Ye Wang

  • Biography

    Ye was a member of the Information Systems and Sciences Laboratory at Boston University, where he studied information-theoretically secure multiparty computation. His current research interests include information security, biometric authentication, and data privacy.

  • Recent News & Events


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  • Awards

    •  AWARD    MERL Team Wins IROS 2026 Humanoid IKEA Assembly Challenge
      Date: October 1, 2026
      Awarded to: Kei Suzuki, Jing Liu, Alexander Schperberg, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, Harsh Singh, Chak Lam Shek, Maxwell Asselmeier, and Haodi Hu
      MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jing Liu; Alexander Schperberg; Kei Suzuki; Ye Wang
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Control, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing
      Brief
      • MERL's team MEL-Craft won first place in the Humanoid IKEA Assembly Challenge at IROS 2026, held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The inaugural competition attracted approximately 34 registered teams worldwide.

        The challenge asked teams to develop autonomous robot policies for a Unitree G1 humanoid robot to assemble an IKEA UTTER table from its component parts. The robot had to perform the task autonomously at the competition venue, requiring capabilities including perception, bimanual manipulation, spatial reasoning, planning, and control. Human intervention was penalized, and teams were evaluated based on assembly progress and completion time.

        MERL competed as MEL-Craft and achieved first place in the competition. The result demonstrates progress toward reliable humanoid robots capable of performing complex, contact-rich manipulation tasks in real-world environments, an important direction for physical AI and general-purpose robotic systems.

        The MERL team members were Kei Suzuki, Jing Liu, Alexander Schperberg, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, and Ye Wang, with contributions from MERL interns Harsh Singh, Chak Lam Shek, Maxwell Asselmeier, and Haodi Hu.

        The Humanoid IKEA Assembly Challenge was held as part of IROS 2026, the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.
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    •  AWARD    Mitsubishi Electric Team Wins Awards at GalFer Contest
      Date: June 23, 2025
      Awarded to: Bingnan Wang, Tatsuya Yamamoto, Yusuke Sakamoto, Siyuan Sun, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, and Ye Wang
      MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Bingnan Wang; Ye Wang
      Research Areas: Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization
      Brief
      • The MELSUR (Mitsubishi Electric SURrogate) team, consisting of a group of MERL and Mitsubishi Electric researchers, ranked first in two out of three categories in the GalFer Contest.

        The GalFer (Galileo Ferraris) contest aims to compare the accuracy and efficiency of data-driven methodologies for the multi-physics simulation of traction electric machines. A total of 26 teams worldwide participated in the contest, which consists of three categories. The MELSUR team, including MERL staff Bingnan Wang, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, MERL intern Siyuan Sun, Mitsubishi Electric researchers Tatsuya Yamamoto and Yusuke Sakamoto, ranked first for the category of "Novelty" and "Interpolation". The results were announced during an award ceremony at the COMPUMAG 2025 conference in Naples, Italy.
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    •  AWARD    MERL Wins Awards at NeurIPS LLM Privacy Challenge
      Date: December 15, 2024
      Awarded to: Jing Liu, Ye Wang, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Tsunato Nakai, Kento Oonishi, Takuya Higashi
      MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jing Liu; Ye Wang
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Information Security
      Brief
      • The Mitsubishi Electric Privacy Enhancing Technologies (MEL-PETs) team, consisting of a collaboration of MERL and Mitsubishi Electric researchers, won awards at the NeurIPS 2024 Large Language Model (LLM) Privacy Challenge. In the Blue Team track of the challenge, we won the 3rd Place Award, and in the Red Team track, we won the Special Award for Practical Attack.
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    •  AWARD    MERL’s Paper on Wi-Fi Sensing Earns Top 3% Paper Recognition at ICASSP 2023, Selected as a Best Student Paper Award Finalist
      Date: June 9, 2023
      Awarded to: Cristian J. Vaca-Rubio, Pu Wang, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, Petros Boufounos and Petar Popovski
      MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Pu (Perry) Wang; Ye Wang
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
      Brief
      • A MERL Paper on Wi-Fi sensing was recognized as a Top 3% Paper among all 2709 accepted papers at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2023). Co-authored by Cristian Vaca-Rubio and Petar Popovski from Aalborg University, Denmark, and MERL researchers Pu Wang, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, and Petros Boufounos, the paper "MmWave Wi-Fi Trajectory Estimation with Continous-Time Neural Dynamic Learning" was also a Best Student Paper Award finalist.

