Ruochen Jiao

PhD candidate, Computer Engineering, Northwestern University Evanston, IL, U.S. Email: ruochen.jiao@u.northwestern.edu My name in Chinese is 焦若辰

I am a final-year Ph.D. student in Computer Engineering at Northwestern University, advised by Prof. Qi Zhu. I also work close with Prof. Alfred Chen. Prior to Northwestern, I received my B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Zhejiang University in 2019.

The long-term goal of my research is to make machine learning components in autonomous systems robust, interpretable, and efficient. My research interests include robust and explainable ML, generative models for behavior modeling/decision-making, and their applications in embodied AI and autonomous systems.

Education

Northwestern University: Ph.D. candidate in Computer Engineering, 2019 - present

Zhejiang University: B.S. in Electrical Engineering, 2019

News

• Mar 2024   Our paper Empowering Autonomous Driving with Large Language Models: A Safety Perspective has been accepted to LLMAgents @ ICLR 2024.

• Nov 2023   We have a few preprints on physics-informed motion generation, the large language models (LLMs) for autonomous driving, and safe RL with image observations

• Aug 2023   The co-authored book chapter "Safety-Assured Design and Adaptation of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles" is now available online.

• July 2023   Our paper Semi-supervised Semantics-guided Adversarial Training for Robust Trajectory Prediction has been accepted by ICCV 2023!

• June 2023   Our two papers have been accepted by IROS 2023!

• June 2023   I will join Amazon as an Applied Scientist intern.

• April 2023   Our paper Enforcing Hard Constraints with Soft Barriers: Safety-driven Reinforcement Learning in Unknown Stochastic Environments has been accepted by ICML 2023.

• Feb. 2023   Our paper Efficient Stuttering Event Detection Using Siamese Networks has been accepted by ICASSP 2023.

• June 2022   Our paper TAE: A Semi-supervised Controllable Behavior-aware Trajectory Generator and Predictor has been accepted by 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2022).

• Feb. 2022   Our paper Neural Network based Interactive Lane Changing Planner in Dense Traffic with Safety Guarantee has been accepted by ASP-DAC 2023.

• June 2021   I will join the InfoTech Labs Toyota as a research scientist intern and work on mobile vehicular cloud.

• May 2021   Our paper End-to-end Uncertainty-based Mitigation of Adversarial Attacks to Automated Lane Centering has been accepted by the 32th IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV21).

• Feb 2021   Our paper WIP: End-to-end analysis of adversarial attacks to automated lane centering systems has been accepted by the 2021 Automotive and Autonomous Vehicle Security (AutoSec) Workshop and awarded best short paper.

Selected Publications

• State-wise Safe Reinforcement Learning With Pixel Observations paper.

  • Sinong Simon Zhan, Yixuan Wang, Qingyuan Wu, Ruochen Jiao, Chao Huang, Qi Zhu

  • Under Review

• Empowering Autonomous Driving with Large Language Models: A Safety Perspective paper.

  • Yixuan Wang*, Ruochen Jiao*, Chengtian Lang, Sinong Simon Zhan, Chao Huang, Zhaoran Wang, Zhuoran Yang, Qi Zhu

  • LLMAgents @ ICLR 2024

• Kinematics-aware Trajectory Generation and Prediction with Latent Stochastic Differential Modeling paper.

  • Ruochen Jiao*, Yixuan Wang*, Xiangguo Liu, Chao Huang, Qi Zhu

  • Under Review

• Semi-supervised Semantics-guided Adversarial Training for Robust Trajectory Prediction paper.

  • Ruochen Jiao, Xiangguo Liu, Takami Sato, Alfred Chen, Qi Zhu

  • ICCV 2023

• Learning Representation for Anomaly Detection of Vehicle Trajectories paper.

  • Ruochen Jiao, Juyang Bai, Xiangguo Liu, Takami Sato, Xiaowei Yuan, Alfred Chen, Qi Zhu

  • IROS 2023

• Safety-Assured Speculative Planning with Adaptive Prediction.

  • Xiangguo Liu, Ruochen Jiao, Yixuan Wang, Yimin Han, Bowen Zheng, Qi Zhu

  • IROS 2023

• Enforcing Hard Constraints with Soft Barriers: Safety-driven Reinforcement Learning in Unknown Stochastic Environments paper.

  • Yixuan Wang, Simon Zhan, Ruochen Jiao, Zhilu Wang, Wanxin Jin, Zhuoran Yang, Zhaoran Wang, Chao Huang, Qi Zhu

  • ICML 2023

• TAE: A Semi-supervised Controllable Behavior-aware Trajectory Generator and Predictor paper.

  • Ruochen Jiao, Xiangguo Liu, Bowen Zheng, Dave Liang, Qi Zhu

  • IROS 2022

• Neural Network based Interactive Lane Changing Planner in Dense Traffic with Safety Guarantee paper.

  • Xiangguo Liu, Ruochen Jiao, Bowen Zheng, Dave Liang, Qi Zhu

  • ASP-DAC 2023

• End-to-end Uncertainty-based Mitigation of Adversarial Attacks to Automated Lane Centering paper.

  • Ruochen Jiao*, Hengyi Liang*, Takami Sato, Junjie Shen, Alfred Chen, Qi Zhu

  • IV 2021

• WIP: End-to-end analysis of adversarial attacks to automated lane centering systems paper.

  • Ruochen Jiao*, Hengyi Liang*, Takami Sato, Junjie Shen, Alfred Chen, Qi Zhu

  • AutoSec 2021, Best Short Paper Award

• Safety-assured design and adaptation of learning-enabled autonomous systems paper.

  • Qi Zhu, Chao Huang, Ruochen Jiao, Shuyue Lan, Hengyi Liang*, Xiangguo Liu, Yixuan Wang, Zhilu Wang, Shichao Xu

  • ASP-DAC 2021

• Leveraging weakly-hard constraints for improving system fault tolerance with functional and timing guarantees paper.

  • Hengyi Liang, Zhilu Wang, Ruochen Jiao, Qi Zhu

  • ICCAD 2020

Experience

Applied scientist intern, Amazon, Seattle, supervised by Binchao Chen, Jun. 2023 - Sep. 2023

Research scientist intern, InfoTech Labs, Toyota, Mountain View, supervised by Onur Altintas, Jun. 2021 - Sep. 2021

Big data engineer, Intel, Shanghai, Mar. 2019 - Jun. 2019

Service

Reviewer   ECCV, IROS, Neurips, IV, RA-L, IEEE TMM, IEEE TIV, IEEE JSAC