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.
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News
Selected Publications
Notation * indicates equal contributions.
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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) -
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 -
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 -
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]