        Performed during Cristian’s stay at MERL first as a visiting Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and then as a full-time intern in 2022, this work capitalizes on standards-compliant Wi-Fi signals to perform indoor localization and sensing. The paper uses a neural dynamic learning framework to address technical issues such as low sampling rate and irregular sampling intervals.

        ICASSP, a flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS), was hosted on the Greek island of Rhodes from June 04 to June 10, 2023. ICASSP 2023 marked the largest ICASSP in history, boasting over 4000 participants and 6128 submitted papers, out of which 2709 were accepted.
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    •  AWARD    MERL Ranked 1st Place in Cross-Subject Transfer Learning Task and 4th Place Overall at the NeurIPS2021 BEETL Competition for EEG Transfer Learning.
      Date: November 11, 2021
      Awarded to: Niklas Smedemark-Margulies, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, Deniz Erdogmus
      MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Ye Wang
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Signal Processing, Human-Computer Interaction
      Brief
      • The MERL Signal Processing group achieved first place in the cross-subject transfer learning task and fourth place overall in the NeurIPS 2021 BEETL AI Challenge for EEG Transfer Learning. The team included Niklas Smedemark-Margulies (intern from Northeastern University), Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, and Prof. Deniz Erdogmus (Northeastern University). The challenge addresses two types of transfer learning tasks for EEG Biosignals: a homogeneous transfer learning task for cross-subject domain adaptation; and a heterogeneous transfer learning task for cross-data domain adaptation. There were 110+ registered teams in this competition, MERL ranked 1st in the homogeneous transfer learning task, 7th place in the heterogeneous transfer learning task, and 4th place for the combined overall score. For the homogeneous transfer learning task, MERL developed a new pre-shot learning framework based on feature disentanglement techniques for robustness against inter-subject variation to enable calibration-free brain-computer interfaces (BCI). MERL is invited to present our pre-shot learning technique at the NeurIPS 2021 workshop.
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  • Research Highlights

  • MERL Publications

    •  Hu, H., Huang, C.-T., Liu, J., Wang, Y., Suzuki, K., Brand, M., Koike-Akino, T., "ReCoVLA: VLM-Guided Reward Compilation for Failure Recovery in Vision-Language-Action Policies", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop, September 2026.
      BibTeX TR2026-148 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Hu2026sep,
      • author = {Hu, Haodi and Huang, Chung-Ta and Liu, Jing and Wang, Ye and Suzuki, Kei and Brand, Matthew and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki},
      • title = {{ReCoVLA: VLM-Guided Reward Compilation for Failure Recovery in Vision-Language-Action Policies}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-148}
      • }
    •  Singh, H., Suzuki, K., Wang, Y., Liu, J., Cascante-Bonilla, P., Koike-Akino, T., "DYNAMIT: Dynamic Zero-Shot Manipulation via Instruction-Grounded Visual Tracking and Interception in Industrial Conveyor Environments", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop, September 2026.
      BibTeX TR2026-146 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Singh2026sep,
      • author = {Singh, Harsh and Suzuki, Kei and Wang, Ye and Liu, Jing and Cascante-Bonilla, Paola and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki},
      • title = {{DYNAMIT: Dynamic Zero-Shot Manipulation via Instruction-Grounded Visual Tracking and Interception in Industrial Conveyor Environments}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-146}
      • }
    •  Shek, C.L., Wang, Y., Liu, J., Suzuki, K., Tokekar, P., Koike-Akino, T., "Read the Manual: Grounding Behavior Tree Synthesis for Multi-Machine Factory Operation", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop, September 2026.
      BibTeX TR2026-149 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Shek2026sep,
      • author = {Shek, Chak.Lam and Wang, Ye and Liu, Jing and Suzuki, Kei and Tokekar, Pratap and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki},
      • title = {{Read the Manual: Grounding Behavior Tree Synthesis for Multi-Machine Factory Operation}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-149}
      • }
    •  Liu, J., Wang, Y., Suzuki, K., Koike-Akino, T., "Test-Time Attention: Can Robots Better Follow Commands?", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) IARL Workshop, September 2026.
      BibTeX TR2026-142 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Liu2026sep,
      • author = {Liu, Jing and Wang, Ye and Suzuki, Kei and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki},
      • title = {{Test-Time Attention: Can Robots Better Follow Commands?}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) IARL Workshop},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-142}
      • }
    •  Koike-Akino, T., Blaykhman, V., Wang, Y., Liu, J., Vinokur, G.V., "Vibe Patenting: Evaluating LLM Judges for Professional Patent-Drafting Agents", arXiv, September 2026.
      BibTeX arXiv
      • @article{Koike-Akino2026sep,
      • author = {{Koike-Akino, Toshiaki and Blaykhman, Vlad and Wang, Ye and Liu, Jing and Vinokur, Gennadiy V.}},
      • title = {{Vibe Patenting: Evaluating LLM Judges for Professional Patent-Drafting Agents}},
      • journal = {arXiv},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13422}
      • }
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  • Software & Data Downloads

