Agency · Reasoning · Intelligence · Autonomy
A research lab building agents that act, reason, and understand — grounded in values, capable and even beyond.
ARIA is a research lab at Peking University. We pursue four intertwined directions — Agency, Reasoning, Intelligence, and Autonomy — toward machines that are general, dependable, intelligent, and their own.
Our name is our program
Four directions, one lab.
ARIA spells out the questions we care about. Each letter is a research agenda; together they describe an agent that lives, thinks, and acts in the world.
Agency
Agents that act autonomously under a value system of their own — making choices, taking responsibility, and surviving in an open world.
Reasoning
Models that reason efficiently: drawing sound conclusions from little, thinking only as hard as a problem demands.
Intelligence
Systems that reach super-human performance on specific tasks, turning narrow mastery into dependable capability.
Autonomy
Robot systems that weave our research directions together into embodied agents that operate on their own in the physical world.
Latest news
What's new.
ARIA members won the Marr Prize (Best Paper) at CogSci 2026 for "Timing is Everything: Temporal Scaffolding of Semantic Surprise in Humor."
Our lab website goes live. Publications and people pages coming online as the group grows.
ARIA is founded at Peking University. We are recruiting motivated students and engineers across all four directions.