction.

Focus Areas

• Visual understanding for complex real-world scenes
• Spatial intelligence for embodied reasoning and planning
• Scalable learning systems for perception and autonomy

Explore

Use the navigation above to browse the lab’s team, research, publications, and contact pages.