  • Videos

  • MERL Issued Patents

    • Title: "Stochastic Control Subject to Generative AI-Based Disturbance"
      Inventors: Chakrabarty, Ankush; Wang, Ye; Laughman, Christopher; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Wichern, Gordon P; Salatiello, Alessandro; Sorourifar, Farshud; Paulson, Joel
      Patent No.: 12,769,266
      Issue Date: Oct 20, 2026
    • Title: "System and Method for Generating Two-Dimensional (2D) Image of an Object in a Scene"
      Inventors: Marks, Tim; Dey, Rahul; Egger, Bernhard; Wang, Ye
      Patent No.: 12,675,919
      Issue Date: Jul 7, 2026
    • Title: "Method and System for Training a Neural Network for Generating Universal Adversarial Perturbations"
      Inventors: Wang, Ye; Aeron, Shuchin; Rakin, Adnan; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Moulin, Pierre; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 12,645,933
      Issue Date: Jun 2, 2026
    • Title: "Integrated Sensing and Communications Empowered by Networked Hybrid Quantum-Classical Machine Learning"
      Inventors: Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Wang, Ye; Wang, Pu
      Patent No.: 12,639,612
      Issue Date: May 26, 2026
    • Title: "Reconfigurable wavelength selective splitter"
      Inventors: Kojima, Keisuke; Jung, Minwoo; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Wang, Ye; Brand, Matthew E.
      Patent No.: 12,639,552
      Issue Date: May 26, 2026
    • Title: "Learning-Based Nonlinear Compensation with Physics-Informed Neural Network for Data Access"
      Inventors: Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Dzieciol, Hubert; Parsons, Kieran; Wang, Ye
      Patent No.: 12,614,059
      Issue Date: Apr 28, 2026
    • Title: "Phase Identification of Power Distribution Systems"
      Inventors: Sun, Hongbo; Ye, Zong-Jhen; Guo, Jianlin; Wang, Ye
      Patent No.: 12,607,662
      Issue Date: Apr 21, 2026
    • Title: "System and Method for Training a Regression Neural Network for Localization of a Device in an Environment"
      Inventors: Wang, Pu; Xia, Haifeng; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Wang, Ye; Orlik, Philip V.
      Patent No.: 12,572,815
      Issue Date: Mar 10, 2026
    • Title: "Generative Model for Inverse Design of Materials, Devices, and Structures"
      Inventors: Kojima, Keisuke; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Tang, Yingheng; Wang, Ye
      Patent No.: 12,260,339
      Issue Date: Mar 25, 2025
    • Title: "Automated Construction of Neural Network Architecture with Bayesian Graph Exploration"
      Inventors: Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Wang, Ye; Demir, Andac; Erdogmus, Deniz
      Patent No.: 12,061,985
      Issue Date: Aug 13, 2024
    • Title: "Anomaly Detection and Diagnosis in Factory Automation System using Pre-Processed Time-Delay Neural Network with Loss Function Adaptation"
      Inventors: Guo, Jianlin; Liu, Bryan; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Wang, Ye; Kim, Kyeong-Jin; Parsons, Kieran; Orlik, Philip V.
      Patent No.: 12,007,760
      Issue Date: Jun 11, 2024
    • Title: "Multi-Band Wi-Fi Fusion for WLAN Sensing"
      Inventors: Wang, Pu; Yu, Jianyuan; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Wang, Ye; Orlik, Philip V.
      Patent No.: 11,902,811
      Issue Date: Feb 13, 2024
    • Title: "Apparatus and Method for Anomaly Detection"
      Inventors: Wang, Ye; Kim, Kyeong-Jin; Wang, Xiao
      Patent No.: 11,843,623
      Issue Date: Dec 12, 2023
