Yaru Niu
Hi! I am a PhD candidate at CMU Safe AI Lab, advised by Prof. Ding Zhao. Previously, I received an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, working with Prof. Matthew Gombolay. Before that, I received a B.E. in Intelligence Science and Technology at South China University of Technology. I also spent wonderful time as a research intern at BCAI, Baidu Research and MSC Lab at UC Berkeley.
My research interest lies at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and multi-agent systems. My research goal is to build methodologies for collaborative and reliable intelligent robotic systems that can interact with complex environments around them. My work is generously supported by Google DeepMind and Toyota North America.
My Chinese name is 牛雅儒 (Niu-Ya-Ru), where my first name (雅儒) means a scholar with elegance in ancient Chinese.
CV / Google Scholar / Twitter / Github / Linkedin
News
| Apr, 2025 | Human2LocoMan is accepted to RSS 2025. See you in LA! |
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| Jan, 2025 | MAPush is accepted to ICRA 2025. See you in Atlanta! |
| May, 2024 | Our work LocoMan is covered by TechXplore, IEEE Spectrum, CMU Engineering, GlobalSpec, and Interesting Engineering. |
| Jan, 2024 | Our work on modular policies for snake robots is accepted to ICRA 2024. |
| Nov, 2023 | Our work RoboTool is covered by TechXplore, ML@CMU Blog, and CMU Engineering. |
| Jun, 2023 | Our work on goal-conditioned curriculum reinforcement leanring for robotic scooping is accepted to IROS 2023. |
| Jan, 2023 | Our work on group distributionally robust reinforcement learning is accepted to AISTATS 2023. |
| May, 2022 | I graduate from Georgia Tech. Thank you, GT. Check out my MS Thesis. |
| Apr, 2022 | Our work Interpretable Continuous Control Tree (ICCT) is accepted to RSS 2022! |
| Oct, 2021 | Our work Multi-Agent Graph-Attention Communication (MAGIC) receives the Best Paper Award at ICCV 2021 Mair2 Workshop! |
Selected Publications
Notation * indicates equal contributions.
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LocoMan: Advancing Versatile Quadrupedal Dexterity with Lightweight Loco-ManipulatorsIn International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024
Spotlight talk at ICRA 2024 Workshop on Future Roadmap for Manipulation SKills -
COMPOSER: Scalable and Robust Modular Policies for Snake RobotsIn International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024
Abridged in CoRL 2023 Workshop on Learning for Soft Robots: Hard Challenges for Soft Systems (Spotlight) -
Safety-aware Causal Representation for Trustworthy Reinforcement Learning in Autonomous DrivingRobotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2024
Abridged in Machine Learning for Autonomous Driving Symposium -
Creative Robot Tool Use with Large Language ModelsarXiv preprint, 2023
In CoRL 2023 Workshop on Language and Robot Learning and NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Foundation Models for Decision Making -
GOATS: Goal Sampling Adaptation for Scooping with Curriculum Reinforcement LearningIn International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023
Abridged in ICRA 2023 Workshop on Representing and Manipulating Deformable Objects [PDF] [Spotlight Talk] -
Group Distributionally Robust Reinforcement Learning with Hierarchical Latent VariablesIn International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2023
In 5th Symposium on Advances in Approximate Bayesian Inference -
Multi-Agent Graph-Attention Communication and TeamingIn International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2021 (Oral)
Best Paper Award at ICCV 2021 Mair2 Workshop [PDF] [Spotlight Talk]
