CS PhD Student · Oklahoma State University

Chrisantus Eze

I'm a Computer Science PhD student at Oklahoma State University, advised by Christopher Crick. I build systems that enable robots to reason about and manipulate objects in complex, cluttered environments — combining foundation models (VLMs, VLAs), imitation learning, and model-based planning to support long-horizon spatial reasoning.

I'm a fourth-year PhD student at Oklahoma State University, previously a Graduate Student Mentee at Google (Feb 2023 – Jun 2025), where I co-developed sequential manipulation policies achieving 98% benchmark success. I received my B.Eng. in Electrical & Electronic Engineering from FUTO, Nigeria.

My current projects include Unveiler — a planning–control framework for sequential object retrieval in clutter (94% sim-to-real success) — and VLM-RAG pipelines for object grounding (+34% improvement). I also developed A3, a source-free domain adaptation method that improves cross-domain transfer by 15%. I am currently working on a JEPA-style world model with a learned critic for long-horizon robot planning, and exploring logic-augmented spatial reasoning via Answer Set Programming (ASP) to improve compositional reasoning in VLMs. I have published 6 peer-reviewed papers across robotics and ML venues.

Robot Manipulation Long-Horizon Planning Spatial Reasoning Imitation Learning Foundation Models VLMs / VLAs World Models
Photo of Chrisantus Eze

News

Oct 2025 Learning by Watching accepted for publication at IEEE Access.
Sep 2025 Unveiler, a paper on improving robots' spatial reasoning for manipulation, is under review at ICRA 2026.
Dec 2024 Presented A3 at ICMLA 2024 in Miami, Florida.
Nov 2024 Paper on Data-Driven Fairness Generalization for Deepfake Detection accepted at ICAART 2025.
Sep 2024 A3 accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA), 2024.

Research

7 papers

JEPA-Style World Models with a Learned Critic for Long-Horizon Robot Planning

Chrisantus Eze, Christopher Crick

Coming Soon

Latent-space world model with a critic for multi-step predictive planning in robot manipulation.

Learning Object-Centric Spatial Reasoning for Sequential Manipulation in Cluttered Environments

Chrisantus Eze, Ryan Julian, Christopher Crick

Under Review

Two-module architecture enabling robots to reason about occlusions and retrieve hidden objects through strategic sequential manipulation.

Service

Oct 2025 Reviewer, HRI'26 — 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
Jun 2025 Reviewer, CoRL'25 — 9th Annual Conference on Robot Learning
Nov 2024 Reviewer, HRI'25 — 20th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
Feb 2024 Feedback provider, 2024 Undergraduate Research Symposium at Oklahoma State University
Nov 2023 Reviewer, HRI'24 — 19th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
Apr 2023 Feedback provider, 2023 Undergraduate Research Symposium at Oklahoma State University
Dec 2022 Reviewer, HRI'23 — 18th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
Jul 2022 Feedback provider, 2022 NSF REU Summer Program at Oklahoma State University

Writing