Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence

A Beijing research institute led by Song-Chun Zhu, focused on general and embodied artificial intelligence.

The Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence was founded in 2020, backed by the Beijing municipal government and the Ministry of Science and Technology, in partnership with Peking University and Tsinghua University; its director is Song-Chun Zhu, who moved to the US in 1992, spent 18 years on the UCLA faculty, and returned to China in 2020. It champions a “small data, big tasks” approach, emphasizing reasoning and value-driven behavior rather than simply scaling up large models. Its results include the virtual agent Tong Tong (released January 2024, upgraded to version 2.0 that April), a General Intelligence Test (通智测试) benchmark, the 3D embodied generalist model LEO (ICML 2024), the simulation-training platform TongSIM (open-sourced December 2025), and the TongAgents agent framework. It also works on humanoid robot locomotion control, and has won awards at the World Humanoid Robot Games.

ExampleLEO feeds first-person images, object-level 3D point clouds, and text instructions into a large language model together, letting it answer questions, navigate, and manipulate objects within a 3D scene.

Also called

BIGAI

Related

LEO (BIGAI) · Embodied AI · Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence · PKU EPIC Lab · World Humanoid Robot Games

Sources

BIGAI 官网 About (Chinese)
Wikipedia: Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence
BIGAI 官网 (Chinese)

As of

2026-07