I am Yuejiang Liu, a postdoc at Stanford, advised by Chelsea Finn. Previously, I obtained my PhD at EPFL, advised by Alexandre Alahi, and interned with Francesco Locatello, Chris Russell, and Bernhard Schölkopf.
I enjoy designing and prototyping algorithms that enable deep neural networks to generalize or adapt to the unexpected. In particular, I've been focused on robot learning in open dynamic worlds, where training data is fundamentally limited while moving objects, partial observability, and other interactive agents are the norm.
My research spans three elements:
interaction representation: incorporating structured or causal priors for robust interactions with environments
data curation: synthesizing, selecting, and mining quality and informative examples from online experience
test-time adaptation: designing objectives and mechanisms for dynamic model adaptation during inference
My long-term goal is to enable robots to step out of lab demos and thrive in our ever-evolving daily lives. I believe achieving this requires not just scaling, but real breakthroughs in the science of scaling, across data, representation, and inference. If our research interests intersect, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
(For pronunciation: my first name /yweh-jyang/, but any close approximation is welcome)
Scaling Verification Can Be More Effective than Scaling Policy Learning for Vision-Language-Action Alignment.
J Kwok, X Zhang, M Xu, Y Liu^, A Mirhoseini^, C Finn^, M Pavone^
In submission. 2026. [pdf, code]
RoboMME: Benchmarking and Understanding Memory for Robotic Generalist Policies.
Y Dai, H Fu, J Lee, Y Liu, H Zhang, J Yang, C Finn, N Fazeli, J Chai
In submission. 2026. [pdf, code]
Short-to-Long Distillation: Learning Long-Context Policies from Short-Context Supervision.
Y Liu*, Y Qian*, Y Du, C Finn
In submission. Short version at NeurIPS ER, 2025.
Learning Long-Context Diffusion Policies via Past-Token Prediction.
M Villasevil*, A Tang*, Y Liu*, C Finn
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL). Best paper at RSS RoboReps, 2025. [pdf, code]
Demo SCORE: Curating Demonstrations using Online Experience.
A Chen, A Lessing, Y Liu, C Finn
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2025. [pdf, code]
Bidirectional Decoding: Improving Action Chunking via Guided Test-Time Sampling.
Y Liu*, J Hamid*, A Xie, Y Lee, M Du, C Finn
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025. [pdf, code]
Targeted Data Selection via Optimal Transport.
L Feng, F Nie, Y Liu^, A Alahi^.
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025. [pdf, code]
Sim-to-Real Causal Transfer: A Metric Learning Approach to Causally-Aware Interaction Representations.
A Rahimi*, P Luan*, Y Liu*, F Rajic, A Alahi.
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025. [pdf, code]
Co-Supervised Learning: Improving Weak-to-Strong Generalization with Hierarchical Mixture of Experts.
Y Liu, A Alahi.
Preprint. 2024. [pdf, code]
On Pitfalls of Test-time Adaptation.
H Zhao*, Y Liu*, A Alahi, T Lin.
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023. [pdf, code]
Causal Triplet: An Open Challenge for Intervention-centric Causal Representation Learning.
Y Liu, A Alahi, C Russell, M Horn, D Zietlow, B Schölkopf, F Locatello.
Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning (CLeaR), 2023. [pdf, code]
Towards Robust and Adaptive Motion Forecasting: A Causal Representation Perspective.
Y Liu, R Cadei, J Schweizer, S Bahmani, A Alahi.
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022. [pdf, code]
Modular Low-Rank Style Transfer for Deep Motion Forecasting.
P. Kothar*, D. Li*, Y Liu, A Alahi.
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2022. [pdf, code]
TTT++: When Does Self-supervised Test-time Training Fail or Thrive?
Y Liu, P Kothari, B Delft, B Bellot-Gurlet, T Mordan, A Alahi.
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2021. [pdf, code]
Social NCE: Contrastive Learning of Socially-aware Motion Representations.
Y Liu, Q Yan, A Alahi.
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021. [pdf, code]
Collaborative Sampling from Generative Adversarial Networks.
Y Liu*, P Kothari*, A Alahi.
Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2020. [pdf, code]
Crowd-Robot Interaction: Crowd-aware Robot Navigation with Attention-based Deep Reinforcement Learning.
C Chen, Y Liu, S Kreiss, A Alahi.
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2019. [pdf, code]
Map-based Deep Imitation Learning for Obstacle Avoidance.
Y Liu, A Xu, Z Chen.
International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2018. [pdf]
Real-Time Distributed Algorithms for Nonconvex Optimal Power Flow.
Y Liu, JH Hours, G Stathopoulos, CN Jones.
American Control Conference (ACC), 2017. [pdf]
RSS RoboReps Best Paper, 2025
SNSF Postdoc Fellowship, 2024
Thesis Award Nominations, 2023
National Doctorate Award, 2022
1st Place, BoltzGo, ICML, 2021
1st Place, TrajNet++, ICCV, 2021
Review: NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, RSS, CoRL, JMLR, PAMI
Organize: CoRL Data in Robotics Workshop