NG CHI KIT

NG CHI KIT

CUHK

Project Website Endoscopic Autonomy
EndoVLA · CAN · EndoLIFT Open ↗

About Me

Hi! I’m Chi Kit Ng (Justin), a PhD student at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in Electronic Engineering, supervised by Prof. Hongliang Ren in IMMlab.
My research focuses on end-to-end autonomous control of robotic endoscopes and intelligent surgical robotics.
I graduated from CUHK EE with First Class Honours, ranking 1/54.

Open Projects @ CUHK EE

I’m happy to cooperate with CUHK EE undergraduates (including FYP), Summer Research Internship (SRI) students, and MSc students (course project or MSc project).

  • 🌱 Undergraduates (FYP/Independent Study) — under supervision from Prof. Ren or Prof. Lai or Prof. Gao
  • ☀️ Funded CUHK UG Summer Research Internship — see the official program: USRI
  • ☀️ CUHK International Summer UG Research Program (SURP) — see the official program: SURP
  • 🎓 MSc Projects — scoped research/engineering topics aligned with your interests

Feel free to reach out and discuss ideas!

Example Topics (mix & match)

  • Vision-Language-Action (VLA) with Large Language Model (LLM) as backbone
  • Robotics+: AR/VR
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Soft/continuum robot control (tendon-driven, Cosserat models, stiffness tuning modeling)
  • AIoT: Artificial Intelligence + Internet of Things
  • Federated Learning (FL)
  • AI Chips
  • Cross-border Communication

Previous research experiences

Northwestern University, AIML Lab, Supervised by Prof. Ping Guo

  • Optical Meta-grating for Snapshot Multi-spectral Imaging, (ASPE 2025, Oral)

CUHK EE Image Processing Lab, supervised by Prof. Thierry Blu

CUHK AIoT Lab, supervised by Prof. Guoliang Xing and Prof. Xiaomin Ouyang

🔥 News

  • 9.2026: Our work on Flexible Whole-body Tactile Sensing on a Soft Continuum Robot got the best poster award in [IROS workshop] 🎉
  • 9.2026: Our work on visual quality examination of colonscopy accepted by top clinical conference [UEG 2026] 🎉
  • 8.2026: EndoLIFT preprint released — bidirectional endoscopic control with language-disambiguated intent. [project page]
  • 6.2026: 1 UG FYP paper accepted by ICBIR. Congrat Hang Li！
  • 6.2026: 1 paper accepted by RSS workshop. Congrat Xiyue！
  • 6.2026: 1 paper accepted by IEEE-IROS. Congrat Jinsong.
  • 6.2026: Our project “CR agent for fire rescuing” earn the third prize of HK Challenge Plus. Thanks all contributors~
  • 3.2026: Our embodied endoscopy dataset is available via Nvidia Open-H-Embodiment collection. Thanks all contributors~
  • 2.2026: 3 papers accepted by IEEE-ICRA. Thanks all contributors~
  • 10.2025: Our SoftVisioBots team won the The First Place Award in ACM MM 2025 RoboSoft Workshop! Thanks all teammates~
  • 10.2025: CAN-DRL accepted by IEEE ROBIO 2025 — T.J. Tarn Best Paper Award in Robotics. [project page]
  • 8.2025: EndoVLA accepted by CoRL 2025 (spotlight).
  • 6.2025: JEDP accepted by IEEE-IROS-2025 (Oral).
  • 12.2024: 🎉 Establish personal webpage

🤖 Projects

Project pages with videos, figures and full results live on the Endoscopic Autonomy site — my work on end-to-end autonomous control of flexible robotic endoscopes, in IMMlab at CUHK.

EndoVLA tracking a polyp in a stomach phantom
CoRL 2025 · Spotlight

EndoVLA

Dual-phase vision-language-action model. One policy tracks polyps, abnormal mucosa and circumferential cutting markers from a surgeon's prompt.

Open project →
 CAN navigation across targets of increasing difficulty
ROBIO 2025 · Best Paper

CAN

Contact-aided navigation. Force feedback turns the deformable stomach wall into guidance rather than an obstacle, learned with PPO in an FEM simulation.

Open project →
 EndoLIFT intent aliasing concept
Preprint 2026

EndoLIFT

Language-disambiguated latent-conditioned rectified flow. The same view can demand opposite axial actions — an instruction selects forward navigation or urgent retraction.

Open project →

Also: JEDP-RL — Jacobian exploratory dual-phase RL for dynamic endoluminal navigation of deformable continuum robots (IROS 2025, oral) · arXiv. Related lab page: EndoWAM.

📝 Publications

* equal contribution · † corresponding author. Full list on Google Scholar.

🎖 Honors and Awards

  • 2026 Talent Development Scholarship by HKSAR government
  • 2026 Lead “CR agent for fire rescuing” with third prize of HK Challenge Plus
  • 2025 Lead “Soft VLA” with the First Place Award in ACM MM 2025 RoboSoft Workshop
  • 2025 T.J. Tarn Best Paper Award in Robotics, IEEE ROBIO 2025 — Contact-Aided Navigation
  • 2024 CUHK Capstone Project Competition Grand Final 2024 (Creative Award)
  • 2022,23,24 CUHK Faculty Dean’s List
  • 2021,22,23,24 CUHK United College Head’s List
  • 2024 HKEX Foundation Scholarship for Biotechnology and Innovation
  • 2024 Professor Chung Yu To Memorial Scholarship
  • 2023 Chiang Chen Industrial Scholarship
  • 2022,23,24 Suga Intl Holdings Limited Scholarship
  • 2022 Chen Chih-Fan Scholarship
  • 2021 Talent Development Scholarship by HKSAR government

📖 Education

  • Sep 2024 – Aug 2028 (expected) — PhD, CUHK, Hong Kong
  • Aug 2020 – Jul 2024 — BEng (1st Class Honours, rank 1/54), CUHK, Hong Kong
  • Sep 2017 – Jul 2020 — Pui Ching Middle School, Hong Kong

👨‍🔬 Services

  • Reviewer: MIR; CVPR; NeurIPS; CoRL; IROS; ICRA; RoboSoft; MICCAI

👨‍🏫 Teaching

Teaching Assistantships

  • 2024–2026 Spring — ELEG3103 Robotic Perception and Intelligence
  • 2024–2026 Fall — ELEG2202 Fundamentals of Electric Circuits

Mentees

  • Yuqing Wei · UG FYP → HKPFS
  • Sean Kong Ko Lun — website · UG intern → PhD student, CityU

🗣️ Languages

  • Chinese: Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka
  • English