Hello, I'm Rui Liu

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, working with Prof. Pratap Tokekar and Prof. Ming Lin. Previously, I earned my bachelor’s degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. I have also interned at Apple and Tencent Robotics X.

My research focuses on developing robust and adaptive learning algorithms for autonomous systems. Specifically, I work on Imitation Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Multimodal Learning, and Representation Learning etc. My goal is to advance AI-driven decision-making by improving efficiency, generalization, and robustness in real-world scenarios, such as Robotics and Autonomous Driving.


Selected Publications

AUKT: Adaptive Uncertainty-Guided Knowledge Transfer with Conformal Prediction

AUKT: Adaptive Uncertainty-Guided Knowledge Transfer with Conformal Prediction

Under Review, 2025

A universal framework that leverages conformal prediction to quantify teacher prediction uncertainty and dynamically adjust its guidande on the student under domain shifts.

CAML: Collaborative Auxiliary Modality Learning for Multi-Agent Systems

CAML: Collaborative Auxiliary Modality Learning for Multi-Agent Systems

Under Review, 2025

A novel multi-agent multi-modality framework that enables agents to collaborate and share multimodal data during training while allowing inference with reduced modalities per agent during testing.

MMCD: Multi-Modal Collaborative Decision-Making for Connected Autonomy with Knowledge Distillation

MMCD: Multi-Modal Collaborative Decision-Making for Connected Autonomy with Knowledge Distillation

Under Review, 2025

A novel multi-modal collaborative decision-making approach for connected autonomy.

Towards Efficient Risk-Sensitive Policy Gradient: An Iteration Complexity Analysis

Towards Efficient Risk-Sensitive Policy Gradient: An Iteration Complexity Analysis

Under Review, 2025

A thorough iteration complexity analysis for the risk-sensitive policy gradient method, focusing on the REINFORCE algorithm and employing the exponential utility function.

IMRL: Integrating Visual, Physical, Temporal, and Geometric Representations for Enhanced Food Acquisition

IMRL: Integrating Visual, Physical, Temporal, and Geometric Representations for Enhanced Food Acquisition

ICRA, 2025

Integrated Multi-Dimensional Representation Learning, which integrates visual, physical, temporal, and geometric representations to enhance the robustness and generalizability of Imitation Learning for food acquisition.

LAVA: Long-horizon Visual Action based Food Acquisition

LAVA: Long-horizon Visual Action based Food Acquisition

IROS, 2024 Best Paper Award at ICRA 2024 Workshop on Cooking Robotics: Perception and Motion Planning

Long-horizon Visual Action-based (LAVA) food acquisition of liquid, semisolid, and deformable foods.

Data-Driven Distributionally Robust Optimal Control with State-Dependent Noise

Data-Driven Distributionally Robust Optimal Control with State-Dependent Noise

IROS, 2023

A data-driven technique for estimating the uncertainty and bound for the KL divergence for distributionally robust optimal control.

Adaptive Visual Imitation Learning for Robotic Assisted Feeding Across Varied Bowl Configurations and Food Types

Adaptive Visual Imitation Learning for Robotic Assisted Feeding Across Varied Bowl Configurations and Food Types

ICRA Workshop on Cooking Robotics Perception and Motion Planning, 2024

Adaptive visual imitation learning that exhibits adaptability and robustness across different bowl configurations and diverse food types for robotic scooping.