    • Title: "System and Method for Manipulating Two-Dimensional (2D) Images of Three-Dimensional (3D) Objects"
      Inventors: Marks, Tim; Medin, Safa; Cherian, Anoop; Wang, Ye
      Patent No.: 11,663,798
      Issue Date: May 30, 2023
    • Title: "Non-Uniform Regularization in Artificial Neural Networks for Adaptable Scaling"
      Inventors: Wang, Ye; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki
      Patent No.: 11,651,225
      Issue Date: May 16, 2023
    • Title: "Protograph Quasi-Cyclic Polar Codes and Related Low-Density Generator Matrix Family"
      Inventors: Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Wang, Ye
      Patent No.: 11,463,114
      Issue Date: Oct 4, 2022
    • Title: "Battery Diagnostic System for Estimating Remaining useful Life (RUL) of a Battery"
      Inventors: Gorrachategui, Ivan Sanz; Pajovic, Milutin; Wang, Ye
      Patent No.: 11,346,891
      Issue Date: May 31, 2022
    • Title: "Generative Model for Inverse Design of Materials, Devices, and Structures"
      Inventors: Kojima, Keisuke; Tang, Yingheng; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Wang, Ye
      Patent No.: 11,251,896
      Issue Date: Feb 15, 2022
    • Title: "DATA-DRIVEN PRIVACY-PRESERVING COMMUNICATION"
      Inventors: Wang, Ye; Ishwar, Prakash; Tripathy, Ardhendu S
      Patent No.: 11,132,453
      Issue Date: Sep 28, 2021
    • Title: "Irregular Polar Code Encoding"
      Inventors: Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Wang, Ye; Draper, Stark C.
      Patent No.: 10,862,621
      Issue Date: Dec 8, 2020
    • Title: "Method and Systems using Privacy-Preserving Analytics for Aggregate Data"
      Inventors: Wang, Ye; Raval, Nisarg Jagdishbhai; Ishwar, Prakash
      Patent No.: 10,452,865
      Issue Date: Oct 22, 2019
    • Title: "Irregular Polar Code Encoding"
      Inventors: Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Wang, Ye; Draper, Stark C.
      Patent No.: 10,313,056
      Issue Date: Jun 4, 2019
    • Title: "Soft-Output Decoding of Codewords Encoded with Polar Code"
      Inventors: Wang, Ye; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Draper, Stark C.
      Patent No.: 10,312,946
      Issue Date: Jun 4, 2019
    • Title: "Method and Systems using Privacy-Preserving Analytics for Aggregate Data"
      Inventors: Wang, Ye; Hattori, Mitsuhiro; Shimizu, Rina; Hirano, Takato; Matsuda, Nori
      Patent No.: 10,216,959
      Issue Date: Feb 26, 2019
    • Title: "Privacy Preserving Statistical Analysis on Distributed Databases"
      Inventors: Wang, Ye; Lin, Bing-Rong; Rane, Shantanu D.
      Patent No.: 10,146,958
      Issue Date: Dec 4, 2018
    • Title: "Method and System for Determining Hidden States of a Machine using Privacy-Preserving Distributed Data Analytics and a Semi-trusted Server and a Third-Party"
      Inventors: Wang, Ye
      Patent No.: 9,471,810
      Issue Date: Oct 18, 2016
    • Title: "Method for Determining Hidden States of Systems using Privacy-Preserving Distributed Data Analytics"
      Inventors: Wang, Ye; Xie, Qian; Rane, Shantanu D.
      Patent No.: 9,246,978
      Issue Date: Jan 26, 2016
    • Title: "Privacy Preserving Statistical Analysis for Distributed Databases"
      Inventors: Wang, Ye; Lin, Bing-Rong; Rane, Shantanu D.
      Patent No.: 8,893,292
      Issue Date: Nov 18, 2014
    • Title: "Secure Multi-Party Computation of Normalized Sum-Type Functions"
      Inventors: Rane, Shantanu D.; Sun, Wei; Wang, Ye
      Patent No.: 8,473,537
      Issue Date: Jun 25, 2013
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