Yaru Niu

Hi! I am a second-year 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 Baidu Research with Dr. Liangjun Zhang, and at Berkeley with Prof. Masayoshi Tomizuka.
My research interest lies at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and multi-agent systems. My research goal is to build methodologies for collaborative, interpretable, and reliable intelligent robotic systems that can interact with complex environments around them.
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
Selected Publications
Notation * indicates equal contributions.
-
Creative Robot Tool Use with Large Language ModelsarXiv preprint, 2023
Abridged in CoRL 2023 Workshop on Language and Robot Learning (LangRob): Language as Grounding -
Safety-aware Causal Representation for Trustworthy Reinforcement Learning in Autonomous DrivingarXiv preprint, 2023
Abridged in Machine Learning for Autonomous Driving Symposium -
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] -
COMPOSER: Scalable and Robust Modular Policies for Snake RobotsarXiv preprint, 2023
Abridged in CoRL 2023 Workshop on Learning for Soft Robots: Hard Challenges for Soft Systems (Spotlight) -
Group Distributionally Robust Reinforcement Learning with Hierarchical Latent VariablesIn International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2023
Also appeared 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]